Cross Purposes: Catholicism and the Political Imagination in Poland 1009230956, 9781009230957

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CROSS PURPOSES

No other symbol is as omnipresent in Poland as the cross. This multilayered and contradictory icon features prominently in public spaces and state institutions. It is anchored in the country’s visual history, inspires protest culture, and dominates urban and rural landscapes. The cross recalls Poland’s historic struggles for independence and antiCommunist dissent, but it also encapsulates the country’s current position in Europe as a self-avowed bulwark of Christianity and a champion of conservative values. It is both a national symbol – defining the boundaries of Polishness in opposition to a changing constellation of the country’s Others – and a key object of contestation in the creative arts and political culture. Despite its long history, the cross has never been systematically studied as a political symbol in its capacity to mobilize for action and solidify power structures. Cross Purposes is the first cultural history of the cross in modern Poland, deconstructing this key symbol and exploring how it has been deployed in different political battles. magdalena waligórska is a cultural historian and sociologist. Her fields of interest include contemporary Polish and Belarusian history, nationalism and national symbols, Jewish heritage, Jewish–non-Jewish relations, and memory studies. She is currently leading a research group at the Department of European Ethnology of the Humboldt University in Berlin. She has published extensively on nationalism, Jewish culture, and Jewish–non-Jewish relations in journals including East European Politics and Societies, Holocaust Studies, East European Jewish Affairs, and Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry. Her first book, Klezmer’s Afterlife: An Ethnography of the Jewish Music Revival in Poland and Germany, was published in 2013.

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new studies in european history Edited by peter baldwin, University of California, Los Angeles holly case, Brown University christopher clark, University of Cambridge james b. collins, Georgetown University karin friedrich, University of Aberdeen mia rodríguez-salgado, London School of Economics and Political Science timothy snyder, Yale University The aim of this series in early modern and modern European history is to publish outstanding works of research, addressed to important themes across a wide geographical range, from southern and central Europe, to Scandinavia and Russia, from the time of the Renaissance to the present. As it develops the series will comprise focused works of wide contextual range and intellectual ambition. A full list of titles published in the series can be found at: www.cambridge.org/newstudiesineuropeanhistory

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CROSS PURPOSES Catholicism and the Political Imagination in Poland

MAGDALENA WALIGÓRSKA Humboldt University of Berlin

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009230957 DOI: 10.1017/9781009230933 © Magdalena Waligórska 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. A Cataloging-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-1-009-23095-7 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

CROSS PURPOSES

No other symbol is as omnipresent in Poland as the cross. This multilayered and contradictory icon features prominently in public spaces and state institutions. It is anchored in the country’s visual history, inspires protest culture, and dominates urban and rural landscapes. The cross recalls Poland’s historic struggles for independence and antiCommunist dissent, but it also encapsulates the country’s current position in Europe as a self-avowed bulwark of Christianity and a champion of conservative values. It is both a national symbol – defining the boundaries of Polishness in opposition to a changing constellation of the country’s Others – and a key object of contestation in the creative arts and political culture. Despite its long history, the cross has never been systematically studied as a political symbol in its capacity to mobilize for action and solidify power structures. Cross Purposes is the first cultural history of the cross in modern Poland, deconstructing this key symbol and exploring how it has been deployed in different political battles. magdalena waligórska is a cultural historian and sociologist. Her fields of interest include contemporary Polish and Belarusian history, nationalism and national symbols, Jewish heritage, Jewish–non-Jewish relations, and memory studies. She is currently leading a research group at the Department of European Ethnology of the Humboldt University in Berlin. She has published extensively on nationalism, Jewish culture, and Jewish–non-Jewish relations in journals including East European Politics and Societies, Holocaust Studies, East European Jewish Affairs, and Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry. Her first book, Klezmer’s Afterlife: An Ethnography of the Jewish Music Revival in Poland and Germany, was published in 2013.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

new studies in european history Edited by peter baldwin, University of California, Los Angeles holly case, Brown University christopher clark, University of Cambridge james b. collins, Georgetown University karin friedrich, University of Aberdeen mia rodríguez-salgado, London School of Economics and Political Science timothy snyder, Yale University The aim of this series in early modern and modern European history is to publish outstanding works of research, addressed to important themes across a wide geographical range, from southern and central Europe, to Scandinavia and Russia, from the time of the Renaissance to the present. As it develops the series will comprise focused works of wide contextual range and intellectual ambition. A full list of titles published in the series can be found at: www.cambridge.org/newstudiesineuropeanhistory

Published online by Cambridge University Press

CROSS PURPOSES Catholicism and the Political Imagination in Poland

MAGDALENA WALIGÓRSKA Humboldt University of Berlin

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009230957 DOI: 10.1017/9781009230933 © Magdalena Waligórska 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. A Cataloging-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-1-009-23095-7 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

CROSS PURPOSES

No other symbol is as omnipresent in Poland as the cross. This multilayered and contradictory icon features prominently in public spaces and state institutions. It is anchored in the country’s visual history, inspires protest culture, and dominates urban and rural landscapes. The cross recalls Poland’s historic struggles for independence and antiCommunist dissent, but it also encapsulates the country’s current position in Europe as a self-avowed bulwark of Christianity and a champion of conservative values. It is both a national symbol – defining the boundaries of Polishness in opposition to a changing constellation of the country’s Others – and a key object of contestation in the creative arts and political culture. Despite its long history, the cross has never been systematically studied as a political symbol in its capacity to mobilize for action and solidify power structures. Cross Purposes is the first cultural history of the cross in modern Poland, deconstructing this key symbol and exploring how it has been deployed in different political battles. magdalena waligórska is a cultural historian and sociologist. Her fields of interest include contemporary Polish and Belarusian history, nationalism and national symbols, Jewish heritage, Jewish–non-Jewish relations, and memory studies. She is currently leading a research group at the Department of European Ethnology of the Humboldt University in Berlin. She has published extensively on nationalism, Jewish culture, and Jewish–non-Jewish relations in journals including East European Politics and Societies, Holocaust Studies, East European Jewish Affairs, and Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry. Her first book, Klezmer’s Afterlife: An Ethnography of the Jewish Music Revival in Poland and Germany, was published in 2013.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

new studies in european history Edited by peter baldwin, University of California, Los Angeles holly case, Brown University christopher clark, University of Cambridge james b. collins, Georgetown University karin friedrich, University of Aberdeen mia rodríguez-salgado, London School of Economics and Political Science timothy snyder, Yale University The aim of this series in early modern and modern European history is to publish outstanding works of research, addressed to important themes across a wide geographical range, from southern and central Europe, to Scandinavia and Russia, from the time of the Renaissance to the present. As it develops the series will comprise focused works of wide contextual range and intellectual ambition. A full list of titles published in the series can be found at: www.cambridge.org/newstudiesineuropeanhistory

Published online by Cambridge University Press

CROSS PURPOSES Catholicism and the Political Imagination in Poland

MAGDALENA WALIGÓRSKA Humboldt University of Berlin

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009230957 DOI: 10.1017/9781009230933 © Magdalena Waligórska 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. A Cataloging-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-1-009-23095-7 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

CROSS PURPOSES

No other symbol is as omnipresent in Poland as the cross. This multilayered and contradictory icon features prominently in public spaces and state institutions. It is anchored in the country’s visual history, inspires protest culture, and dominates urban and rural landscapes. The cross recalls Poland’s historic struggles for independence and antiCommunist dissent, but it also encapsulates the country’s current position in Europe as a self-avowed bulwark of Christianity and a champion of conservative values. It is both a national symbol – defining the boundaries of Polishness in opposition to a changing constellation of the country’s Others – and a key object of contestation in the creative arts and political culture. Despite its long history, the cross has never been systematically studied as a political symbol in its capacity to mobilize for action and solidify power structures. Cross Purposes is the first cultural history of the cross in modern Poland, deconstructing this key symbol and exploring how it has been deployed in different political battles. magdalena waligórska is a cultural historian and sociologist. Her fields of interest include contemporary Polish and Belarusian history, nationalism and national symbols, Jewish heritage, Jewish–non-Jewish relations, and memory studies. She is currently leading a research group at the Department of European Ethnology of the Humboldt University in Berlin. She has published extensively on nationalism, Jewish culture, and Jewish–non-Jewish relations in journals including East European Politics and Societies, Holocaust Studies, East European Jewish Affairs, and Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry. Her first book, Klezmer’s Afterlife: An Ethnography of the Jewish Music Revival in Poland and Germany, was published in 2013.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

new studies in european history Edited by peter baldwin, University of California, Los Angeles holly case, Brown University christopher clark, University of Cambridge james b. collins, Georgetown University karin friedrich, University of Aberdeen mia rodríguez-salgado, London School of Economics and Political Science timothy snyder, Yale University The aim of this series in early modern and modern European history is to publish outstanding works of research, addressed to important themes across a wide geographical range, from southern and central Europe, to Scandinavia and Russia, from the time of the Renaissance to the present. As it develops the series will comprise focused works of wide contextual range and intellectual ambition. A full list of titles published in the series can be found at: www.cambridge.org/newstudiesineuropeanhistory

Published online by Cambridge University Press

CROSS PURPOSES Catholicism and the Political Imagination in Poland

MAGDALENA WALIGÓRSKA Humboldt University of Berlin

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009230957 DOI: 10.1017/9781009230933 © Magdalena Waligórska 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. A Cataloging-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-1-009-23095-7 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Rodzicom moim dedykuję

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CONTENTS

List of Figures page viii Acknowledgments x Introduction

1 27

1

The Ascendance of the Cross

2

Colonization in the Shadow of the Cross

3

Female and Furious: The Invention of the “Defense of the Cross” 146

4

Solidarity’s Sacred Politics

5

The Transformation Crusades

6

Religious Populism and Its Opponents Conclusion

302

Appendix 318 Bibliography 319 Index 373

vii

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63

208 243

108

FIGURES

1. A postcard reproducing Artur Szyk’s image of the Jew Landy with the cross, published by Drukarnia Narodowa in Kraków, 1930s. page 30 2. A seal of the National Government (Rząd Narodowy) from 1863. 31 3. A postcard from the 1920s depicting Artur Grottger’s Sacrilege. 33 4. A posthumous photograph of Michał Landy at St. Roch’s Hospital in Warsaw. 47 5. Bolesław Podczaszyński’s medal commemorating the casualties of the antiRussian demonstrations of February 27 and April 8, 1861, bearing the name of Michał Landy. 52 6. The three crosses of Arabowszczyzna, 2020. 67 7. The Three Crosses of Wilno on a postcard from the 1930s. 81 8. The Three Crosses of Wilno illuminated during the Northern Trade Fair. 85 9. A competing team laying a wreath at the Legionnaires’ Cross, 1934. 89 10. The Bobrujsk Mound of the First Corps. 92 11. The first moments of the cross defense, photographed by a secret police operative. 111 12. Women carrying potted plants to decorate the cross with. 113 13. Women pursuing and threatening a state official at the site of the cross defense. 116 14. Women with children at the site of the cross defense, photographed by a secret police operative. 118 15. Underground stamp series by Solidarność Małopolska celebrating the twentysixth anniversary of the cross defense in Nowa Huta. 137 16. Krystyna Janiszewska, December 1970. 151 17. A memorial pin with the photograph of a floral cross made for the occasion of John Paul II’s visit to Poland in 1983. 154 18. A Solidarity poster titled “We shall resurrect. The Polish Jerusalem.” 159 19. Inauguration of the Poznań Crosses. 174 20. (a) Jacek Ćwikła’s poster for the unveiling of the Poznań Croses. (b) Poster for the thirtieth anniversary of the Poznań revolt. 176 21. A pin with the motif of krzyżomłot by Jacek Ćwikła. 178

viii

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list of figures

ix

22. Tadeusz Adamski’s poster “May 1, 1982: For the Dignity of the Working Man.” 181 23. The Polish Contribution to Strengthening the Troops of the NATO Pact: (clockwise) the Commander in Chief, the Guard of Honor, Intelligence, the Mechanized Regiment. 216 24. Jacek Frąckiewicz, untitled. 217 25. Witold Mysyrowicz, “Limits to Freedom.” 218 26. Józef Burniewicz, untitled. 219 27. “Europe,” by an anonymous author. 220 28. Obelisk of The Fighters for People’s Poland in Łańcut, 1992. 224 29. R. Śniegowski, untitled. 227 30. Pro-choice banners using the symbol of the cross. “Woman, give us a soldier!” and “Religious murderers: make yourselves babies out of clay!” 236 31. Cartoon by an anonymous author. 238 32. Light installations on the students’ halls of residence in Kraków, April 11, 2010. 256 33. Assemblage of symbols around the Smolensk cross, shortly before its removal, September 10, 2010. 262 34. “Attention, cross defenders,” August 9, 2010. 290 35. Jakub Baryła attempting to stop the LGBT march in Płock, 2019. 313

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I started working on this book when I was pregnant with my son, continued writing it while struggling to reconcile academic work with parenthood, completed it in the first year of the pandemic, and sent it into production right after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which turned the lives of all EastCentral Europeans upside down. It has been a bumpy road, with one unprecedented challenge following the next, and a time when dark clouds started gathering above my part of Europe, bringing change we did not anticipate. So, even though the formulaic sentence makes its way into the acknowledgment section of every book, it has never been as true for anything else I ever wrote in my life – This book would never have seen the light of day if it had not been for the help and support of many individuals, who assisted, encouraged, and inspired hope in the author of this book. I embarked on this project at the University of Bremen, where I had the privilege of tapping into the resources of the Archive of the Forschungsstelle Osteuropa, one of the biggest collections of Eastern European samizdat in the West. With my office located just one flight of stairs from the archive’s rooms, I literally sat atop of a wealth of materials that came to inspire this work. The head of the Polish archive, Karina Garsztecka, was an invaluable help during this time, serving as my guide to the unexplored stacks of the Polish collections. I also received a lot of help and friendly support from Maria Klassen and Alesia Kananchuk from the Soviet section of the archive. My colleagues from the History Department, Ulrike Huhn and Jacob Nuhn, as well as Silke Plate from the Research Center for East European Studies in Bremen, provided a lot of critical insight and encouragement in the early stages of this work. My research assistants Bartosz Gruszka and Paula Maciejewski helped me in the archival work and with the transcription of the interviews. Jacqueline Skottki helped to digitize the illustrations. The Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin) was my academic home in the last and most critical phase of the work on the manuscript. Their generous fellowship and the green refuge in Grunewald made it possible for me not only to finish the book, but also to retain my sanity in the horrid lockdown winter of 2020. The amazing community of outstanding scholars that surrounded me there was an endless source of inspiration and x

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acknowledgments

xi

support. Jan-Werner Müller offered useful criticisms of parts of the manuscript and helped me refine my arguments. Konrad Schmid helped me navigate the theological waters, sharing his expertise on the early history of Christianity. Dieter Grimm was an invaluable source of information on the legal aspects of the “cross controversies” and a perfect interlocutor to discuss the arguments of my book. Nadine Amsler was a kind and generous discussion partner. Dissecting academic issues during our daily outings to the playground, while ankle-deep in the sandpit, will belong to my best memories of our Wiko year. Sonja Dümpelmann helped me calibrate my book proposal, and Daniel Schönpflug was instrumental in guiding me through the process of the German Habilitation, which this book was part of. Conversations with Minou Arjomand, Katya Assaf-Zakharov, Johannes Böhme, Hakan Ceylan, Angela Creager, Jaeeun Kim, Yael Sternhell, and Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger gave me much food for thought, inspiration, and encouragement. Without the unwavering support of the technical and academic staff at Wiko, heroic (and uninterrupted!) library and language services, lunch boxes arriving at the doorstep in the darkest hours of lockdowns, and the immense solidarity and human kindness I received from the fellow fellows, this book would not be here now. Special thanks are due to Alexander Bevilacqua, fellow historian, and my office mate in the quaint attic of Wiko’s Weiße Villa. His sharp intellect, academic precision, the gift of being able to see the ramifications of this book which I could not, and his immense generosity and kindness were like a beam of sunshine in this dark lockdown winter. If giving birth to this book was a long process that involved many stages, he was the midwife who made sure that I made that one final push. Many other colleagues across the globe contributed to the final shape of this book. Jan Kubik and Monica Rüthers were the first readers of the whole manuscript, and their comments and encouragement meant a lot to me. Agnieszka Graff provided crucial criticism to Chapter 3 and the discussions with her, in the early stages of this work, were truly eye-opening. Fruitful directions of inquiry were also suggested by Andrzej Leder, Antony Polonsky, Simon Lewis, Frank Golczewski, and Mateusz Kusio. Mindaugas Kelpša helped to locate and translate some Lithuanian sources. Ilay Halpern translated the Hebrew sources. Klementyna Chrzanowska, Agata Masłowska, and Erica Lehrer lent their hand to render into English some of the puns and poems. Excellent copy-editors Rachel Harland, Mitch Cohen, and Steven Holt helped to correct my English. All my interviewees who agreed to share their stories and personal archives with me deserve my special thanks: Tadeusz Adamski, Teresa Bogucka, Jacek Ćwikła, Stanisław Krajewski, Małgorzata Łukasiewicz, Dominik Taras, Kazimierz Wosiek, and Jakub Zysnarski. Without their assistance it would have been impossible to reconstruct some of the events I describe in the book.

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xii

acknowledgments

I am also indebted to the institutions and individuals who made available the archival material that made its way into the book: the Archive of the Museum of Polish History in Warsaw; the Princes Czartoryski Library in Kraków; the National Library in Warsaw; the European Solidarity Center in Gdańsk; the Foundation Center for the Documentation of Independence Struggles, Kraków; The KARTA Center Foundation Photographic Archive; the Archive of the Research Center for East European Studies at the University of Bremen; the Archive of the Institute of National Remembrance; and the Scientific Library of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences and Polish Academy of Science in Kraków. I also wish to thank all of the individuals and institutions who granted me permission to use their copyrighted visual material: Marek Sosenko, Polish Scientific Publishers PWN, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Antykwariat Dawid Janas, John Kunstadter, The National Digital Archives, the National Museum in Gdańsk, the Institute of National Remembrance in Kraków, the European Solidarity Center in Gdańsk, the Archive of the Research Center for East European Studies at the University of Bremen, Jacek Ćwikła, Tadeusz Adamski, NIE, Wprost, Józef Burniewicz, Szymon Łabiński, Forum, and Agencja Wyborcza. I am also extremely grateful to the series editors of New Studies in European History at Cambridge University Press, in particular, Christopher Clark and Timothy Snyder, as well as Commissioning Editor in European History Liz Friend-Smith, for believing in this project and their kind support. I owe my greatest debt of gratitude, however, to those who were with me on this journey. I would never have managed to write this book without the help of my parents, who spent many weeks babysitting my son to enable my “writing retreats.” Neither would anything have been possible without my husband Niko, who, throughout these years, and particularly during the pandemic, took care of our child, cooked, and cared for me, giving me the precious time to finish this book. I want to thank my son Leon for all these times he showed mature understanding when his mom locked herself in another room to write a book, instead of playing with him. I am also grateful for all the moments when he showed no such understanding, as LEGO blocks and superhero action figures provided a very welcome distraction from the serious matter at hand. The darkness of the last two years would have been much harder to bear had it not been for my friends Klementyna Chrzanowska, Katarzyna Franek, Agata Hołobut, Agata Masłowska, and Nina Müller, who laughed with me, cried with me, and made sure that the crosses did not overshadow everything.

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u Introduction

A woman in protective gear resolutely strides towards a tall wooden cross, carrying a chainsaw. She lowers her face shield and starts the chainsaw’s motor. The metal teeth meet the wood, spitting an arc of sawdust into the air. Within a few minutes, the vertical beam has been cut in half and the cross tumbles to the ground. Behind it, a surface covered with electric bulbs suddenly lights up, forming the shape of the Polish national emblem – a crowned eagle. This scene is the epilogue of Klątwa (The Curse) by Oliver Frljić, a play that premiered in 2017 in Warsaw and that one critic pronounced “the most iconoclastic and blasphemous performance of the century.”1 Frljić’s play, which ruthlessly denounces the hegemony of the Catholic Church in Poland and tests the boundaries of artistic freedom in a country where the principles of liberal democracy are in question, provoked a harsh response from conservative politicians and state-owned media, who branded it “an attack on Poland.”2 While right-wing activists and religious groups protested against the play in front of the theater, the Polish Bishops’ Conference called for expiatory prayers, municipal authorities attempted to ban performances in state-owned theaters, and the state attorney placed the production under investigation for offending religious feeling and inciting violence.3 1

2

3

Aneta Kyzioł, “Skąd to święte oburzenie ‘Klątwą’ w Teatrze Powszechnym? Polska klątwa,” Polityka, February 22, 2017, www.polityka.pl/tygodnikpolityka/kultura/1695242,2,skad-toswiete-oburzenie-klatwa-w-teatrze-powszechnym.read (accessed December 6, 2017). “Wulgarny i obsceniczny spektakl. Zbiórka na zabójstwo Kaczyńskiego pod politycznym patronatem,” TVP INFO, February 21, 2017, www.tvp.info/29162149/zbiorka-nazabojstwo-kaczynskiego-pod-politycznym-patronatem (accessed December 6, 2017); Natalia Staszczak-Prüfer, “Rosenkranz ins Gesicht,” nachtkritik.de, www.nachtkritik.de /index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=13772:theaterbrief-aus-polen-15klatwa-fluch-vonoliver-frljic-in-warschau-analyse-eines-hochpolitischentheaterskandals&catid=416&Itemid=100055 (accessed December 6, 2017). Konferencja Episkopatu Polski, “Rzecznik Episkopatu: Spektakl ‘Klątwa’ ma znamiona bluźnierstwa,” February 21, 2017, http://episkopat.pl/rzecznik-episkopatu-spektaklklatwa-ma-znamiona-bluznierstwa (accessed December 6, 2017); “Warszawska Platforma broni ‘Klątwy,’” Nasz Dziennik, March 16, 2017, http://naszdziennik.pl /polska-kraj/178305,warszawska-platforma-broni-klatwy.html (accessed December 6, 2017); “Nie chcą ‘Klątwy’ w Warszawie. Przepychanki przed Teatrem Powszechnym,” Do Rzeczy, May 28, 2017, https://dorzeczy.pl/kraj/30798/Nie-chca-Klatwy-w-

1

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009230933.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

2

introduction

Facing threats and continuing the performance staged under police protection, Frljić made an open call to the President of the European Commission, JeanClaude Juncker, to take a stance on the “clear violation of human rights and [. . .] attack on freedom of speech” occurring in Poland.4 Pickets and skirmishes in front of the theater accompanied the performance throughout the year, as Klątwa continued to play to sold-out audiences. The heated controversy sparked by Frljić’s work was not the first of its kind in Poland, but it revealed with particular poignancy a fundamental fissure in Polish society.5 The Curse threw into relief the contradiction between two constitutive elements of the Polish national narrative: the will to freedom and self-determination and the centrality accorded to the Catholic faith and its symbols and rituals. The clash of the independent state (symbolized by the crowned eagle) and the all-powerful Church (the cross) depicted in the play’s closing scene represented the major conflict over which values should define Polishness. Felling the cross on stage and equipping his actors with machine guns assembled from wooden and iron crucifixes, Frljić touched a nerve not only because of the play’s anticlerical message, but also because the symbols he used had long ago begun to represent the nation itself. ***

Why the Cross? No other symbol is as omnipresent in Poland as the cross. It features prominently in public spaces and state institutions; it is anchored in the country’s visual history, inspires protest culture, and dominates the natural landscape itself. No other symbol is as multilayered and contradictory either: the cross recalls Poland’s historic struggles for independence and anti-Communist dissent, but it also encapsulates the country’s current position in Europe as a bulwark of Christianity and a champion of conservative values. It is both

4

5

Warszawie-Przepychanki-przed-Teatrem-Powszechnym.html (accessed December 6, 2017); “Prokuratura: ws. spektaklu ‘Klątwa’ – przesłuchania świadków,” Gazeta Prawna, May 15, 2017, http://kultura.gazetaprawna.pl/artykuly/1042772,prokuraturaspektakl-klatwa-przesluchania-swiadkow.html (accessed December 6, 2017). Oliver Frljić, “Campaign against ‘Curse’ Is a Disgrace [Letter to Jean-Claude Juncker],” Krytyka Polityczna & European Alternatives, March 1, 2017, http://politicalcritique.org /world/eu/2017/oliver-frjlic-jean-claude-juncker (accessed December 7, 2017). See also Frljić’s video statement hosted by Teatr Powszechny at www.powszechny.com/aktual nosci/wypowiedz-olivera-frljicia-dot-spektaklu-klatwa.html (accessed December 7, 2017). See the controversy over another play, Golgota Picnic (Golgotha Picnic) by Rodrigo García in 2014: Agata Adamiecka-Sitek and Iwona Kurz (eds.), Piknik Golgota Polska: Sztuka, religia, demokracja (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2015). Another pertinent example is the trial of the artist Dorota Nieznalska, see Magda Romańska, “The Anatomy of Blasphemy: Passion and the Trial of Dorota Nieznalska,” TDR 51, 2 (2007): 176–181.

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a national symbol – defining the boundaries of Polishness in opposition to a changing constellation of the country’s Others, be it Russians, Jews, or Muslim refugees – and a key object of contestation in the creative arts and political culture. Yet, despite the centrality of the symbol in Polish culture, political history, and social life, a cultural history of the cross in Poland has not yet been written. Cross Purposes is a cultural history of the symbol of the cross in modern politics that, focusing on the case of Poland, traces the symbol’s political genealogy and the ways different secular projects appropriated it for their own ends. Doing that, it debunks the popular misconceptions that the symbol’s semantic content is set in stone or that, in the political realm, the cross is the symbol of conservative values par excellence. Both in Poland’s current public discourse and in much of the critical writing, the cross emerges as a “natural”6 and “obvious”7 symbol of Polish “national traditions,”8 “values that Poles hold dear,”9 “national memory,”10 and “Polish identity.”11 In this kind of narrative, all these categories appear to be clearly defined, invariable, uncontested, and perennial. The supposedly shared principles, legacies, and narratives that the symbol embodies are invariably positively valued and presented as requiring to be protected, defended, and preserved.12 It is, therefore, the physical presence of the cross in the public arena that becomes a visible guarantor of their continuity. From this point of view, the cross appears as the embodiment and material guardian of the old order, the ultimate shorthand for “the nation” that indexes the past, encodes stability, and withstands change. In reality, the cross has never meant just one thing. Its meaning has changed from epoch to epoch; it has been contested and is contingent on partisan 6

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Michał Łuczewski, “Katastrofa, Mesjasz, Krzyż,” in Katastrofa: Bilans dwóch lat, edited by Jan Filip Staniłko (Warsaw: Instytut Sobieskiego, 2012), 100. Tomasz Żukowski, “Długa wędrówka przez mgłę: Poglądy Polaków na katastrofę smoleńską,” in Katastrofa: Bilans dwóch lat, edited by Jan Filip Staniłko (Warsaw: Instytut Sobieskiego, 2012), 79. Józef Darski, “Krzyż: Symbol religijny czy narodowy,” Gazeta Polska, August 27, 2010, www.salon24.pl/u/autorzygazetypolskiej/222719,krzyz-symbol-religijny-czy-narodowy (accessed April 10, 2020). “Oświadczenie Komitetu Politycznego PiS,” August 2, 2010, cited in Andrzej Draguła, “Rzecz o narodowości krzyża,” Więź 625 (2010): 58. Joanna Burzyńska in Ewa Stankiewicz (dir.), Krzyż, Film Open Group, 2011, available at https://gloria.tv/post/tUqAPTeQLFUe6dGtinqTnwnAR (accessed June 4, 2020), at 22:00. See two cross defenders cited in Stankiewicz (dir.), Krzyż, at 43:20 and 38:20. See, for example, Andrzej Nowak, “Wolność krzyżami się mierzy,” in Krzyż Polski, edited by Adam Bujak and Leszek Sosnowski (Kraków: Biały Kruk, 2011), 10–83; Bishop Edward Frankowski cited in Katarzyna Wiśniewska, “Wojny o krzyż nie będzie,” Gazeta Wyborcza, July 22, 2010, 2; Tadeusz Rydzyk in an interview with Małgorzata Rutkowska, “Nowa lewica walczy z krzyżem,” Nasz Dziennik, July 17–18, 2010, 3.

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interests. In different periods, the cross has even connoted diametrically opposed ideas. While at the turn of the twentieth century Polish socialists used it to communicate ideals of social justice, to their opponents, the National Democrats, the cross denoted the right-wing worldview and served as a rallying sign against the Communist “heresy.”13 While in the Solidarność era it served as “a sign of diversity against an imposed monolithic worldview,” after the fall of Communism it became to many Poles a symbol of “right-wing oppression within the nation.”14 And if the symbol’s history demonstrates any continuity, it is in the fact that its tremendous emotional impact has always provided the ultimate resource for those demanding radical political change or attempting to legitimize a new and still vulnerable political system. Indeed, the reconstruction of the symbol’s historical trajectory reveals a paradox that lies at the heart of its political success: the cross gained its political appeal as a tool to legitimize new and risky political projects. Rather than being a synecdoche of the old order, for the last century and a half, the cross came to embody political projects that were radical, daring, emancipatory, or outright revolutionary. Tracing the history of the cross as a symbol of transformation allows us to see not only how society mobilizes support for new and risky political undertakings, but also how it articulates new demands and reconfigures its boundaries vis-à-vis the Others. Looking at modern Polish history through the prism of the multiple iterations of this crucial symbol helps us challenge the myth of the immutable national canon. Such a microperspective reveals paradoxes, contradictions, and creative appropriations under the surface of the ostensibly linear narrative of national endurance and the preservation of the nation’s values. The story of the cross discloses how even the most iconic symbols of what are routinely seen as the unchanging bedrock values of “the Polish nation” have undergone multiple, and sometimes mutually contradictory, symbolic mobilizations, served disparate agendas, and demarcated the core of the national community each time anew. Focusing on the symbol of the cross in the longue durée, this book also illuminates the way Poles have used religious symbols to rally their ranks, but also to disempower, demonize, and exclude their adversaries. By doing that, the book foregrounds the costs of grand narratives of national unity, including the stigmatization and silencing of the minorities, but also symbolic violence against those cast out of the national collective. To be sure, Poland is not unique in the way its political culture is intensely interconnected with religion. The political appeal of the cross has been a global phenomenon, too. Yet, despite its long history of political deployment not just 13 14

Andrzej Chwalba, Sacrum i rewolucja (Kraków: Universitas, 1992), 232–81. Jan Kubik, The Power of Symbols against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of State Socialism in Poland (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 179, 212.

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in Poland, but across the world, including in the colonization of the Americas, the Nazi rise to power, and the recent storming of Capitol Hill, the cross has never been systematically studied as a political symbol in its capacity to mobilize for action and solidify power structures, much less across different historical epochs. In other regions of the world where Catholicism has a traditionally prominent position, such as Latin America, the symbol of the cross has also been repetitively used for political mobilization.15 Peronism in Argentina employed religious imagery to craft a “civil religion” that was detached from the Catholic Church, but deployed as an ideology to unite the nation behind its leader.16 Repressive military regimes in countries like Paraguay, El Salvador, Brazil, and Chile made extensive use of Christian symbols as they attempted to legitimize themselves as defending “Western Christian civilization.”17 And radical proponents of Liberation Theology, who preached the necessity of politically organized combat for social justice, envisioned the cross as “a symbol of challenge and struggle” in the name of the poor and the oppressed.18 Also in Western Europe, considered the most secularized region of the world, the symbol of the cross has accompanied a number of disparate political enterprises, particularly in Catholic countries, like Spain, Italy, and Ireland.19 Catholic imagery was used, for example, to mobilize support for Italy’s colonial ambitions in Libya, and, later, served as a reference point for the antidemocratic Italian Nationalists and proto-fascists.20 Catholic symbols were also salient in the so-called Northern Ireland Troubles, where the involvement of the Catholic Church in the conflict caused a lot of controversy.21 In the Spanish Second Republic, religious symbols and rituals became a bone of contention in the confrontation between the republican government, seeking to confine religion to the private sphere, and its opponents, who protested the 15

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Stephen J. C. Andes, The Vatican and Catholic Activism in Mexico and Chile: The Politics of Transnational Catholicism, 1920–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 143, 218. Daniel H. Levine, Religion and Politics in Latin America: The Catholic Church in Venezuela and Colombia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 50; Austen Ivereigh, Catholicism and Politics in Argentina 1810–1960 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 158–160. Levine, Religion and Politics in Latin America, 50. Bastiaan Wielenga “Liberation Theology in Asia,” in The Cambridge Companion to Liberation Theology, edited by Christopher Rowland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 56. Mar Griera, Julia Martínez-Ariño, and Anna Clot-Garrell, “Banal Catholicism, Morality Policies and the Politics of Belonging in Spain” Religions 12, 293 (2021): 1–12, here 2. Richard A. Webster, The Cross and the Fasces: Christian Democracy and Fascism in Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), 28–30, 31–34. Margaret M. Scull, The Catholic Church and the Northern Ireland Troubles, 1968–1998 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 32–33, 108–111.

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secularization measures and framed the predicament of Spanish Catholics as that of martyrs.22 The ensuing Franco regime, with its “liturgical triumphalism,” reaffirmed the central role of the Catholic imaginary in the Spanish public sphere, as Catholicism became the “ideological pillar” of the regime.23 Catholic symbols remained ubiquitous and “invisible” in the public spaces even after the demise of Italian fascism and the Franco regime, turning into markers of “banal Catholicism.”24 They become salient only if challenged by pro-secularist activists or court rulings. Over the last three decades, major controversies around the presence of crucifixes in public institutions have taken place in Italy, Spain, and Germany, for example.25 The political engagements with the symbol of the cross continue, however, as right-wing populists across Europe (and beyond) have begun to brandish Christian religious symbols as markers of “a civilizational identity” pitched in opposition to Islam.26 Since the refugee crisis of 2015, the symbol of the cross has been increasingly instrumentalized in anti-immigrant discourse across Europe, aimed in particular against Muslim refugees. The German party Alternative für Deutschland, for example, used the image of a crucifix on their 2018 election posters, one of which read “Islam does not belong in Bavaria.”27 Meanwhile, Matteo Salvini, Italy’s interior minister (2018–2019) and leader of the Lega Nord party, caused a nationwide controversy with his 2019 tweet: “If you’ve got a problem with the crucifix in public buildings, go back where you came from.”28 Such instrumentalization of religious symbols by right-wing populists is not limited to regions with a predominantly Catholic population.29 And the political context in which the symbol of the cross is being used extends beyond the core populist issues of the defense of conservative values, or immigration. 22

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Mary Vincent, Catholicism in the Second Spanish Republic: Religion and Politics in Salamanca 1930–1936 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 185–190. Ibid., 259; Eugenia Relaño Pastor, “Spanish Catholic Church in Franco Regime: A Marriage of Convenience,” Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 20, 2 (2007): 275–287, here 286. Griera et al., “Banal Catholicism.” Ibid.; John Pollard, Catholicism in Modern Italy: Religion, Society and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2008), 168; Dieter Grimm, Oliver Lepsius, Christian Waldhoff, and Matthias Roßbach, Dieter Grimm: Advocate of the Constitution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 95–104. Rogers Brubaker “Between Nationalism and Civilizationism: The European Populist Movement in Comparative Perspective” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40, 8 (2017): 1191–1226, here 1193–1194. Alternative für Deutschland Landesverband Bayern, “Dafür steht die AfD!,” www .afdbayern.de/themenplakate (accessed June 29, 2020). Matteo Salvini, https://twitter.com/matteosalvinimi/status/1185580927679975424 (accessed June 29, 2020). Lega Nord also captured public attention in 2011 when the party proposed a new law obliging public institutions in Lombardy – including schools, universities, and public administration buildings – to display crucifixes. For more examples, see Florian Höhne and Torsten Meireis, Religion and Neonationalism in Europe (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2020).

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During the Covid-19 pandemic, for example, the crucifix became part of the protest paraphernalia of the anti-vaccine movement, too.30 Poland, therefore, does not stand alone in having developed cultural scripts that employ religious symbols as shorthand for political agendas. And the specifically Polish brand of Catholicism, which frames the Polish nation as a unique recipient of divine patronage, is, likewise, not as singular as it might seem from the Polish perspective.31 Yet, against the wider canvas of different global employments of the symbol of the cross, Poland still provides a perfect case to investigate the permutations of religious symbols in the political realm. Focusing on Poland – today a nearly homogeneously Catholic country, where the long history of foreign rule conditioned the symbol’s incorporation into the national iconography, enables us not only to trace the role of religious symbolism in a modern nation state, but also to study its shifting significance under dynamically changing political conditions. Given that the semantic content of any symbol can only be understood in a long chronology, Poland, where the symbol of the cross changed hands, serving a number of sometimes diametrically opposed political agendas, provides a rich field of analysis. Once a multiethnic regional power that fell into the orbit of the Russian Empire, the Habsburg Empire, and Prussia, losing its sovereignty for more than a century, Poland re-emerged on Europe’s political map in the twentieth century, only to meet a series of further challenges, including Nazi and Soviet occupation, genocide, major border shifts, mass migration, and decades of Soviet control. Looking at the politicization of religion in a territory marked by foreign occupations, mass-scale liberation movements, forced migrations, and oppressive authoritarian regimes, the analysis of the Polish case also offers insights into the historical experience of a European region that disrupts the neat binary of the so-called Global North and Global South. Cross Purposes aims to fill a considerable historiographical lacuna by critically tracing the iterations of a single but highly contentious political symbol – one of the most powerful and polarizing images in Poland’s modern political life. While Polish nationalism is far from being an understudied field,32 the intersection of nationalism and religion remains an area where 30

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Julius Geiler and Alexander Fröhlich, “‘Querdenker’ rufen zu Corona-Demo an deutsch– polnischer Grenze auf,” Der Tagesspiegel, November 25, 2020, www.tagesspiegel.de/ berlin/nach-protesten-in-berlin-und-leipzig-querdenker-rufen-zu-corona-demo-andeutsch-polnischer-grenze-auf/26655406.html (accessed December 2, 2021). For a comparative analysis of the political instrumentalization of Catholicism in seventeenth-century Poland–Lithuania, France, and Bavaria, see Damien Tricoire, Mit Gott rechnen: Katholische Reform und politisches Kalkül in Frankreich, Bayern und Polen– Litauen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2013), 89–94. Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus 1596–1999 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Brian Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Rafał Pankowski, The Populist Radical Right in Poland: The

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critical research is still needed. A number of authors have investigated the entanglement between Polish nationalism and Catholicism, examining how Romantic nationalism fed on the Christian motifs of crucifixion, resurrection, and salvation, generating the philosophy of Polish Messianism;33 exploring how the idea of the nation became central to the Polish Catholic Church and led to the emergence of the concept of Polak-katolik;34 or tracing the role of the Catholic Church in Polish politics and the negotiation of “national values.”35 But, while the populist mobilization of the “realm of symbolic imagination”36 and the emergence of a new “mnemonic language of

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Patriots (London: Routledge, 2010); Michael Fleming, Communism, Nationalism and Ethnicity in Poland 1944–1950 (London: Routledge, 2012); Pieter M. Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016). Andrzej Walicki, Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism: The Case of Poland (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994); Adam Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots, and Revolutionaries 1776–1871 (New York: Viking, 2000); Maria Janion, Do Europy tak, ale razem z naszymi umarłymi (Warsaw: Sic!, 2000); Geneviève Zubrzycki, The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in PostCommunist Poland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Paulina Małochleb, Przepisywanie historii (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 2014). Brian Porter-Szücs, Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity and Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Stanisław Obirek, Polak katolik? (Stare Groszki: Wydawnictwo CiS, 2015); Krzysztof Koseła, Polak i katolik: Splątana tożsamość (Warsaw: IFIS PAN, 2003). For example, Danuta Waniek, Orzeł i krucyfiks: Eseje o podziałach politycznych w Polsce (Toruń: Adam Marszałek, 2011); Andrzej Micewski, Kościół–państwo 1945–1989 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Szkolne i Pedagogiczne, 1994); Mieczysław Ryba, Studia nad polityką polską XX wieku: Relacje państwo–Kościół (Lublin: Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski, 2016); Agata Chełstowska, Małgorzata Druciarek, Jacek Kucharczyk, and Aleksandra Niżyńska, Relacje państwo–Kościół w III RP (Warsaw: Instytut Spraw Publicznych, 2013); Paweł Łubiński, Naród w służbie Kościoła, Kościół w służbie narodu: Więzi, relacje i zależności w XX i XXI wieku (Lublin: Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski, 2017); Robert E. Alvis, White Eagle, Black Madonna: One Thousand Years of the Polish Catholic Tradition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). A few studies have also considered the Polish case against the wider canvas of Eastern European nationalisms: Bruce R. Berglund and Brian Porter-Szücs (eds.), Christianity and Modernity in Eastern Europe (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2010); Robert E. Alvis, Religion and the Rise of Nationalism: A Profile of an East-Central European City (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2005); Martin Schulze Wessel (ed.), Nationalisierung der Religion und Sakralisierung der Nation im östlichen Europa (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006); Albert S. Kotowski, “Polen in Deutschland: Religiöse Symbolik als Mittel der nationalen Selbstbehauptung,” in Nation und Religion in Europa: Mehrkonfessionelle Gesellschaften im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Dieter Langewiesche (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2004), 253–280. Joanna Niżyńska, “The Politics of Mourning and the Crisis of Poland’s Symbolic Language after April 10,” in East European Politics and Societies 24, 4 (2010): 467–479, here 470. On the use of religious symbols by right-wing populists in Poland, see also

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politics”37 in Poland have been noted in the existing scholarship, a more systematic study of the symbols used to maintain cleavages and sustain partisan identities is still missing. What is more, a large part of Poland-based scholarship on the intersection of nationalism and Catholicism lacks the necessary critical distance, often celebrating rather than questioning Poland’s “nationalized Catholicism.”38 Insofar as the impact of religious symbols in the Polish public domain is concerned, it is their religious meaning and their status as sacred art objects that has attracted most of the attention of historians and ethnographers.39 Only a few

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Krzysztof Jaskułowski, “Polityka krzyża,” in Wspólnota symboliczna: W stronę antropologii nacjonalizmu (Gdańsk: Katedra, 2012); Ben Stanley, “Defenders of the Cross: Populist Politics and Religion in Post-Communist Poland,” in Saving the People: How Populists Hijack Religion, edited by Nadia Marzouki, Duncan McDonnell, and Olivier Roy (London: Hurst, 2016), 109–128; Zbigniew Mikołejko, Między zbawieniem a Smoleńskiem: Studia i szkice o katolicyzmie polskim ostatnich lat (Warsaw: IFIS PAN, 2017); Ireneusz Krzemiński, “Narodowo-katolicka mowa o Polsce,” Czas Kultury 4 (2017): 50–64. Kate Korycki, “Memory, Party Politics, and Post-transition Space: The Case of Poland,” in East European Politics and Societies and Cultures 31, 3 (2017): 518–544, here 535. Bogumił Grott, Różne oblicza nacjonalizmów: Polityka, religia, etos (Kraków: NOMOS, 2010); Bogumił Grott, Nacjonalizm Chrześcijański (Kraków: Ostoja, 1996); Maciej Strutyński, Religia i naród: Inspiracje katolickie w myśli ruchu narodowego w Polsce współczesnej (1989–2001) (Kraków: NOMOS, 2006); Rafał Łętocha (ed.), Religia, polityka, naród: Studia nad współczesną myślą polityczną (Kraków: NOMOS, 2010); Krzysztof Ożóg, Kościół na straży polskiej wolności, vol. 1: Korona i krzyż (Kraków: Biały Kruk, 2012); Robert Kościelny, Kościół na straży polskiej wolności, vol. 2: Przedmurze Chrześcijaństwa (Kraków: Biały Kruk, 2013). I borrow the notion of “nationalized Catholicism” from Krzysztof Jaskułowski, “W obronie krzyża: Rzecz o używaniu i nadużywaniu symboli w polityce,” Dyskurs: Pismo Naukowo/Artystyczne ASP we Wrocławiu 16 (2013): 90–91. Renata Rogozińska, W stronę Golgoty: Inspiracje pasyjne w sztuce polskiej w latach 1970– 1999: (Poznań: Księgarnia Świętego Wojciecha, 2002); Adam Bujak and Leszek Sosnowski (eds.), Krzyż Polski, 4 vols. (Kraków: Biały Kruk, 2010–2011); Tadeusz Seweryn, Kapliczki i krzyże przydrożne w Polsce (Warsaw: PAX, 1958); Jan Adamowski and Marta Wójcicka (eds.), Krzyże i kapliczki przydrożne jako znaki społecznej, kulturowej i religijnej pamięci (Lublin: Uniwersytet Marii Curie Skłodowskiej, 2011); Tomasz Czerwiński, Kapliczki i krzyże przydrożne w Polsce (Warsaw: Sport i Turystyka Muza, 2012); Grażyna Holly, “Krzyże i kapliczki przydrożne na pograniczu polsko–słowacko–ukraińskim,” Roczniki Bieszczadzkie 20 (2012): 309–345; Kamila Gillmeister, Krzyże i kapliczki przydrożne, czyli opowieść o świętych i przestrzeni (Tczew: Fabryka Sztuk, 2015); Anna Niedźwiedź, The Image and the Figure: Our Lady of Częstochowa in Polish Culture and Popular Religion (Kraków: Jagiellonian University Press, 2010); Catherine de Busser and Anna Niedźwiedź, “Mary in Poland: A Polish Master Symbol,” in Moved by Mary: The Power of Pilgrimage in the Modern World, edited by Anna-Karina Hermkens, Willy Jansen, and Catrien Notermans (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 87–100; Anna Niedźwiedź, “Religious Symbols in Polish Underground Art and Poetry of the 1980s,” in Underground Publishing and the Public Sphere, edited by Jan C. Behrends and Thomas Lindenberger (Vienna: LIT, 2014), 189–211.

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studies have critically addressed the symbol of the cross in the Polish political realm.40 Adopting a diachronic perspective, this book takes such analyses further by examining both the way the symbol of the cross has been politically instrumentalized in different historical epochs and how the meaning of the cross has changed over time. Reconstructing the genealogy of a single symbol, as this book does, can open our eyes to more than just the “historical depth” of a given emblem. If “we think only in signs,” as Charles Sanders Peirce had it, symbols are not only our gateways into the concepts they represent, but can also help us understand the human capacity to interpret, to ascribe meaning, and to associate.41 Understanding how symbols work can tell us how we communicate, but also what we hold dear, what evokes our emotions, and how societies change over time. If symbols have the capacity to “synthesize a people’s ethos,”42 they provide important points of entry into the inner workings of communities, too. Reconstructing the history of a key Polish symbol, the cross, therefore allows us to probe not only the ways Poles have conceived of themselves as a nation over time, but also the very weave of Poland’s culture itself.

The Cross as a Polyphonic Symbol “[S]ymbols are dynamic entities, not static cognitive signs,” argued Victor Turner in his path-breaking Dramas, Fields and Metaphors from 1974.43 The often volatile situations in which symbols emerge and operate mean that some connections between symbols and their meanings are temporary and contingent. This “uncertainty of meaning” is, however, what constitutes the strength of the symbol.44 Seemingly limitless possibilities of association render particularly “opaque” symbols like the cross incredibly powerful and subject to intense appropriation. Paul Ricœur, who used the notion of “opacity” to define the quality of symbols, in which their literal meaning points to further latent layers of significance that are accessible only through the primary meaning, argued that the “depth” of a symbol can be “inexhaustible.”45 A single symbol’s capacity to invoke even seemingly disjointed ideas and images, but also to 40

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Chwalba, Sacrum i rewolucja; Kubik, The Power of Symbols; Zubrzycki, The Crosses of Auschwitz. Charles Sanders Peirce, The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 1994) (electronic edition), CP 2.302. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 89. Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1974), 96. David Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 11. Paul Ricœur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 15.

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render some of them less obvious and accessible, makes the analysis of symbols an ideal starting point from which to study changing master narratives and societies in transition. Examining the different meanings ascribed to the cross, this book aims to reveal mechanisms by which certain visions of community become fortified through symbolic practices, while others are repressed and forgotten. Investigating how those meanings have been recycled or overwritten, it also aims to pinpoint the specific circumstances that have given rise to shifts in the symbol’s semantic field. One phenomenon in particular that the book sets out to explore is cycles of protest and institutionalization. One of the main theoretical concepts informing this analysis has been Victor Turner’s premise that political symbols follow a cycle of “structure” and “antistructure.” To Turner, symbolic shifts are always a result of changes in social relations.46 In other words, the content of symbols transforms continuously as societies evolve, adapting to new agendas, goals, and master narratives. If “structure” corresponds to periods in which power is solidified, “antistructure” stands for dissent, rebellion, and change.47 The symbols of structure thus legitimize hierarchies, underscore differences between “us” and “them,” secure boundaries, and define the rules undergirding a given group. The symbols of antistructure, in turn, are characterized by creativity; have non-rational, emotional appeal; and point to alternative, more egalitarian modes of coexistence.48 In Turner’s vision, structure and antistructure are not two fully separate conditions, but rather phases in a cycle that blur into one another. Even though antistructural “communitas,” or communities of dissent, rebel against established structures, if they succeed, their discourses solidify into a new mainstream and “are converted into institutionalized structure, or become routinized, often as ritual.”49 Initially daring and innovative protest language is thus harnessed by the emerging structure once again. As a result of ritualizing previously spontaneous practices and introducing sanctions for violating the new symbolic order, power holders eventually find themselves confronted with fresh opposition. And given that this flux in the significance and status of political symbols is caused by moments of change (e.g. transition of power), the history of symbolic upheavals will also reflect the political history of a nation. The Turnerian cycle helps us to understand how a single symbol might perform an entirely different function depending on whether it is used to mobilize the public for collective acts of defiance (“antistructure”) or to help solidify power (“structure”). For example, in the period leading up to the 46 47 48 49

Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, 55. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 248.

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Polish national uprising of 1863–1864, the cross served as an inclusive symbol of emancipation from absolutist power and was meant to rally different ethnic groups to join the anti-tsarist struggle. In those years, anti-Russian demonstrations, which were usually headed by a large crucifix, also attracted a number of progressive Warsaw Jews, who not only marched alongside ethnic Poles, but also, after one cross had been damaged by the gendarmes, even raised funds for a new one.50 Yet, if the cross was initially used as a symbol of interethnic solidarity in a fight for national sovereignty and a more egalitarian society, the message it embodied changed fundamentally after Poland regained its independence in 1918. Now the cross was no longer a sign of defiance on the part of an oppressed ethnic group, but rather a tool of domination utilized by a colonizing power in multiethnic areas, where other groups were expected to abandon their aspirations to nationhood.51

The Cross as a Political Symbol While the cross is an extremely multilayered symbol whose primary religious signification has been reflected both in Poland’s sacred art and in its vernacular culture, this book concerns itself solely with its political dimension. The obvious challenge of this approach, however, lies in the difficulty of discerning where the religious transforms into the political. While some ambiguity in the symbol’s use and reception is always a given, my analysis is guided by Brian Porter-Szücs’s dictum that a religious symbol becomes political when it turns into a “means of easily labeling combatants in struggles motivated primarily by secular concerns.”52 Thus, even if the symbol of the cross features in social practices that may include acts of devotion, it is its use in the articulation of secular agendas that gives it its political character. A religious symbol employed in a political setting can also signal something entirely different from the spiritual message it originally carried. As David 50

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Norbert Getter, Jakub Schall, and Zygmunt Schipper, Żydzi bojownicy o niepodległość Polski (Warszawa: Rada Ochrony Pamięci Walk i Męczeństwa, 2002), 62–64; Julian Komar, Warszawskie manifestacje patriotyczne 1860–1861 (Warszawa: PWN, 1970), 91; N. M. Gelber, Die Juden und der polnische Aufstand 1863 (Vienna: Löwit, 1923), 42. Henryk Mościcki, Pomniki bojowników o niepodległość 1794–1863 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Ministerstwa Robót Publicznych, 1929); Jarosław Komorowski, Kresowym szlakiem: Kapliczki, pomniki, groby, vol. I: Polesie (Świdnica: Polskie Towarzystwo Turystyczno Krajoznawcze, 1997); Jarosław Komorowski, Kresowym szlakiem: Kapliczki, pomniki, groby, vol. II: Nowogródczyzna (Świdnica: Polskie Towarzystwo Turystyczno Krajoznawcze, 2000); Czesław Skiba, “Kult Nieznanego Żołnierza na Kresach Wschodnich,” Przegląd Historyczno-Wojskowy 3 (54), 1 (2002): 58–78; Tadeusz Swat, “Listopad 1918 roku: Miejsca upamiętnione i pomniki,” Niepodległość i Pamięć 10, 1 (2003): 95–105. Porter-Szücs, Faith and Fatherland, 167.

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Kertzer convincingly demonstrates, “the power of the ritual transcends its ideological content.”53 And, by being “less obviously political in form,” religious symbols can actually be much more politically efficacious than others, especially since they are not only widely recognizable, but also provide political movements with a moral authority and a transcendental legitimation of their political objectives.54 Last but not least, if such “secular concerns,” bolstered by religious paraphernalia, win the endorsement of religious leaders, they enable political actors to tap into the logistics, networks, and mobilization mechanisms that religious organizations have at their disposal.55 This malleability of religious symbols and their tremendous emotional appeal are what renders them so irresistible on the political scene and brings them onto so many different barricades. But when did the cross first become a political symbol? There is some point to the argument that the cross was a political symbol from day one. As the biblical scholar Neil Elliott notes, the crucifixion of Jesus was “one of the most unequivocally political events recorded in the New Testament.”56 If Jesus was a victim of political persecution and the form of capital punishment he received was “an instrument of imperial terror”57 that enabled the Romans to exert large-scale social control, then the political character of the symbol of the cross predates Christianity itself. With Emperor Constantine the Great (c. 280–337), the cross became for the first time a state symbol. Representations of the cross in the form of christograms and staurograms appear on his coins and, with time, the cross becomes more and more diffused as the “victorious symbol of the emperor” and a military insignia.58 The cross also becomes a symbol of conquest and subjugation. As later Christian emperors take control over new territory, they place crosses on pagan temples and “Christianize” heathen human statues 53 54 55

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Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power, 45. Abner Cohen cited in Kubik, The Power of Symbols, 6. Ulrich Willems, “Religion und soziale Bewegungen – Dimensionen eines Forschungsfeldes,” Forschungsjournal NSB 17, 4 (2004): 28–41, here 33–34. Neil Elliott, “The Anti-Imperial Message of the Cross,” in Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society, edited by Richard A. Horsley (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1997), 1. Ibid., 167. See also Thomas Söding, “Der König am Kreuz: Politik und Religion in der Passionsgeschichte,” in König und Priester: Facetten neutestamentlicher Christologie: Festschrift für Claus-Peter März zum 65. Geburtstag, edited by Martina Bär, MarkusLiborius Hermann, and Thomas Söding (Würzburg: Echter, 2012), 89. On the legal aspect of crucifixion, see John Granger Cook, Crucifixion in the Mediterranean World (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 358–416. John Granger Cook, “Crucifixion in the West: From Constantine to Recceswinth,” Zeitschrift für antikes Christentum, 16 (2012): 234–235; Dale C. Allison et al. (eds.) “Cross,” in Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, vol. 5 (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2012): 1059.

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by having crosses etched on their foreheads.59 Coins adorned with the cross in the role of an imperial symbol first appear in Constantinople in the fourth century.60 Soon, the Byzantine iconography, like the globus cruciger, the crossbearing orb, establishes itself as a Christian symbol of authority and royal regalia.61 By the fifth century, memorial crosses marking the military victories of Christians are already a widespread tradition, and soon even liturgical hymns include the topos of the cross as battle insignia.62 The military use of the cross becomes even more articulated in the Middle Ages, when not only are crosses carried to the battlefields, but also the institution of the crusade captures the imagination of contemporaries.63 The political history of the cross in the Polish context can also be traced a long way back. In the early fifteenth century, as the conflict between the Teutonic Knights and the Polish crown reached its apex, King Ladislaus Jagiełło’s diplomatic efforts focused on delegitimizing the Order’s crusade in the international diplomatic arena. Contesting the Teutonic Knights’ right to raid, dispossess, and forcibly convert the heathens, Paul Wladimiri, Jagiełło’s legal expert and representative in this debate, sought to present the Polish king, in a state of war with the crusaders, as the bearer of true Christian values.64 The symbol of the cross, adorning the robes of the Order, also known as the Crucifers (Cruciferi), thus became the central object of contention. And, as the Teutonic Knights insisted that they had been “adorned with the sign of the cross to [fight] the enemies of the Cross of Christ,”65 Wladimiri, in his numerous political writings, went to great lengths to wrest from them the claim to the symbol. Reporting about the Order’s atrocities against the civilian population, Wladimiri spoke of “the diabolic devotion cloaked under the white 59

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Stefan Heid “Vexillum crucis: Das Kreuz als Religions-, Missions- und Imperialsymbol in der frühen Kirche,” Rivista di Archeologia Cristiana 78 (2002): 228, 233. Cook, “Crucifixion in the West,” 234. Dimiter Angelov and Judith Herrin “The Christian Imperial Tradition – Greek and Latin,” in Universal Empire: A Comparative Approach to Imperial Culture and Representation in Eurasian History, edited by Peter Fibiger Bang and Dariusz Kołodziejczyk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 156. Heid “Vexillum crucis,” 227. A good example is the sixth-century Latin hymn Vexilla Regis (Royal Banners), available at www.preces-latinae.org/thesaurus/Hymni/Vexilla .html (accessed April 4, 2021). Allison et al., Encyclopedia of the Bible, 1047; Heid, “Vexillum crucis,” 239. On the role of the physical object of the cross during the crusades, see also Anne E. Lester, “Remembrance of Things Past: Memory and Material Objects in the Time of the Crusades, 1095–1291,” in Remembering the Crusades and Crusading, edited by Megan Cassidy-Welch (London: Routledge, 2017), 73–94. Ludwik Ehrlich, Rektor Paweł Włodkowic: Rzecznik obrony przeciw Krzyżakom (Kraków: Uniwersytet Jagielloński, 1963). John Frebach of Bamberg, cited in Paul Wladimiri, “Quoniam Error, part II, 1417,” in Pisma wybrane Pawła Włodkowica/Works of Paul Wladimiri (A Selection), vol. II, edited by Ludwik Ehrlich (Warsaw: Instytut Wydawniczy PAX, 1969), 376.

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gown”66 and “the iniquitous causer of darkness, and father of lies, hiding under [the Crucifers’] black cross.”67 With the emergence of modern Polish nationalism, the image of the Crucifers and their black cross was to return as a powerful symbol of German subjugation of Poland, inspiring both the visual arts and, later, post-1945 Communist propaganda.68 The period of the Counter-Reformation brought a surge of Catholic piety and a more intensive dissemination of Catholic symbols in public space. To discourage the spread of “heresy,” the Catholic hierarchy ordered all Protestants “under severe penalty” to participate in the Corpus Christi public processions, and banned Protestants (and Jews) from displaying their own religious worship publicly.69 After a synod of 1621 had ordered Catholic parishes to plant wayside crosses “to manifest that God-fearing Catholics have nothing to do with heretics, Jews and pagans,”70 wayside Latin crosses mushroomed across the country. Their function was both ritual – delineating the perimeter of the spaces believed to be thus protected from evil, disease, and other harm – and political, signaling the privileged position of the Catholic Church in the Commonwealth.71 This symbolic marking of space survived in Poland for centuries. As the author of a Polish-language Ecclesiastical Encyclopedia noted in 1878, “No other country of today has as many large 66

67 68

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In the original: “quam idem auctor iniquus tenebrarum et pater mendacij sub nigra cruce latitans.” Paul Wladimiri, “Ad Episcopum Cracoviensem, 1432,” in Pisma wybrane Pawła Włodkowica/Works of Paul Wladimiri (A Selection), vol. III, edited by Ludwik Ehrlich (Warsaw: Instytut Wydawniczy PAX, 1969), 211. Ibid. A remarkable example was Tadeusz Trepkowski’s poster “Grunwald 1410–Berlin 1945” celebrating the Soviet victory over the National Socialists as the continuation of King Jagiełło’s triumph over the Teutonic Knights in the Battle of Grunwald. See Jacek Friedrich, “Krzyżacy w niemieckiej i polskiej kulturze wizualnej,” in Obok: Polska–Niemcy: 1000 lat historii w sztuce, edited by Małgorzata Omilanowska (Cologne: DuMont, 2011), 108. The obligation for Protestants to participate in the Corpus Christi processions was introduced in Kraków and Lublin in 1689. The prohibition banning Jews and Protestants from engaging in public processions was passed at the 1717 synod of Wilno. See Magda Teter, Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland: A Beleaguered Church in the Post-Reformation Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 124, 139. Kamila Gillmeister, Krzyże i kapliczki przydrożne, czyli opowieść o świętych i przestrzeni (Tczew: Fabryka Sztuk, 2015), 20. Wayside crosses delineated the symbolic boundary of a village. It was outside of the village perimeter, marked by the cross, that suicides would be buried and illnesses or poverty would be ritually discarded. It was also believed that such crosses protected the crops and prevented the spread of epidemics. See Holly, “Krzyże i kapliczki przydrożne,” 336; Jan Adamowski, “Motywacje stawiania krzyży i kapliczek przydrożnych,” in Krzyże i kapliczki przydrożne jako znaki społecznej, kulturowej i religijnej pamięci, edited by Jan Adamowski and Marta Wójcicka (Lublin: Uniwersytet Marii Curie Skłodowskiej, 2011), 35–36; Gillmeister, Krzyże i kapliczki przydrożne, 7; Piotr Drapkiewicz, “Krzyże wsi Żegary,” Almanach Sejneński 6 (2008): 19–27.

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crosses beside the roads, in the fields, and in village cemeteries as we do.”72 In 1936, a local priest from Janów reported that there were so many crosses lined up along the roads in his parish that they could be mistaken for overhead telephone lines.73 Another key early modern episode that helped to cement the central position of Catholic symbolism in the Commonwealth was King Sobieski’s Relief of Vienna in 1683. Arriving to aid the international military alliance formed in defense against the Ottoman invasion, Jan III Sobieski went down in European historiography and literature as the “last crusader,”74 the “defender of Christ,”75 and a “destroyer of the Muslims”76 who was “converting mosques into churches.”77 Though the iconography of the period does not make very intensive use of the symbol of the cross in representations of the battle,78 the image of the fearless crusader who rallies his troops “to defend the Cause of God, and to preserve the Western Empire”79 did leave a lasting mark on the political imagination of the Commonwealth’s elites. As European poets eulogized Sobieski as “a man sent by God”80 who “has no fear 72 73

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77 78

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Michał Nowodworski, quoted in Holly, “Krzyże i kapliczki przydrożne,” 309. Artur Gaweł, “Przydrożne krzyże i kapliczki na Sokólszczyźnie jako dawne i współczesne ‘akty wiary’ ludu wiejskiego,” in Krzyże i kapliczki przydrożne jako znaki społecznej, kulturowej i religijnej pamięci, edited by Jan Adamowski and Marta Wójcicka (Lublin: Uniwersytet Marii Curie Skłodowskiej), 2011, 230. John Bingham Morton, “Sobieski and the Relief of Vienna,” Blackfriars Monthly Review 25 (1944): 244. Marco Antonio Martorelli, “Per la glorissima vittoria riportata contro il commune nemico dal valore delle armi imperiali” (1683), cited in Bronisław Biliński, Le glorie di Giovanni III Sobieski vincitore di Vienna 1683 nella poesia italiana (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1990), 202. Carlo Andrea Sinibaldi, “Vienna invitta e trionfante,” cited in Biliński, Le glorie di Giovanni III Sobieski, 77. Morton, “Sobieski and the Relief of Vienna,” 248. Though King Sobieski himself is often portrayed as carrying the Order of the Holy Spirit, and some individual memorabilia of the Battle of Vienna do contain the symbol of the cross (e.g. a silver votive crucifix placed atop a Turkish banner pole), see Jerzy T. Petrus and Magdalena Piwocka (eds.), Odsiecz wiedeńska 1683: Wystawa jubileuszowa na Zamku Królewskim na Wawelu w trzechsetlecie bitwy, vol. 2 (Kraków: Państwowe Zbiory Sztuki na Wawelu, 1990), fig. 211, fig. 147, fig. II; Jerzy Szablowski, “Obchody jubileuszowe zwycięstwa pod Wiedniem w 1683 roku w ciągu trzech stuleci,” in Odsiecz wiedeńska 1683: Wystawa jubileuszowa na Zamku Królewskim na Wawelu w trzechsetlecie bitwy, vol. 1, edited by Jerzy T. Petrus and Magdalena Piwocka (Kraków: Państwowe Zbiory Sztuki na Wawelu, 1990), 7–40; Dagnosław Demski, “Jan Sobieski: Anniversaries of the 1683 Battle of Vienna (from 1783 to 1983) and Its Historical Imagination,” Traditiones 1 (2014): 13–28; Tadeusz Gasiński, “A Croatian Poetic Echo of King John III Sobieski’s Victory at Vienna,” The Polish Review 15, 1 (1970): 46–53. A Speech Delivered by the King of Poland to His Army before the Battle, September 12th, 1683 (London: N. Thompson, 1683). Biliński, Le glorie di Giovanni III Sobieski, 18.

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of any force”81 because he “raises the Cross as his standard”82 and may even “return Byzantium to worshipping the Cross,”83 the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was forging its own myth as the eastern “bulwark of Christianity.” Emerging in this turbulent period, the image of Poland as the Antemurale Christianitatis, a state on the edge of the “Western Empire” resisting invasions by Protestant Swedes, Orthodox Muscovites, and Muslim Ottomans, continued to shape the Polish political imagination for centuries to come.84 And, in the early twentieth century, as Polish ethnonationalism was taking its modern form, the memorialization of the Battle of Vienna and of Sobieski as the “defender of the cross” returned in full force, serving new political agendas.85 The cross became an important symbol in intra-Polish political clashes at the latest during the Confederation of Bar (1768–1772). An alliance of Catholic Polish gentry formed to rebel against King Stanisław August Poniatowski and took to arms when the Polish parliament, pressured by Catherine the Great, passed an unpopular bill that granted Protestants and Russian Orthodox believers equal political rights and limited the liberties of the nobility. The armed mobilization in defense of “faith and freedom,” which led to four years of civil war and precipitated foreign intervention and the first partition of Poland, carried the symbol of the cross on its banners and insignia.86 The Catholic symbols not only served as rallying signs for adherents of the Confederation, but also provided the means to confound the opponent in battle by changing the register of the encounter from armed struggle into an act of religious devotion. As Paweł Jasienica recounts, based on an eyewitness report, when the joined royalist and Russian forces approached the stronghold of the rebels, the fortress of Bar, expecting to start the siege with negotiations, “from the ramparts of Bar, resounding with hymns and supplications, instead of envoys, descended ‘four priests with crucifixes and the fifth one with the statue of Virgin Mary, whom nobody knew how to deal with.’”87 From that point on, the symbol of the cross not only came to connote political projects that entailed the supremacy of Roman Catholics and the 81

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Antonio Cutrona, “Gia (lode al Ciel) disciolto il fosco velo . . .” (1683), cited in Biliński, Le glorie di Giovanni III Sobieski, 170. Ibid. Giovan Battista Fracanzano, “Vienna liberata dalla Maestà di Giovanni III Re di Polonia,” cited in Biliński, Le glorie di Giovanni III Sobieski, 119. Porter-Szücs, Faith and Fatherland, 209. See Marja Dynowska, Jan Sobieski: Obrońca krzyża (Warsaw: Dobra Prasa, 1933). On the twentieth-century iconography of the Battle of Vienna, see Joanna Wolańska, “The Interior Decoration of the Sobieski Chapel at the Church on Kahlenberg Hill in Vienna,” Sacrum et Decorum 10 (2017): 67–86. For some examples of the iconography, see Władysław Konopczyński, Konfederacja Barska: Przebieg, tajemne cele i jawne skutki, 2 vols. (Poznań: Zysk i Spółka, 2017). Paweł Jasienica, Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodów: Dzieje Agonii (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1999), 273.

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privileged position of the Catholic Church in the Polish state, but also became a symbol that marked the banners of partisan conflicts. With the Polish parliament declaring 2018 the year of the Confederation of Bar, the ambiguous legacy of the rebellion and its aesthetics got revived both in the right-wing populist “historical politics” and in the popular culture at large.88 A true golden age for religious imagery in the Polish political discourse came, however, with the Romantic era. The motif of crucifixion as an allegory of the suffering of partitioned Poland had been particularly popular among the Polish Romantics. Adam Mickiewicz, the Polish national bard, verbalized this metaphor most powerfully in his Books of the Polish Nation and of the Pilgrimage of Poland, published in Paris in 1831. Comparing Poland to the crucified Christ was a way of expressing hope for Poland’s resurrection – that is, regaining independence. “For the Polish nation did not die,” wrote Mickiewicz, “its body lies in the tomb [. . .] And on the third day the soul will re-enter the body and the nation will rise from the dead and liberate all the peoples of Europe from slavery.”89 The biblical language of this vision reinforced a narrative of Poland as the Christ of nations, but also invested a series of images – related to crucifixion, death, entombment, and so on – with not only spiritual, but also political meaning. Thus, the cross, a bier, and a crown of thorns became symbols of foreign rule in the Polish lands, as well as visual shorthand for the failed uprisings and the repercussions in their aftermath. This language of symbols established itself as early as in the 1820s and soon gained resonance in the political sphere. During the November Uprising of 1830, the symbol of the cross featured on the insurgents’ banners, while the symbolism of crucifixion and resurrection inspired a flurry of patriotic images and lyrical texts in its aftermath.90 The symbol also reappeared in 1846, when a group of 88

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See “Uchwała Sejmu Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej z dnia 8 czerwca 2017 r. w sprawie ustanowienia roku 2018 Rokiem Konfederacji Barskiej,” http://orka.sejm.gov.pl/proc8 .nsf/uchwaly/1513_u.htm (accessed January 30, 2021). Under the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) government, the Confederation of Bar received a good deal of attention both in the traditional memorial genres (like postage stamps) and in pop-cultural productions, like comic books and board games. See Paweł Kołodziejski, Konfederacja Barska w komiksie (Kraków: Wydawnictwo AA, 2018). Adam Mickiewicz, Księgi narodu polskiego i pielgrzymstwa polskiego (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1983 [1831]), 221. The best-known banner from the November Uprising, reading “In the name of God, for our and your freedom,” from 1831, featured the symbol of the cross, painted in red on a white background. One of the most renowned texts of Polish Romanticism, written in the aftermath of the November Uprising and referencing the symbol of the cross as a representation of the Polish predicament, is Juliusz Słowacki’s Kordian, first published in 1834. Among the images commemorating the uprising with the symbol of the cross, see Teofil Kwiatkowski, Dziewczyna przy powstańczej mogile (1850), in Polona, https://polona.pl/item/dziewczynaprzy-powstanczej-mogile,NDU4Nzk5NTA/0/#info:metadata (accessed January 30, 2021); Die trauernden Polinnen, in Polona, https://polona.pl/item/die-trauernden-polinnen, MzExMDA4NTc/0/#info:metadata (accessed January 30, 2021).

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revolutionaries carried it in a rally to mobilize peasants in the area of Kraków for an uprising against the Austrians. The envoys with the crucifix were not successful, however, and twenty-four-year-old Edward Dembkowski, who marched at the head of the group, was killed when the demonstration was attacked by the Austrian troops supported by local peasants.91 The incident and the resulting Austrian policy of containment sparked off a massacre of over 2,000 Polish nobles, students, and other activists in the course of the so-called Galician Slaughter (Rabacja Galicyjska). It was only at the time leading up to the January Uprising, however, that the circulation of these Romantic symbols in the public sphere reached significant dimensions. “Widely used in a limited number of variations,” note Opalski and Bartal, “these biblical images spread rapidly, enriching the language of the street as well as that of political propaganda.”92 Adam Zamoyski, observing this trend in a transnational comparison, does not mince his words, speaking of Poland “developing a pathology of martyrdom” in this period.93 What contributed to the spread of these symbols was not only the revolutionary mood, but also the advent of new technologies that facilitated the reproduction and wide circulation of such contents. The advances in printing, lithography, and photography allowed contemporaries to disseminate greater amounts of visual material both to rally support for armed struggle against foreign rule and to report on current events in the ever more widely circulating illustrated press. The middle of the nineteenth century was precisely this point in time when the rising interest in matters of politics and the increasing literacy rate coincided with a greater and cheaper supply of the printed word and visual materials.94 With the advent of machine-made paper, the rotary press, mechanical binding, and new techniques that reduced the cost of printed illustrations, activists of the national cause could reach an exponentially larger audience than ever before, and communicated their ideas with visual symbols on an unprecedented scale.95 Mass manufacturing, in turn, supplied the new material vehicles of dissent, in the form of patriotic jewelry, medallions, and other small objects that encapsulated the message of national resistance. 91 92

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Zamoyski, Holy Madness, 331–332. Magdalena Opalski and Israel Bartal, Poles and Jews: A Failed Brotherhood (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1992), 52. Zamoyski, Holy Madness, 291. Sigfrid Henry Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of Printing (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1955), 189. Thanks to the mechanization of paper mills and the invention of wood-pulp paper around 1850, annual paper production increased tenfold from 1800 to 1860. The invention of the rotary press in 1848, in turn, made it possible to make 24,000 impressions per hour, whereas a hand press yielded only 300 impressions. See Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of Printing, 191–195.

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It is in this period that the revolutionary imagery begins to reach a wide audience and symbols like the cross enter the visual canon of a nation-in-themaking. It is also at this point that religious symbols, decontextualized from their original use, become visual shorthand for the profound social change unfolding in Polish society. The time of the last and most tragic nineteenthcentury Polish insurrection, with the “patriotic fever” that accompanied it, was such a watershed for the Polish symbolic imagination because the revolutionary impulse that sparked the uprising brought with it a promise of very radical social changes. The abolition of serfdom by the revolutionary National Government and the promise of social equality extended to Jews, at least in the short period of Polish–Jewish rapprochement, meant an epochal transformation of social relations. And, indeed, the period of the January Uprising counts as “one of the greatest breakthroughs and upheavals” of Polish history – a military failure that “ploughed through Polish life more deeply than any other and weighed with a great force on the minds of at least two generations to come.”96 Beginning my scrutiny at this historical juncture, I take up the long history of the cross midstream, but also at a crucial caesura that marks the true onset of modern forms of political participation. It is in the 1860s that new social challenges emerge that require a novel language of politics. Thanks to the new technologies of communication, the visual language developed at that point continued to inspire Polish political debates for decades to come. The story of the symbol of the cross entering the visual arsenal of political communication parallels in many ways that of the icon of Our Lady of Częstochowa. Ever since the consecration of the Virgin Mary as the “Queen of Poland” by King Jan Kazimierz after the defense of the Jasna Góra monastery against the invading Swedes in 1656, the icon of Our Lady of Częstochowa has had a prominent place in the Polish “national sensorium.”97 It is also an immensely popular symbol, both in Polish culture and in the process of negotiating the national identity.98 De Busser and Niedźwiedź go as far as to

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Władysław Pobóg-Malinowski, Najnowsza historia polityczna Polski, vol. I: 1864–1914 (London: B. Świderski, 1963), 9. Geneviève Zubrzycki, “History and the National Sensorium: Making Sense of Polish Mythology,” Qualitative Sociology 34 (2011): 26, 29–30. See also Kubik, The Power of Symbols; Anna Niedźwiedź, The Image and the Figure: Our Lady of Częstochowa in Polish Culture and Popular Religion (Kraków: Jagiellonian University Press, 2010); Catherine de Busser and Anna Niedźwiedź, “Mary in Poland: A Polish Master Symbol,” in Moved by Mary: The Power of Pilgrimage in the Modern World, edited by Anna-Karina Hermkens, Willy Jansen, and Catrien Notermans (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 87–100; Niedźwiedź, “Religious Symbols in Polish Underground Art and Poetry,” Alvis White Eagle, Black Madonna. Niedźwiedź, The Image and the Figure; Niedźwiedź, “Religious Symbols in Polish Underground Art and Poetry”; Andrzej Draguła, “Od kapliczki do mody: Obraz Maryi w kulturze współczesnej,” Colloquia Theologica Ottoniana 2 (2018): 43–64.

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say that the icon is a “Polish master symbol” that “enshrine[s] the major hopes and aspirations of an entire society.”99 Indeed, the two symbols have coexisted on political banners, often used to rally for the same cause and, at times, even appearing in combination. The images of Maria Regina, just like those of the cross, have served to legitimize imperial authority, crusades, and conquests since late Antiquity.100 The symbol of the imperial Virgin Mary, which featured on Byzantine coins, spread from Constantinople throughout the Mediterranean, but also far beyond.101 The representation of Mary as a triumphant “war goddess,” who is both “imperious” and “pugnacious,” served the Teutonic Knights to morally sanction the conquest of pagan peoples in Prussia.102 The image of the Virgin Mary as “La Conquistadora” also figured in the Spanish colonization of New Mexico “as an embodiment of military conquest and of religious conversion.”103 The icon of Mary likewise inspired warfare against the Muslims during the Reconquista and the Battle of Vienna.104 In the era of rising nationalisms, the Virgin Mary also remained a politically relevant symbol from partitioned Poland to Mexico.105 Finally, the cult of Marian apparitions, like those in Medjugorje and Transcarpathian Ukraine, continues to inspire ethnonationalist discourses, and their locations become sites of political contention.106 Despite the functional similarities in the way the symbol of the cross and the image of the Virgin Mary have been politically instrumentalized to legitimize power, draw lines of demarcation between different groups, mark territory, 99 100

101

102

103

104 105

106

De Busser and Niedźwiedź, “Mary in Poland,” 87. Dragos Boicu, “Marian Devotion as a Form of Legitimation of the Imperial Authority,” Review of Ecumenical Studies 6 (2014): 102–120; Eileen Rubery, “Pope John VII’s Devotion to Mary: Papal Images of Mary from the Fifth to the early Eighth Centuries,” in The Origins of the Cult of the Virgin Mary, edited by Chris Maunder (London: Burns and Oates, 2008), 176–184; Susie Speakman Sutch and Anne-Laure van Bruaene, “The Seven Sorrows of the Virgin Mary: Devotional Communication and Politics in the Burgundian–Habsburg Low Countries, c. 1490–1520,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 61, 2 (2010): 252–278; Tricoire, Mit Gott rechnen. Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 49. Marian Dygo, “The Political Role of the Cult of the Virgin Mary in Teutonic Prussia in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Journal of Medieval History 15 (1989), 67, 71. Amy G. Remensnyder, La Conquistadora: The Virgin Mary at War and Peace in the Old and the New Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 6. Ibid., 15–30; Petrus and Piwocka, Odsiecz wiedeńska 1683, vol. 2. Mary Vaughan and Stephen Lewis (eds.), The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico 1920–1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). Agnieszka Halemba, Negotiating Marian Apparitions: The Politics of Religion in Transcarpathian Ukraine (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2015); Mart Bax, Medjugorje: Religion, Politics and Violence in Rural Bosnia (Amsterdam: VU Uitgeverij, 1995).

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introduction

and mobilize for armed conflicts, the two symbols have divergent semantic fields and a different materiality. The uniqueness of the symbol of the cross in the political context, as I will argue throughout this book, results from its simplicity, abstractness, and ease of reproduction and adaptation, as well as from its vertical expressivity and the variety of performative uses that it affords. A cross can be planted, painted on surfaces, assembled from other objects, performed as a gesture, or used as a weapon. It can also become a canvas for other images, messages, or manifestos, and a site of performance (e.g. during a mock crucifixion). It can be toppled, destroyed, or burned. While the image of the Virgin Mary circulates in the Polish political context as a symbol much akin to, and, in some instances, functionally interchangeable with, that of the cross, it is the latter that offers a uniquely efficient tool for political mobilization, thanks to its visual minimalism, symbolic opacity, and wide range of affordances. This book sets out to survey moments of symbolic mobilization in Poland’s modern history as symptoms of social change. Focusing on key political caesuras in modern Polish history, it looks at how different moments of transition necessitated efficient and impactful means of political mobilization and how the symbol of the cross successfully delivered that tool. It is a story of how a very old symbol, inextricably embedded in the nation’s centuries-long history and tradition, became a vehicle to domesticate political ideas that were new, radical, and, sometimes, revolutionary. The simple, but powerfully expressive symbol of the cross captured the eye, synthesized complex contents in a visually minimalist message, underscored intellectual arguments with an emotional overtone, and, last but not least, could reach a wide audience before the era of mass literacy.107 At the same time, it has always been a contested and polarizing symbol that political actors of different colors, and sometimes opposing factions in the same conflict, placed a claim on. The inappositeness of the sacred symbol put to a profane political use made this kind of instrumentalization inevitably controversial – the politicized cross has always triggered emotions and a cacophony of contesting voices. The story of what political messages the cross came to amplify and what responses it catalyzed is the heart of this book. Inspired by theories of nationalism and classical semantics, but also by political anthropology, cultural studies, and gender studies, this text draws on a wealth of sources, ranging from the visual arts to political pamphlets, patriotic music and literature, monuments, and performative practices, using a radically interdisciplinary toolkit. It offers a cultural history of the cross spanning the period from the national uprisings of the nineteenth century, when the cross was first used as a political symbol on a mass scale, to the present day. Taking this diachronic perspective, it fills a gap in the existing 107

Chwalba, Sacrum i rewolucja, 217.

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scholarship while also critically exploring a number of controversial issues, such as the role of the Catholic Church in shaping Polish nationalism and the interethnic violence, antisemitism, and misogyny that have long undergirded the Polish nation-building project. At the same time, the book aims to address a number of broader issues. Taking the symbol of the cross as a point of departure from which to explore Poland’s key political upheavals, it traces the country’s dramatic transformations on both a macro- and a micro-scale, addressing the nation’s grand narratives as well as its forgotten margins: geographic borderlands, ethnic minorities, and the female voice. Despite being primarily a historical study, the book aims to contribute to understanding of how religious symbols work to bolster national discourses and become powerful tools to mobilize political action. By examining how the symbol of the cross has been used as a tool to exclude certain groups from the national community and how it emerged as the symbol of popular dissent against a ruling elite perceived as illegitimate, the book also traces the roots and symbolic repertoire of contemporary Polish populism. At the same time, it provides insight into legacies of nationalism specific to the East-Central European region more generally, including nineteenth-century imperialisms, national consolidation in the interwar period, state socialism, and neoliberal transformation after 1989.

Organization of the Book The chapters to follow focus on a sequence of case studies that afford insight into six key moments in Poland’s modern history in which the symbol of the cross loomed large as a rallying sign: the anti-tsarist uprisings of the nineteenth century, the First Republic (1918–1939), the early decades of state socialism, the Solidarity era (1980–1989), the years of systemic transformation, and, finally, the aftermath of the Smolensk plane catastrophe in 2010. Although this book tries to provide an overview of the evolution of the symbol of the cross in Poland’s modern history, the story also takes large leaps forward, skipping over, most notably, the period of World War II and the Holocaust. Given the extent to which wartime occupation regimes in the Polish lands repressed free public expression, decimated the political elites, stripped whole groups of civil rights altogether, limited political participation, and criminalized political dissent, I regard the years between 1939 and 1945 as a caesura in the story of political evolution that this book tries to tell. This is not to say that the symbol of the cross was absent from the grassroots expressions of wartime piety and collective mourning, or that the tribulations of World War II and the profound traumas that Poland’s population suffered in these years did not have a bearing on what the symbol of the cross came to signify to Poles in the changed political reality after 1945. My argument here, however, is that the new political articulations of the symbol could only truly unfold after the traumatic

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earthquake that the war-related violence brought with it. And, indeed, as I demonstrate in Chapter 3, they came out with full force during the 1956 “symbolic revolution” and its aftermath. The ripples of the exogenous shocks that Poland’s population suffered in the war could become visible in the symbolic sphere only in the ensuing period of (relative) calm. Although each of the chapters to follow paints, in broad strokes, the general atmosphere, ideological goals, and underlying frictions that motivated political actors in a given period, they go beyond a synthetic overview. Focusing on specific micro-histories, they shed light on the cracks, paradoxes, and discontinuities of the grand narratives; point to local idiosyncrasies; and deliver what Marci Shore has termed “excessive detail”: the unexpected, curious, and jarring facts that challenge the master framework, revealing its silences and limitations.108 Chapter 1 recounts how the cross began functioning as a political symbol in modern Polish history. Set against the background of the last and most tragic nineteenth-century Polish insurrection and the patriotic fever that preceded it, the story opens with the figure of the Jewish defender of the cross, Michał Landy, shot dead while carrying a crucifix at an anti-tsarist demonstration in 1861. Landy’s death and its resonance provide an entry point into the story of how the cross was first used to voice protest, mobilize action, and convey a strictly political vision – in this case, that of an interethnic alliance of the Central Eastern European nations subjugated by the tsarist regime rising in a joint struggle for freedom, equality, and emancipation. Chapter 2 takes us to the moment when partitioned Poland regains its independence in the aftermath of World War I. As the young nation attempts to delineate its new borders and defend them against threatening Others, in particular atheist Soviet Russia, the symbol of the cross comes to denote an ethno-nationalist vision of the country’s future. Harnessed to legitimize Poland’s claim to the multiethnic territories of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the cross is now used as a symbol of military dominance and morally grounded supremacy over Lithuanians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Jews, who are symbolically excluded from the national fold. Three case studies illustrate this transition in the symbol’s meaning, focusing on three highly controversial and politicized “borderland crosses”: the Three Crosses monument in Wilno (Vilnius), the Cross of the First Corps at the fortress of Bobrujsk, and the Cross at the Legionnaires’ Pass in the Carpathian Mountains. Chapter 3 traces the emergence of a spectacular and uniquely Polish form of protest – the “defense of the cross.” It focuses on the iconic defense of a wayside cross that took place at the heart of the model socialist metropolis of Nowa 108

Marci Shore, Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 6.

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Huta in 1960, an initially peaceful protest that transformed into violent street riots against the Communist authorities. The case study not only illustrates how the cross became a rallying sign for anti-systemic protest in Communist Poland, but also sheds light on the role of women in devising creative modes of nonconformist behavior in the gray zone between religiosity and rebellion. Focusing on the transformative decade marked by the rise of the Solidarity movement (1980–1989), Chapter 4 examines how the cross served as a source of metaphysical legitimation for Poland’s growing opposition movement. The chapter traces how Solidarity used the symbol to mark spaces of antiCommunist dissent, mourn workers killed in confrontations with the police, and foster a rift in the popular mind between “the nation” and the Communist power holders, portrayed as “anti-nation.” Three case studies illustrate how the symbol of the cross was instrumental in both solidifying and challenging this boundary: Communist attempts to hijack celebrations held at the foot of the Poznań Crosses in commemoration of the workers’ rebellion of 1956, Solidarity’s campaign to rebrand May Day using Catholic symbols, and the project to display the symbol of the cross during the fortieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising throw into sharp relief the ambivalence and contradictory nature of the symbol in the late socialist period. Chapter 5 covers the immediate post-1989 period, when exploitation of the symbol of the cross by a variety of political actors was unabated and it continued to define new frontlines of conflict. Examining a number of contexts in which the symbol intersected with politics, including the abortion debate, the anti-pornography campaign, and Poland’s lustration process, the chapter reveals the inner workings of an ideological shift that deeply transformed the country. Finally, Chapter 6 revisits the events of the year 2010, when a fatal crash suffered by the Polish presidential plane near Smolensk sent massive shock waves through society and triggered some of the most iconic symbolic clashes in the county’s contemporary history. The rise of right-wing populism, which followed the Smolensk crash and laid the groundwork for the country’s recent shift towards illiberal democracy, coincided with a surge in the use of religious imagery, which came to dominate mainstream expressions of national pride and belonging. Taking as a case study the so-called Smolensk cross planted in front of the Presidential Palace in Warsaw, which for six months was fiercely defended by a group of the late President Kaczyński’s supporters, this chapter investigates populist instrumentalization of Catholic symbols and the opposition it triggered. A comprehensive history of the symbol of the cross in Polish political life could fill volumes, and this book certainly has no ambition to list encyclopedically every single manifestation of the symbol. Nor is it a history of Polish religiosity or an anthology of a single motif within the national culture. Instead, tracing how the central symbol of Christianity came to feature on

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very different political barricades, harnessed in conflicts over entirely secular concerns, the book aims to illuminate how the symbol of the cross has achieved its present status as a ubiquitous, unmarked, and almost transparent element of the public realm in Poland. In doing so, it journeys through a territory exceptionally fraught with taboos and befogged with myths. While at times the story follows the mainstream Polish national narrative, revisiting well-known events, at other points it meanders into obscure, marginal, and uncharted tributaries, exploring unexpected facts and unconventional sources. It is a history of political crusades, appropriation, and power, but also of cultural resistance and nonconformism – a story of hope and of outrage.

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1 The Ascendance of the Cross

Monday, April 8, 1861 was a cloudy, cold day. Snow fell in the morning, and though it melted during the day, it left wet puddles and a sense of mournful melancholy in the streets of Warsaw. This was a day that would go down in history as memorable. For the seventeen-year-old Jewish student, Michał Landy, it was to be his last. On that Monday, he was to become a Jewish hero of the Polish nation, dying as a defender of the cross. At four o’clock that afternoon, Michał left home in high spirits to stroll with a friend in the Saski Gardens – his father reminisced later. The weather was bad, but the agitated atmosphere in the city center must have been a magnet to the boys. Warsaw was in the throes of “a convulsive patriotic possession.”1 The tsarist authorities had just allowed a form of quasi-autonomous Polish municipal authority, nominating Count Aleksander Wielopolski as a new minister in Warsaw. The new hopes for Polish autonomy, however, quickly soured as Wielopolski disbanded the Agricultural Society, a semi-autonomous organization associating Polish landowners that, Polish patriots imagined, could become the nucleus of a future Polish parliament. The unpopular decision threw the capital city into a state of turmoil, triggering a series of spontaneous demonstrations across the city.2 Just like the day before, Varsovians were filling up the Castle Square again. There was a sense of excitement and anticipation in the air. The police stepped up their presence, after a new ban on public assemblies was issued. Yet, passers-by, clad in mourning, kept on gathering in small groups here and there, wandering up and down the streets without apparent purpose, as if waiting for something to happen.3 Warsaw was still recovering from the shock 1

2

3

Ewa Toniak, Śmierć bohatera: Motyw śmierci heroicznej w polskiej sztuce i literaturze od Powstania Kościuszkowskiego do manifestacji 1861 (Gdańsk: słowo/obraz terytoria, 2015), 143. The Agricultural Society (Towarzystwo Rolnicze) was brought to life on the wave of liberal reforms of Tsar Alexander II in 1857. On the events surrounding Wielopolski’s appointment and the demonstrations that it triggered, see Mikołaj Wasyliewicz Berg, Zapiski o Powstaniu Polskiem 1863 i 1864 roku, vol. 1 (Kraków: Księgarnia Spółki Wydawniczej Polskiej, 1899), 251–298. Walery Przyborowski, Historya dwóch lat: 1861–1862, vol. 2 (Kraków: Drukarnia Anczyca i Spółki, 1893), 330.

27

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of the recent bloody skirmishes between civilian protesters and the tsarist gendarmes: just over a month earlier, on February 27, Russian troops shot into a patriotic demonstration that gathered thousands of Varsovians, killing five. That, and the ensuing spectacular funeral of the Five Fallen, jointly escorted to the cemetery by the representatives of the Catholic and Protestant Churches, as well as the Chief Rabbi of Warsaw, was still fresh in the collective memory. On that cold April day, the city’s cemeteries attracted considerable attention again. The funeral of a deportee to Siberia, Ksawery Stobnicki, gathered a sizeable crowd of Catholics, while a memorial service for the proassimilationist Director of the Rabbinical School, Antoni Eisenbaum (1791– 1852), drew a large group of Jews to the Jewish cemetery. Encouraged by patriotic speeches and mutual declarations of Polish–Jewish alliance against the Russian aggressor, the two gatherings eventually merged and, headed by a priest holding a crucifix (most likely belonging to the paraphernalia of the funeral), started marching towards the Castle Square, singing Polish patriotic songs. Confronted by the Russian troops and unwilling to disperse, the demonstrators found themselves under the gunfire of the gendarmerie. At one point, the priest holding the crucifix fell to the ground wounded. Michał Landy, who marched at the head of the group, caught the falling crucifix and – according to the reports of the eyewitnesses – lifted it high above the heads of the demonstrators. Moments later, he was wounded, too. Taken to the hospital by other civilians, he died of his wounds the next day. A small circle of family and friends attended his surreptitious funeral at the Jewish cemetery, held just after midnight on the following night. As the Jewish family mourned their son, almost overnight a legend was born. As a Jewish defender of the cross, Landy has become part of a much larger and long-lived narrative. In the popular accounts and visual and literary representations that honored Landy’s deed, we encounter not only the topoi of heroic death for the fatherland, but also the beginning of the ascendance of the cross as a political symbol. With time, it would become not only the dominant visual shorthand for the 1863 insurrection against the Russians, but also a more universal symbol of righteous protest against an illegitimate power. This function of the cross as a revolutionary rallying sign has, indeed, outlived the memory of Michał Landy’s death. The legend of the Jewish Defender of the Cross was born and began circulating at a very specific moment. Thirty years after the bloodily crushed insurrection of 1830–1831 had forced thousands of public figures, military leaders, artists, and intellectuals to leave the country, while others were deported to Siberia or suffered dispossession, the Kingdom of Poland was again aflame with demands for more autonomy from Imperial Russia, as well as for social reform. The desire for change, especially urgently needed land

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reform that would end serfdom, and the demand for more civic rights for the groups oppressed by tsarist rule – in particular Jews – accompanied the calls for national emancipation. Thus the early Polish nationalism, taking shape in the Romantic epoch, was now coupled with demands for radical social change that would deeply transform the society. Against this background, Michał Landy’s death, with a crucifix in his hand, focalized the central preoccupations of this transformative moment – such as the idea of sacrifice for the nation and the dream of interethnic mobilization against Russian rule. At the same time, however, it also encapsulated something fundamental about the function of the cross in Polish modernity – as a boundary-marking tool, and a key mobilizing symbol in times of acute social change and crisis. As this instance vividly illustrates, the cross emerged here as a symbol that, perhaps contrary to contemporary perceptions, was not there to ensure the continuity of the status quo, but to mobilize for the unprecedented. In this particular time, it gained political significance not as an emblem of immutable tradition, but as a promise of change and transition.

The Ascendance of the Cross Though the cross had appeared on banners involved in historical conflicts before, it was only now that, with the development of printing technology, lithography, and photography, the symbol reached a greater circulation and became the visual shorthand for the conflict at hand. Legitimizing the agenda of the insurgents as a righteous struggle against injustice and helping to establish a position of moral superiority over the Russian overlords, the symbol of the cross was both extremely efficacious and safe to use. It provided a symbol for the national movement at a time when other symbols, such as the national colors, were banned. It offered both a powerful metaphor for national demise and the hope for resurrection. Last but not least, it provided materiality that afforded certain spectacular forms of protest. A cross could be carried in a procession, used to swear an oath on, planted to commemorate a battlefield, worn as a piece of patriotic jewelry, or even used as a weapon in direct street skirmishes. But, perhaps most importantly, the cross always remained conveniently liminal; positioned in between the national mythology and religion, it always made it possible to cloak strictly political action as religious devotion. Already in the run-up to the January Uprising, the cross emerged as “a unifying sign”4 and a “symbolic representation of the national movement,”5 present not only as a key attribute during demonstrations, but also in popular 4

5

Iwona Kurz, “‘The Five Fallen’ as a Meta-image of Polish Culture in the Mid-19th Century,” transl. Patrick Trompiz, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 10 (2015): 3, www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/2015/10-the-visual-complex-of-the-polishnineteenth-century/the-five-fallen-as-a-meta-image-of-polish-culture-in-the-mid-19th (accessed July 20, 2022). Przyborowski, Historya dwóch lat, 147.

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Fig. 1. A postcard reproducing Artur Szyk’s image of the Jew Landy with the cross, published by Drukarnia Narodowa in Kraków, 1930s. Collection of Marek Sosenko.

poetry, song, visual arts, memorial practices, and even the official heraldry of the insurrectional authorities. Indeed, one of the most manifest proofs of the political status of the symbol may be that, during the January Uprising, the organs of the underground Polish state incorporated the cross into the prospective state

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Fig. 2. A seal of the National Government (Rząd Narodowy) from 1863. Source: Jurij Sztakelberg, Pieczęcie powstańcze 1863–1864 (Warsaw: PWN, 1988), Table XXV 1a.

emblem. As members of the National Central Committee convened to constitute a revolutionary National Government (Rząd Narodowy) in January 1863, a discussion of the design of its official seal was part of the agenda. The new state emblem combined the Polish eagle, a charging knight (Polish: Pogoń, Lithuanian: Vytis, Belarusian: Pahonia) as the symbol of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and Archangel Michael standing for Ukraine. All three emblems were emblazoned on a heraldic field with three divisions, symbolizing the equal standing of all the allied nations. The revolutionaries, however, still wanted an overarching symbol denoting the political ideas of emancipation and equality to be placed at the top of this triple coat of arms. Having rejected the crown as too monarchistic, they eventually voted to have a cross instead. Justifying this decision, the Committee stated, “An emblem of this kind would not hurt anybody’s political sensitivities, but be a symbol of widely understood love, truth, and justice.”6 And although the actual seal produced according to this design never circulated very widely, a related image of the Polish eagle clutching the cross in its claws became extremely popular in the official insignia of the period.7 The fact that the insurrectionary National Government employed religious motifs as state symbols as such a matter of course, making use of their potential to speak to the national feelings of a broad demographic, suggests that the cross 6 7

Jurij Sztakelberg, Pieczęcie powstańcze 1863–1864 (Warsaw: PWN, 1988), 25–26. Ibid., 26.

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had by then already acquired the status of a political symbol. One of the things that catalyzed this transition from a purely religious emblem to the insignia of the national movement was undoubtedly that the cross embodied a religious identity distinct from that of the Russian overlords. As Jurij Sztakelberg points out, the religious symbols that became incorporated in the official use of the National Government were symbols that were “familiar and close to the population of the Kingdom of Poland and of Lithuania, for whom the tsarist authorities were not only alien in the political sense, but also in religious terms.”8 Hence, using the Latin cross to mobilize protest against the Russians was both a way of unifying the insurgents under a symbol that referred to a shared cultural background and a way of othering the Orthodox opponents. The Latin cross clearly dominated as the common rallying sign, even though we have some evidence of cultural diplomacy on the part of the National Government, which, while announcing their 1863 edict freeing the serfs in the Ukrainian lands and offering them land in exchange for their participation in the uprising, circulated a version of this tripartite emblem crowned with an Orthodox cross instead.9 Another way the rebels employed the symbol of the cross to other and discredit the Russian authorities was by framing the suppression of Polish protests as acts of sacrilege. Given that the anti-Russian agitators in Warsaw often carried crosses during demonstrations, a number of them were damaged during the clashes with the gendarmes. This violence against the cross, often anthropomorphized as one more casualty inflicted by the Russian troops, features in many accounts. It often provides a symbolic turning point that triggers massive outrage. The Russian philosopher Alexander Herzen was one of the Tsar’s critics who followed the events in Warsaw with great interest. “In the face of the shots fired at priests, children, crucifixes, and women,” he notes in his memoir My Past and Thoughts, “all questions were silenced and differences disappeared.”10 Apart from the interesting gradation of victims that Herzen introduces here, placing crucifixes before women in this list of martyrs, such formulations emphasized that contemporaries perceived violence against this particular symbol as a serious taboo breach that had consequences for how Russian rule was perceived both in the Kingdom of Poland and beyond. Hence, after the tsarist gendarmes attacked a funerary procession on February 27, 1861, harming the person carrying the cross and damaging the crucifix, the public outcry that followed concentrated on the “desecration of the cross.”11 In his emotional account of the Warsaw events, Agaton Giller mentions on April 8 the “wild and drunken soldier, who did not stop [from 8 9

10 11

Sztakelberg, Pieczęcie powstańcze, 37. Marian Kowalski, Medale, odznaki, biżuteria, numizmatyka i filatelistyka powstania styczniowego (Międzyrzec Podlaski: Wydawnictwo Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Nauk, 1987), 44. Herzen quoted in Paweł Jasienica, Dwie drogi (Warsaw: PIW, 1988), 113. Julian Komar, Warszawskie manifestacje patriotyczne 1860–1861 (Warsaw: PWN, 1970), 42.

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Fig. 3. A postcard from the 1920s depicting Artur Grottger’s Sacrilege. From the author’s collection.

harming] the highest symbol of sacrifice.”12 Similarly, Artur Grottger’s drawing Sacrilege from 1866–1867, picturing Russian soldiers camping in a Catholic church and misusing the crucifix as a rack for their muskets, was one of the most powerful visual images of this Russian “bestiality.”13 Also the revolutionary songs, prayers, and pamphlets written at the time portray the Russian as the Antichrist, who not only enslaves the Polish nation, but, defiling the cross, brings upon it moral decay. Teodor Rutkowski, in his poem The National Prayer, speaks of the Russian as “the blind enemy, the foe of the cross,” who Dips his claws into the chest of our fatherland, Freshly torn open, to remove the cross from it, Wanting to deprive us of the heritage of Christ’s passion, And divert your mercy from us.14 12

13

14

Agaton Giller, Manifestacye Warszawy 1861 r. (Stanisławów: Księgarnia Romana Jasielskiego, 1908), 17. Grottger: Cykle: Warszawa, Polonia, Lituania, Wojna (Lwów: Haltenberg, 1911) (unpaginated). In the original: “Wróg niewidomy, nieprzyjaciel krzyża . . . W świeżo rozdartą pierś naszej ojczyzny, / Utopił rękę – chce krzyż z niej wyrzucić! / Chce ogrójcowej pozbawić

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The underground paper Martyrs (Męczennicy), which appeared at the time of the January Uprising, used such imagery, too, to convince its readers that the postulated Russian benevolence towards Poles was a myth. Neither the Muscovite nor the German can ever be or has ever been your friend. Because a friend never forbids you to pray at the altars or shoots at defenseless children, women, and the elderly, does not imprison priests [. . .] [and] does not rip the holy crosses off the chests of young girls, like one Cossack did today to a young lady who, sad and pale, was returning from church.15

Similar incidents concerning the cross were reported in various political pamphlets of the period as proof that the Russians were morally unfit to guide other Christian nations, such as the Poles or Belarusians. The resonance of these narratives becomes apparent particularly in vernacular texts. In Hutorka Dwóch Susiedou, a revolutionary periodical addressed to Belarusian-speaking peasants to mobilize their support against the tsarist authorities, a rhymed dialogue in Belarusian (written in the Latin alphabet and using Polish diacritics) mirrors the popular outrage caused by the desecration of the cross in Warsaw: Now that I know already How to pray to God, I will ask the good Lord To give us strength to chase the Muscovite away, So that they don’t defile the cross any more, And so our slavery ends, Because the world will not be good As long as the Muscovite rules.16

The figure of the suffering, anthropomorphized cross was used here as a rhetorical device, lending a metaphysical dimension to the argument of detrimental Russian rule and the need for Poles, Belarusians, and Ukrainians to liberate themselves from the tsarist yoke. Yet, as a counterpoint to this image of the vulnerable sacrum exposed to sacrilege, the cross at the same time functioned as a standard-like symbol of power and a protective totem able to shield the demonstrators from bullets. Szymon Katyll, a student at the Warsaw Art Academy and a participant of the demonstrations on February 27, described in his diary how he found himself in

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spuścizny, / I miłosierdzie twe od nas odwrócić.” Teodor Rutkowski, Narodowa modlitwa (Paris: L. Martinet, 1861), 3, 10. All translations by the author unless noted otherwise. S. Kieniewicz and I. Miller (eds.), Prasa tajna z lat 1861–1864, Part 1 (Wrocław, Warsaw, and Kraków: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1966), 191. “O ciepier to wsięko znaju, / I szto Boga prosić maju, / Prosić budu kab Bóg miły, / Prohnać Moskalou dau siły; / Kab bolsz kryżou nie łamali, / Nas w niewoli nie trymali. / Bo nigdy dobra nie budzie, / Poki Moskal rądzić budzie.” Kieniewicz and Miller, Prasa tajna, vol. I, 160.

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a group of people marching towards the castle to submit a petition to Governor Gorchakov for the release of imprisoned students. As more and more passers-by joined the delegation, Katyll suddenly realized that the now sizeable demonstration lacked any “ecclesiastical insignia.” I hurried forward and started running towards St. John the Baptist’s church. The front door was closed. I run to the sacristy and, after a fight with the sacristan, seize a large, wooden cross and, in a few seconds, I am already standing at the head of the march [. . .] Armed with the holy objects, we ignore the threatening posture of the Russians [kapuśniacy] and, with a song on our lips, we bravely approach the rank of infantry.17

Why does Katyll deem it necessary to equip his demonstration with a cross, especially given the resistance of the representative of the church, whom he must overpower to take the crucifix to the street? Many accounts of the period mention that Polish demonstrators “armed with the cross alone” made a powerful, statuesque impression on their contemporaries.18 The cross was used both to intimidate the opponent, who, attacking the demonstrators, would also have to attack the “ecclesiastical insignia,” and as a quasi-magical protection against Russian bullets. “The Wounded under the Cross,” a poem by an anonymous author, circulating during the January Uprising, expresses such a belief in the protective powers of the crucifix: “A granite rock afar, / with a cross atop, / Oh! A safe haven, / and respite for the wounded, / Barely did he manage to get there, / He cried, exhausted: / ‘The cross will protect me / from the Muscovites’ chase.’”19 Apart from the function as a symbolic shield protecting from violence, the crucifix also became, quite literally, a weapon against the charging Russian troops. Szymon Katyll, in his flowery and hyperbolic language, reports the following scene in his diary: The Cossacks repeat their charge and the man marching at the head [of the demonstration] starts swinging the cross like a sword [. . .] And then, suddenly, one arm of the cross falls down and, at the same time, a terrible cry from a thousand voices is heard: [. . .] “Villains, they chopped the cross to pieces!”20 17

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Szymon Katyll, in Krzysztof Dunin Wąsowicz (ed.), Warszawa w pamiętnikach powstania styczniowego (Warsaw: PIW, 1963), 212. Julian Klaczko, quoted in Jasienica, Dwie drogi, 33. In the original: “Widać bryłę granitu, / A krzyż na niej u szczytu, / Ach! Bezpieczneż schronienie, / Dla rannego wytchnienie, / Ledwo zdążyć tam zdołał / I znużony zawoła / ‘Krzyż mię przecież obroni / Od moskiewskiej pogoni’.” “Ranny pod Krzyżem,”in Polska w roku 1863 (Lipsk: Paweł Rhode, 1866), 65. In the original: “Kozacy ponawiają szturm, a idący na ich czele z krzyżem wywija nim młynki w powietrzu – na wzór nieśmiertelnego Zagłoby. Wtem jedno ramię krzyża opada na dół, a jednocześnie rozlega się przeraźliwy krzyk z tysiąca piersi, które nagle jakby spod ziemi wyrosły: – Zbóje, krzyż porąbali!” From Dunin Wąsowicz (ed.), Warszawa w pamiętnikach, 214–215.

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Contemporary historians likewise report instances in which the demonstrators used the cross in self-defense. During the April 8 demonstration, Karol Nowakowski, mentioned in some sources alongside Michał Landy, carried a cross at the head of a procession headed towards the Castle Square to join other protesters.21 Chanting a religious hymn and raising the cross high over his head, he was making such a stunning impression on the gathered crowd that General Stepan Khrulev, in charge of tsarist security forces in Warsaw, immediately gave an order to remove the cross bearer from the scene in an attempt to defuse the explosive mood.22 When a group of gendarmes wanted to detain him, however, Nowakowski tried to resist arrest by “hitting the Russians’ heads with the cross and breaking it to pieces.”23 This minor incident caught the attention of contemporaries to such an extent that the story was not only reported in detail by a number of Polish and Russian historical accounts, but also made it into a diplomatic note sent to the envoy of the National Government in Paris, Count Adam Czartoryski: A man in charge of the funerary procession, who was carrying a cross, wanted to stop the gendarmes. His name was Nowakowski. And it was with the cross that he started hitting the heads of the gendarmes’ horses. In this moment, the cross fell apart in a thousand pieces, and the people started shouting with indignation.24

Belonging to the sphere of the sacrum, but appropriated for profane, political use, the cross gave the demonstrators a sense of metaphysical protection against the Russian forces of order and endowed their spontaneous marches and processions with the solemnity and legitimacy of a sanctified protest. When the first civilian protesters lost their lives, on February 27, 1861, their corpses were put on public display at the Hotel Europejski and became a destination for pilgrimages and a site of patriotic gestures. The symbol of the cross played a ritual function there, not only as a Christian emblem of mourning, but also as a prop in public acts of swearing vengeance. One memoirist recounts the following scene: Each of the visitors bends over the corpses with reverence, kissing their wounds. A couple of old men, with a trace of blood on their long moustaches, kneel down, put their fingers in the shape of a cross and, with a dramatic voice, take an oath of eternal vengeance on the enemy.25

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Przyborowski, Historya dwóch lat, 339–340. Berg, Zapiski o Powstaniu Polskiem, vol. 1, 277. Przyborowski, Historya dwóch lat, 339–340. “Royaume de Pologne 1861,” Archive of Count Władysław Czartoryski Concerning the History of the January Uprising, Biblioteka Książąt Czartoryskich w Krakowie, manuscript signature: 5685. Szymon Katyll, in Dunin Wąsowicz (ed.), Warszawa w pamiętnikach, 216.

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After the bloodily suppressed demonstrations sparked the planning of the actual uprising, the cross became a mobilizing symbol and remained of central importance during the insurgence. Engravings that illustrated the press reports of the period feature the symbol repeatedly. It is under the sign of the cross that volunteers march off to join the uprising.26 Units meet under the wayside crosses to receive a blessing from a local priest.27 Many illustrations of the novels set during the time of the uprising also feature crosses, which dominate and frame the landscape against which the battle scenes take place.28 These representations may, to a certain extent, be true to historical facts, as whenever insurgents hoped to stay longer in one camp, they would erect a cross, thus marking the territory under Polish control.29 On the other hand, such illustrations clearly contained mythologizing elements. A good example is the engraving The Clash of Insurgents with Russians at Ignacewo Forest, 8 May 1863 that appeared in Über Land und Meer: Allgemeine Illustrierte Zeitung in 1863. It pictures a unit of Polish insurgents, surrounded by an overwhelming force of Russian cavalry bracketing them against the backdrop of a forest. Behind the backs of the rebels, who are trying to hold their positions, we can see a crucifix, shrouded in a veil of smoke from their muskets. Leaning forward over the bodies of the insurgents, it appears to be a participant in the battle as well.30 Similar imagery circulated in the poetry of the period. The motif of crucifixion that appears in numerous supplications and prayers, performed publicly at the time of the demonstrations and the uprising of 1863–1864, refers to the political program of the Romantics. The resurrection of the nation is to be achieved through suffering and the offering of the patriots’ blood. “We will gladly take the road of the cross / [. . .] because the cross is our hope” went the lyrics of one popular supplication to the Virgin Mary.31 In a collection of poems devoted to the January Uprising published in Leipzig in 1866, the lyrical voice verbalizes this hope in a more concrete way: “Oh, no! You shall not die in torment, our nation! / The great day will come when you shall be taken down 26

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Bande de volontaires quittant Grodno pour rejoindre l’armée insurrectionnelle, see Anna Grochala, Ewa Milicer, and Kamilla Pijanowska (eds.), Powstanie Styczniowe w europejskiej ilustracji prasowej: Grafika z kolekcji Krzysztofa Kura (Warsaw: Muzeum Historii Polski, 2014), 101. Bénédiction d’une bande de faucheurs allant rejoindre le dictateur Langiewicz, published in L’Illustration in 1863, see Grochala, Milicer, and Pijanowska (eds.), Powstanie Styczniowe, 121. See Événements de Pologne . . . and Entouraient un chanteur qui . . ., in Grochala, Milicer, and Pijanowska (eds.), Powstanie Styczniowe, 263, 540. Grochala, Milicer, and Pijanowska (eds.), Powstanie Styczniowe, 263. Zusammenstoß der Insurgenten mit den Russen im Walde bei Ignacewo, in Grochala, Milicer, and Pijanowska (eds.), Powstanie Styczniowe, 155. Papiery Bałaszewicza, Biblioteka PAN, manuscript signature: 2329.

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from the cross.”32 While some of these patriotic verses picture Poland as crucified, others place the fallen and those persecuted by the tsarist regime as Christs on the cross. “To the Memory of 1863” addresses them directly: “Rise, you fallen, killed, and tortured [. . .] / Executed on the gallows, / this Cross-like sacred tree.”33 Włodzimierz Wolski, author of the poem “Prayer,” places the entire Polish nation on the cross: Send us the trial! We’ll carry the bloodied cross For as long as our strength will last. Only, send us a promise of the dawn of resurrection Over these graves. Your Son in His holy passion, Called your mercy from the cross, Now the entire nation calls you from the cross, Do hear their prayer.34

The crucified nation, symbolized by the body of a young woman, was a popular motif not only in Poland. France, too, was represented in this vein.35 Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, one of the most poignant images of martyred Poland comes from France. Isidore Regnier’s etching La Pologne Martyre, based on a drawing by Charles-Joseph Mettais, depicts a woman falling under the weight of a cross she is carrying and being assisted by a spectral figure of Jesus Christ beside her. The engraving appeared in 1863 as an illustration of Jules Michelet’s Légendes démocratiques du Nord and later adorned the title page of the magazine L’Opinion Nationale.36 Images of this kind – produced to make Europeans more sympathetic to the fate of partitioned Poland – helped to establish the symbol of the cross as shorthand for Poland’s political predicament. The symbol of the cross was also dominant in the memorial practices that emerged in the period leading up to the uprising and in its aftermath. The first event of such symbolic significance was the monumental funeral of the Five Fallen – the first civilian victims shot by Russian gendarmes during the demonstration of February 27, 1861. Their burial, which took place on 32

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In the original: “O nie! Ty w mękach nie skonasz narodzie! / Przyjdzie dzień wielki twego z krzyża zdjęcia.” “Przeczucie Narodów,” in Polska w roku 1863, 152. In the original: “Wstańcie polegli, zabici, dręczeni [. . .] / Na świętym dotąd szubienic drzewie / Jako na Krzyżu straceni!” “Pamięci Roku 1863,” in Polska w roku 1863, 162. In the original: “Zsyłaj męki! Ile siły / Podźwigniemy krwawy krzyż / Jeno, Panie, nad mogiły, / Zmartwychwstania jutrznię zniż [. . .] / Syn Twój wśród męczeństwa chwały / Wzywał z krzyża łaski twej / Z krzyża wzywa cię lud cały, / Jego próśb wysłuchać chciej.” Włodzimierz Wolski, “Modlitwa,” in Rok 1863 w poezji naszej (Warsaw: Odrodzenie, 1916), 8–9. Adam Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots, and Revolutionaries 1776–1871 (New York: Viking, 2000), 370. Grochala, Milicer, and Pijanowska (eds.), Powstanie Styczniowe, 538.

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March 2, 1861, developed into a spectacular mass demonstration of antiRussian sentiment that adopted Catholic symbolism as a carrier of a clearly political message. From then on, the practice of planting new wayside crosses, with the date of the massacre incised on them, became a way of both commemorating deaths and voicing protest against the harsh Russian policies. This usage quickly spread across the country, and such memorial crosses started appearing in many parts of the Polish lands with the intention of “inciting a revolutionary spirit and mobilizing the masses.”37 When the January Uprising started, the practice continued, and the graves of the insurgents, scattered across the country, became sites of new memorial crosses. The Russian authorities were well aware of the symbolic potential of these landmarks and quickly moved to curtail them. The Governor of Vilnius, Mikhail Murav’ëv, appointed in 1863 to crush the rebellion, soon forbade the erection of any new wayside crosses commemorating the uprising, ordering the demolition of those that were already in place.38 The Russian ban on crosses, which continued for the next three decades, left a mark not only on the landscape, but also in popular culture. In his 1863 novel Dziecię Starego Miasta (The Child of the Old Town), Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, reporting from the country ravaged by rebellion, thus spoke of a land of “smoldering fires, [and] toppled crosses.”39 The commemoration of the uprising, taking place throughout the next decades, solidified and canonized the symbolic codes generated by the revolutionary period. This concerned the cross in particular, as most of the monuments to the January Uprising built in the decades to come continued to have this form.40 The anniversaries of the uprising, especially the fiftieth, in 1913, likewise provided an opportunity to recycle the visual canons of national martyrdom to mobilize for further nationalist endeavors. The exhibition of memorabilia of the January Uprising, opened in 1913 in Lwów, was a case in point. Its central element was a big cross positioned in the middle of a windowless hall, all painted in black, with hundreds of death notices with the names of the fallen rebels lining the walls.41 Such sites of memory under the sign of the cross reproduced and canonized the core aesthetics of the January Uprising, which, after the establishment of a Polish nation state in 1918, began 37 38

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Przyborowski, Historya dwóch lat, 145–146. Tadeusz Seweryn, Kapliczki i krzyże przydrożne w Polsce (Warsaw: PAX, 1958), 11; Gabija Surdokaitė, “Krzyże w Guberni Suwalskiej w XIX wieku: Między tradycją a dyktatem władzy,” Zarządzanie w Kulturze 3 (2012): 239–262. Toniak, Śmierć bohatera, 142. Some of these memorial crosses were erected immediately following the events of 1861, for example in Lublin; others would follow in the next decades, for example in Rzeszów (1886), Kraków (1863), Lwów (1909), etc. See Kazimierz Ożóg, “Pamięć o Powstaniu Styczniowym w pomnikach przełomu wieków w Galicji,” Rocznik Biblioteki Naukowej PAU i PAN w Krakowie 58 (2013): 35–45. Franciszek Jaworski, 1863: Album pamiątek (Lwów: Drukarnia Polska, 1913), 25.

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to be framed as one of the episodes in the incessant Polish struggle for national emancipation, leading to the victory over Soviet Russia in the 1920 Battle of Warsaw, which sealed the creation of the Second Republic. While the 1863 revolt found its place in the narrative of Polish ethnic nationalism, its symbolic codes came to be celebrated as shorthand for the essentially Polish tradition of continued heroic defiance, steeped in Catholic faith and based on conservative values of preservation, perseverance, and cultural constancy. What this later rendition occluded, however, was the revolutionary significance of the symbol of the cross in the period leading up to the January Uprising, when it denoted the demand for social change, and when its political deployment was actually vehemently opposed by the Catholic Church. The radical nature of the message that the cross embodied becomes most evident in the myth that accrued around the death of Michał Landy and the wider context of the Polish–Jewish rapprochement that caught the attention of contemporaries at that time. This aspect of the “patriotic fever” of 1861 carries the key to understanding the seemingly paradoxical choice of the progressive rebels to communicate the ideas of an open civic national identity, equality, and interethnic solidarity by means of a religious symbol. The narratives surrounding the death of the “Jewish defender of the cross” help us understand how the redrawing of the nation’s boundaries and the inclusion of those excluded from the pre-partition “republic of the nobility,” most notably Jews and peasants, defined the revolutionary potential of the January Uprising. Given the fiasco of the November Uprising (1830–1831), which failed to mobilize substantial support beyond the demographic of the Polish nobility, the next generation of rebels (though not unanimously and under the pressure of mass protests in Warsaw) understood the necessity of social reforms, which, they believed, had to go hand in hand with the struggle for national independence. The abolition of serfdom and granting equal civic rights for Jews thus emerged as the two postulates that could mobilize the masses against the tsarist authority, now weakened by the wave of peasant rebellions across the empire. This message of inclusion directed at “Poles of the Mosaic faith,” accompanied by numerous performances of “Polish–Jewish brotherhood” staged under the aegis of the cross – an exceptionally charged symbol in the history of Christian–Jewish relations – is an especially illuminating aspect, revealing the dynamics of how the values and boundaries of an in-group become reconfigured in conditions of crisis and radical social change. And even though this particular political project of embracing Jews as Polish citizens of equal standing turned out to be short-lived, fraught with contradictions, trapped in pre-existing power relations, and resonating with just a narrow segment of the society, its history and symbolic articulation are still significant. It shows the extent to which, by the second half of the nineteenth century, the symbol of the cross was so decontextualized that it could undergo the most radical

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kinds of appropriation, becoming a rallying sign for the agenda of modernization and, perhaps most improbably, the emblem of interethnic solidarity and civic national identity.

Jewish Patriots under the Polish Cross A number of authors have critically analyzed and debunked the myths around the historically unprecedented period of Polish–Jewish rapprochement that accompanied the anti-tsarist upheaval of the early 1860s, when a number of progressive urban Jews expressed their support for the Polish national project.42 The flurry of exalted literary images of Polish–Jewish “brotherhood” and the unorthodox manifestations of solidarity that this particular historical moment triggered, however, still deserve a closer look, as they represent perhaps the most radical political deployment of the symbol of the cross in Polish history. The beginnings of this Polish–Jewish patriotic fever date back to the funeral of the five non-Jewish victims of the first bloodily suppressed anti-tsarist demonstration on February 27, 1861, which was attended by Rabbis Dov Ber Meisels, Marcus Jastrow, and Izaak Kramsztyk, alongside the synagogue choir.43 The moment when the Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic clergymen were saying prayers over the grave of the Five Fallen was immortalized in a painting by Aleksander Lesser and became one of the most famous visual symbols of Polish–Jewish relations.44 This gesture of interreligious solidarity was widely commented on by historians, including Efroim Franciszek Kupfer, who noted that it was “the first time in history that Jewish clerics participated in a Christian funeral.”45 The memorial services, which were subsequently held in many churches across Poland, were likewise attended by Jewish delegations. In Lublin and Białystok, representatives of the Jewish community took part in the service held at the cathedral.46 Parts of the Catholic clergy 42

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Magdalena Opalski and Israel Bartal, Poles and Jews: A Failed Brotherhood (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1992); Konrad Sadkowski, Catholic Power and Catholicism as a Component of Modern Polish National Identity, 1863–1918 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001); Theodore R. Weeks, “The Best of Both Worlds: Creating the Żyd-Polak,” East European Jewish Affairs 34, 2 (2004): 1–20; Israel Bartal, The Jews of Eastern Europe 1772–1881 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). Norbert Getter, Jakub Schall, and Zygmunt Schipper (eds.), Żydzi bojownicy o niepodległość Polski (Lwów: Lwowski Instytut Wydawniczy, 1939), 62. Lesser’s The Funeral of the Five Fallen adorned, for example, one of the first post-1989 publications on Christian–Jewish dialogue, see Stanisław Krajewski, Żydzi, Judaizm, Polska (Warsaw: Vocatio, 1997). It also features prominently in the exhibition of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Kupfer quoted in Komar, Warszawskie manifestacje patriotyczne, 66. Ryszard Bender, “Manifestacje religijno-patriotyczne w Lublinie w r. 1861,” in Roczniki Humanistyczne (Lublin: Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL, 1960), 304, 314; Przyborowski, Historya dwóch lat, 156.

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endorsed this Polish–Jewish rapprochement, too. In an attempt to win more widespread support for the upcoming insurgence, one of the influential Catholic periodicals, addressed to the clergy, Głos Kapłana Polskiego, employed a highly “inclusive” rhetoric, speaking of Catholics and Jews as children whom “Poland loves [. . .] with one love.”47 Apart from the lofty declarations and official gestures of the hierarchs, the period of Polish–Jewish brotherhood also generated a number of vernacular genres that always had an anti-Russian overtone. One of them consisted of Jews visiting Christian church services and non-Jews visiting synagogues. The practice was so widespread that, as one Polish historian put it, it took on the dimensions of a “fashion.”48 A Warsaw paper from 1861 reports on these visits quite matter-of-factly: “Jews come to our churches and we attend the synagogue. The last synagogue service was held in Polish and a whole crowd of Catholics attended it.”49 The Warsaw synagogue that lent itself as a natural destination for Catholic Poles was the reformed “Polish Synagogue” in Nalewki Street, where Rabbi Izaak Karmsztyk held sermons in Polish and the congregation intoned Polish patriotic songs. Contemporaries perceived these visits as momentous and full of transformative potential. The historian Agaton Giller even went so far as to claim that the presence of Catholic guests inspired the adoption of Polish as a universal language of religious service in Protestant churches and synagogues.50 In fact, the introduction of the Polish language into the reformed synagogue had already taken place in the 1850s, in particular after Izaak Kramsztyk, the first rabbi to preach in Polish, was appointed at the “Polish Synagogue” in 1852. A few years later, another Polish-speaking rabbi, Marcus Jastrow, was appointed to head another reformed synagogue on Daniłowiczowska Street.51 Yet, it was only the events of 1861 that drew public attention to these developments in the world of Polish Reformed Jewry. These manifestations of Polish–Jewish brotherhood also found other, powerfully symbolic articulations. When, in the wake of the violent skirmishes in Warsaw, the Catholic Church announced a national period of mourning and many Catholic women dressed in black and refrained from wearing jewelry, some Jewish women did the same.52 Julia Kleinmann, the great-grandmother of 47 48 49

50 51

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Cited in Sadkowski, Catholic Power, 11. Komar, Warszawskie manifestacje patriotyczne, 91. Przegląd Rzeczy Polskich, quoted in Getter, Schall, and Schipper (eds.), Żydzi bojownicy o niepodległość Polski, 62. Giller, Manifestacye Warszawy, 41. Marcin Wodziński, Oświecenie żydowskie w Królestwie Polskim wobec chasydyzmu (Warsaw: Cyklady, 2003), 160–162. N. M. Gelber, Die Juden und der polnische Aufstand 1863 (Vienna: Löwit, 1923), 42; Komar, Warszawskie manifestacje patriotyczne, 57–58; B. Nadel, “O stosunku Żydów na Wileńszczyźnie do Powstania Styczniowego,” Biuletyn Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego 28 (1958): 49.

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Janusz Korczak, was one of them. As the family biographer, Joanna OlczakRonikier, notes, “All women of the Kleinmann family put on black dresses, black hats with black feathers, and black jewelry; and the youngest sisters, also clad in back, drove their dolls, likewise dressed in black, in their prams, varnished with a black lacquer.”53 Jewish historians also report a remarkable event that took place after one of the sermons by the Archbishop of Warsaw, Antoni Fijałkowski, during which he made the famous statement that Poles of different denominations were “all children of the same God.” A few Jews present at the site decided to cheer Fijałkowski by unharnessing the horses from his coach and pulling it themselves, bringing the archbishop to his palace after the service.54 Some of these fraternizing practices took on even more striking dimensions. When the crucifix from the Bernardine church was damaged in one of the demonstrations, Warsaw Jews raised money to present the affected Catholic congregation with a new crucifix. In response to that, Christians funded a menorah, adorned with the motto “Sons of One Land are Brothers,” for one of the synagogues.55 Extraordinary manifestations of this kind were not isolated instances and took place outside of Warsaw, too. In late March 1861, Jews in Piotrków and Kalisz celebrated Easter together with Christians and invited Catholics to a Passover Seder meal.56 For the Easter holiday in Warsaw, the local Jewish community collected a large sum of money (9,200 złoty) to be distributed among the Christian craftsmen in town.57 A paper from 1861 also reported how the students of the Warsaw Rabbinical School, one of the flagship institutions of the Jewish Enlightenment in Poland, joined the patriotic demonstrations, singing “Boże coś Polskę” and a supplication to Virgin Mary that begins with the words: “Mother of Christ, Holy Mary / I come to Your altar with woe / A savage enemy offends your defenseless people / Cuts the Lord’s cross to pieces, defiling Your altar.”58

Such religious songs – or rather patriotic songs operating with religious imagery – became, along with processions and public display of cult objects 53 54 55

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Joanna Olczak-Ronikier, Korczak: Próba biografii (Warsaw: WAB, 2002), 35. Getter, Schall, and Schipper (eds.), Żydzi bojownicy o niepodległość Polski, 62. Komar, Warszawskie manifestacje patriotyczne, 91; Getter, Schall, and Schipper (eds.), Żydzi bojownicy o niepodległość Polski, 64; Gelber, Die Juden und der polnische Aufstand 1863, 42. Przyborowski, Historya dwóch lat, 263; Gelber, Die Juden und der polnische Aufstand 1863, 42. Komar, Warszawskie manifestacje patriotyczne, 93; Getter, Schall, and Schipper (eds.), Żydzi bojownicy o niepodległość Polski, 64. Przegląd Rzeczy Polskich, quoted in Getter, Schall, and Schipper (eds.), Żydzi bojownicy o niepodległość Polski, 62. In the Polish original: “Matko Chrystusa, Najświętsza Maryja / Z jękiem przychodzę do Twego Ołtarza, / Lud Twój bezbronny dziki wróg znieważa, / Rąbie krzyż Pański, Twój Ołtarz znieważa.”

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like crucifixes, medallions, and paintings of the Virgin Mary, some of the dominant forms of voicing protest against the repressive tsarist regime. Still, the adoption of these genres, derived from the Catholic ritual, by Jews even from the most assimilationist and pro-Polish circles, like the Warsaw Rabbinical School, constituted an extraordinary form of cultural appropriation.59 That this was possible at all testifies to the degree to which these symbolic practices were decontextualized from the dimension of religious devotion and invested with new, political meaning. The profound nature of this transformation is illustrated best by the Jewish use of the symbol of the cross and the Christian–Jewish fraternizing events staged in the context of Easter. Given the Christian narrative of Jews as deicides, recurrent accusations of ritual murder that would traditionally appear at Eastertime, and Catholic folk traditions that included elements of symbolic violence against Jews,60 the period of Easter had always been precarious for the Jews in the Polish lands.61 Folk customs referencing Christ’s passion could easily spill into real violence against Jews. Jews in the Polish lands would therefore traditionally avoid public places and the vicinity of Christian houses of worship during these holidays.62 The radical departure from these deep-seated fears and such uninhibited adoption of the Catholic idiom and performativity, related to what Jews perceived as the most negatively charged symbols – the crucifix and the festival of Easter – are particularly telling indicators that certain forms of Catholic performativity became so widely circulated in the political realm that they lost their original marking as an (alien) religious ritual. Instead, they began to symbolize the promise of social reforms and the vision of a more egalitarian society that was to convince the multiethnic population of the Kingdom of Poland to support the Polish national project. This semantic reconfiguration of the symbol of the cross would not have been possible, however, without the myth of the Jewish martyr of the Polish nation, Michał Landy, and his spectacular death with the cross in hand. 59

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On the exceptional character of the Warsaw Rabbinical School and its role in the Polish Haskalah, see Wodziński, Oświecenie żydowskie, 53; Weeks, “The Best of Both Worlds,” 7. In particular, the so-called burning of Judas, practiced in some rural parts of Poland, which included the burning of the effigy of Judas. Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, “‘Wieszanie Judasza’ czyli tematy żydowskie dzisiaj,” in Rzeczy mgliste: Eseje i studia (Sejny: Pogranicze, 2004), 73–94. On the Eastertime accusations of ritual murder and blood libel against Jews in Poland in the pre-1861 period, see Jolanta Żyndul, Kłamstwo krwi: Legenda mordu rytualnego na ziemiach polskich XIX i XX wieku (Warsaw: Cyklady, 2011), 87–120. See also Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Legendy o krwi: Antropologia przesądu (Warsaw: WAB, 2008), 108–110. On anti-Jewish Eastertime folk customs in Poland, see Alina Cała, Wizerunek Żyda w polskiej kulturze ludowej (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 1992), 130–131; Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Rzeczy mgliste: Eseje i studia (Sejny: Pogranicze, 2004), 88–89.

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Jewish Hero of the Polish Nation The story of Michał Landy, a Jew who not only dies for a Polish cause, but also seemingly sacrifices his life to prevent the desecration of the most sacred symbol of Christianity, powerfully inspired the Polish collective imagination. Walery Przyborowski, a combatant in the January Uprising and its later historian, went as far as to say, “The history of the world [. . .] since the times of Jesus Christ has not known another incident like that which, with all its reality, would be shrouded by such charm of a wonderful, medieval-like legend.”63 Landy, the cross bearer, thus became a powerful rallying sign for interethnic mobilization in the struggle for Polish national independence, a paragon of Jewish loyalty to the Polish cause, and a posthumously Christianized martyr for faith. Though the story of his death with the cross left a strong mark on the contemporaries, retold in numerous historical accounts, poetry, and fiction, it remained, at the same time, exceptionally fraught with omissions, distortions, and misinterpretations. The source that provides the most details about Michał’s death is a publication that appeared almost eight decades after the incident, in 1939. The date is relevant, because the massive volume that features the story, Jewish Fighters for the Freedom of Poland, was published at a time when antisemitism was on the rise in Poland and when pre-World War II anxiety reached its peak. Edited by a team of Jewish and non-Jewish historians, community activists, journalists, and educators, this nearly 500-page textual pantheon of Polish Jews narrates the Landy story, following closely the account of Michał’s father. From Henryk Landy’s eulogy we learn that Michał was particularly fond of Polish history, which was not taught at schools at that time. Studying Poland’s history of the eighteenth century, he would be outraged by the hideous assault of Poland’s neighbor states on its freedom and he burned with fanatical hatred of Russia. He saw his happiness in the happiness of his Fatherland and its Rebirth.64

This rhetoric reflects a sentiment of Polish patriotism that could resonate both at the time of the January Uprising and in the period of the Second Republic. What is significant, however, is that Henryk Landy, although he adopts the language of Polish nationalism and presents his son as a Polish patriot, fails to mention that his son was fatally wounded while carrying a cross.65 This conspicuous omission reveals, I believe, some of the tension and unease that 63

64

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Walery Przyborowski quoted in Getter, Schall, and Schipper (eds.), Żydzi bojownicy o niepodległość Polski, 243. Henryk Landy, quoted in Getter, Schall, and Schipper (eds.), Żydzi bojownicy o niepodległość Polski, 242. This was first pointed out by a journalist of Wiadomości Literackie who published fragments of this biographical note by Henryk Landy in 1933. He explained this omission by stating, “The scenery [of Michał’s death] must have appeared so drastic to him that he

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contemporary Jews must have felt when witnessing the way Michał Landy’s death was put to use, transformed, and reframed in the subsequent historical and literary works. The editors of Jewish Fighters fill in the gaps, reconstructing the circumstances of Landy’s death with a fair amount of detail: At the head of the procession went a few priests with crosses. When one of the priests carrying a cross was killed, Michał Landy, who walked behind him, caught the falling crucifix; but, wounded with a backsword, he fell. In response to this, the crowd started throwing fistfuls of stones, pieces of wood, and bricks at the approaching gendarmes, who then fired a shot [. . .] Landy was wounded, with a bullet piercing his bowels [. . .] Carried to a nearby Steinert’s pharmacy and then to St. Roch’s hospital, he lived for 12 hours more and died on April 9.66

This relatively matter-of-fact account soon transforms, however, into a metaphysical parable. In this account, Antoni Eisenbaum (1791–1852), a Jewish journalist, educator, and proponent of a Polish–Jewish alliance against tsarist rule, whose grave Landy most likely visited alongside other demonstrators on the fateful day of the massacre, appears as a visionary who prophesized Michał’s heroic death. It is the young Landy whose blood ultimately seals the bond between Poles and Jews and becomes a visible proof of Jewish loyalty to the Polish cause that Poland’s Jewish historians of 1939 feel the need to remind their compatriots of.67 When Henryk Landy pens the biography of his son, this memory is still fresh. “Not only in Warsaw, not only throughout the country, but even abroad, the name of our martyr is being remembered with an almost religious respect,” he writes.68 Landy’s posthumous veneration indeed takes on dimensions similar to the cult of the Five Fallen, whose postmortem photographs, with their wounds exposed, circulated widely as patriotic souvenirs. Michał’s photograph, in all probability taken by the Warsaw photographer Karol Beyer (1818–1877), who had also made portraits and tableaux of the five victims of the February 27 demonstration, was likewise widely distributed. The “photographic rush” in the second half of the nineteenth century gave momentum to the cult of the new national heroes, creating a very specific market for portraits in insurgents’ costumes or in mourning. The mass dissemination of such patriotic keepsakes speaks something of their impact. Iwona Kurz, who analyzed the dissemination of such photographs at the

66 67 68

preferred not to mention it.” See M. H. Piątkowski, “Nieznany życiorys Michała Landy,” Wiadomości Literackie 45 (1933): 3. Getter, Schall, and Schipper (eds.), Żydzi bojownicy o niepodległość Polski, 242. Ibid., 62. Henryk Landy, quoted in the permanent exhibition of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.

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Fig. 4. A posthumous photograph of Michał Landy at St. Roch’s Hospital in Warsaw. Courtesy of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

time of the patriotic demonstrations of the 1860s, estimates that tens of thousands of copies could circulate in Warsaw alone.69 Posthumous photographs of victims, the most striking genre of the period, built on the preexisting visual codes of martyrdom, placing the protagonists of these pictures in the realm of the sacred. Such photographs take these deaths “out of historical time,” argues Kurz, “and place the event on an eschatological horizon [. . .] the photographs become an element of a national mass or national prayer, a holy souvenir.”70 The photograph of Michał Landy is not as dramatically staged as those of the Five Fallen. The deceased remains dressed, his upper body shifted slightly to the right, his head resting on a makeshift pillow or a small sack. Henryk Landy’s note suggests that the initiative to have the body photographed did not come from the family, but from someone who realized the potential symbolism of Michał’s death. The photographing must have been performed in a hurry, with little time for an elaborate composition of the picture. Michał died at the hospital on Tuesday and was buried on Wednesday, after a nerveracking campaign by his father to retrieve the body from the authorities. Arranging a posthumous photo session cannot have been a priority for the family, nor an easy thing to organize, given the uncertain fate of the corpse, 69

70

Iwona Kurz, “Pięciu poległych jako metaobraz kultury polskiej połowy XIX wieku,” Widok: Teorie i praktyki kultury wizualnej, no. 10 (2016), 11. Ibid., 16.

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which, according to the tsarist order, should have been buried together with other demonstration victims in a mass grave at the citadel, and in view of the furtive preparations for a nocturnal funeral. Yet, without that photograph, it is likely that the image of Michał as an individual would have been entirely erased from the narrative of his heroic death. Though the list of poems and works of fiction inspired by Michał’s death is long and impressive, as Magdalena Opalski and Israel Bartal note, the portrayals of Landy “are strikingly short on specifics [. . . and] diverge considerably as to [his] basic social characteristics, including age, profession, and the spelling of his name.”71 And, indeed, many non-Jewish accounts of the bloody dispersal of the demonstration showcase the Christian protagonists instead. In the report of Agaton Giller, a historian and member of the Polish underground authorities during the January Uprising, it is an anonymous Jew who appears in the scene with the cross. From Krakowskie Przedmieście, amid the noise of battle and the whizzing bullets, a supplication resounded: “Great God! Almighty God! Holy Lord! Have pity on us!” A Capuchin monk hurried to defend the crowd from its murderers with a cross. Armed soldiers assaulted him and the others behind him – the monk fell under the butt of a rifle; and from his bloodied hands, the cross was taken by a young man, Karol Nowakowski (they say he died in Siberia in 1867), who, as he was captured by the soldiers and dragged to the castle, managed to pass it on to a young Jew, who, holding it high above the people’s heads, died in its defense. The wounded were being hauled to the castle, the Cossacks were dragging the corpses behind their horses, hitting people’s heads against the cobblestones, while the aide-de-camp, Mayendorf, was running around screaming “more, yet more Polish blood!”72

In Giller’s vivid account, soaked with pathos, Landy the individual becomes fully invisible. Though Landy’s blood is running on the cobblestones, it is Karol Nowakowski, one of the instigators of the protests, who actually survived the demonstration, who is put in the spotlight here. In some other memoirs of the period, Michał Landy transforms into a likewise nameless but already mythologized figure resembling an Old Testament patriarch: “As the carrier of the cross fell down,” writes Władysław Daniłowski, “an old Jew, with a white beard, lifted the cross and held it so long until a bullet ripped it out of his hand.”73 In Święty Jur (Saint George), a novel by Jan Zacharjasiewicz, this same scene becomes even more dramatic: Over a hundred thousand people were filling up the streets. The soldiers started charging the crowds. [. . .] In front of the people stood a priest with 71

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Opalski and Bartal, Poles and Jews, 44. A comprehensive list of literary works referencing Landy can be found in ibid., 38–57. Giller, Manifestacye Warszawy, 15. Władysław Daniłowski, quoted in Gelber, Die Juden und der polnische Aufstand 1863, 48.

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a crucifix, and with the cross of Christ he sought to protect the defenseless crowd, supplicating the Lord’s mercy. And then the cross of our Lord swayed, because God’s servant who held it staggered and fell, soaked in blood [. . .] Suddenly an old Jew with a long, white beard made his way through the crowds and stepped forward, grabbing the falling cross and lifting it high above the heads of all the Christians. It was a profoundly solemn moment. A thousand chests sighed to God, while the follower of Moses held in his hand the Christian cross! [. . .] In that moment, the Jew with the cross shuddered and fell to the ground. His blood mingled with that of the priest [. . .] Hours later [. . .] the corpse of the Jew with the white beard was still there, a testimony to the brotherhood of children of one country, children of different religions.74

But while the legend of the Jew with the cross was transforming into a literary topos and its protagonist was being stripped of his individual features and identity, other testimonies of the period omitted the incident with Michał Landy altogether, creating another, exclusively Christian, narrative of the events. In his memoirs, Seweryn Gąsecki, an eyewitness to the occurrence, features a Capuchin monk as the main protagonist of the skirmishes. “A true slaughter of the defenseless commenced,” he reports in his highly popular account, “The monk who stepped forward with the cross dropped dead, and the cross was sliced in half.”75 But even where the Jewish cross bearer is still present, it is the Christian frame of references, metaphors, and interpretation that undergirds the narrative. In Cyprian Kamil Norwid’s poem, “Polish Jews,” written in Parisian exile but inspired by the death of Landy, the Jewish hero appears a Christ-like martyr for faith. When other nations of riches offered you Crosses you didn’t need to die for,76 But that embellished you. You chose To stretch your defenseless arms, like David. Oh, solemn nation, we hail those among you who, Unafraid of the Mongolo-Circassian thunderstorm, Joined us in the defense of Moses’ God With bare breasts and a knight-like gaze.77

Juxtaposing baptism, as a form of assimilation into the wealthy (Western) European nations, with loyalty to the Polish national cause that brings no immediate profit, but rather calls for the sacrifice of one’s own life, Norwid 74 75 76

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Jan Zachariasiewicz, Święty Jur (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1873), 128. Seweryn Gąsecki, in Dunin Wąsowicz (ed.), Warszawa w pamiętnikach, 205. Jewish converts were usually given the cross as a heraldic symbol in their coats of arms. See Jacek Leociak, “‘Strzaskana całość’: Norwid o Żydach,” Teksty Drugie, no. 5 (1992): 40. Cyprian Kamil Norwid, “Żydowie Polscy” (1861). The translation is mine and after Opalski and Bartal, Poles and Jews, 55.

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suggests that Landy died “for the cross.” Apart from the spiritual message, the poem also has a political one.78 Active dissent against the Russian occupier gives Polish Jews a promise of being fully accepted in the Polish society. And the struggle under the inclusive symbol of the cross, denoting here a common Judeo-Christian tradition, is presented here as a more noble way of assimilation than conversion. The anonymous author of another poem of 1863, “Two Israels,” likewise addresses the Jews, celebrating Landy’s sacrifice for his fatherland and the Polish–Jewish alliance against a common enemy. Your arch is carried by all our children, And the cross of the Poles was lifted by your offspring, Who gave his life for holy Poland.79

The arch and the cross are here the insignia of the two “chosen peoples,” Jews and Poles, who face the same misery of having lost their state. Yet, in this Polish Messianic narrative, Poles supersede Jews as the chosen nation. The mystical alliance of Jews and Christians takes place on Christian terms. As Opalski and Bartal put it, “The brotherhood of the Polish and Jewish nations is accomplished through the elevation of Israel to the Christian concept of sacrifice.”80 In the poetic vision of Zygmunt Felitowicz’s Idealion, Landy is received in heaven by God, accompanied by two Polish national heroes: Hetman Stanisław Żółkiewski and King Jan III Sobieski.81 The choice of these two figures is not incidental. Żółkiewski, commander in many victorious battles against Sweden, Muscovy, and the Tatars, died a heroic death in a 1620 battle against the Ottoman Empire. King Sobieski, in turn, also known as the Savior of Christendom, is remembered mostly for his rescue campaign during the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683. Both military leaders came down in history as defenders of Christianity against the unfaithful. By placing Michał Landy in this Polish pantheon, the contemporaries reframed the traditional position of the Jews as infidels into that of allies of Poland against the “barbarian” Russians. Here Poles and Polish Jews constitute the in-group, while Russians, pictured as a “Mongolo-Circassian thunderstorm,” embody the Asian sphere of cultural influence and are presented as the ultimate Others. But while the insurgent rhetoric of the 1860s coined a new language of inclusion, speaking of “Poles of Mosaic faith” and declaring, “Jews who have 78

79 80 81

Opalski and Bartal in their Poles and Jews provide an in-depth analysis of the spiritual framework of this and other poems and prose from the period, dealing with the Polish– Jewish rapprochement in the wake of the anti-Russian demonstrations. Quoted in Gelber, Die Juden und der polnische Aufstand 1863, 170. Opalski and Bartal, Poles and Jews, 49. Zygmunt Felitowicz, Idealion: Czyli obrazki z 1863 r. (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1864), quoted in Opalski and Bartal, Poles and Jews, 55–56.

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shown Polish feelings are our brothers and Poles, just as we are,”82 the idea of “Polishness” as a civic identity was written into a strong Christianizing framework.83 This prevented the celebration of the Jewish heroes of the Polish national movement as Jews; instead, Jews who embraced the Polish state were treated as aspiring to the Catholic religion. The unusual story of Michał Landy, who was shot with a cross in his hand, lent itself particularly well to such a Christianizing narrative. A good example is the 1862 poem by Karol Baliński, which depicts Michał Landy as “a soldier of Christ,” fighting the Russian Pharisees. MAN: Terrible tidings! Strange tidings! Who damages the cross? A Christian? Pharisees! Pharisees! And who put his faith in the cross? Who has grown, thanks to it? Who spills his blood for it? Who dies for it? A pagan! [. . .] Oh, enemies, eternal horror and shame on you! Because as the tsars attacked the cross, It was a Jew who protected it! WOMAN: A Jew?! MAN: Yes, a Jew. By name, by skullcap, and persuasion, But by spirit, a white lion! A soldier of Christ By his love, his truth and blood. WOMAN: You speak the truth [. . .] Martyrdom is a baptism Of will, of fire and blood [. . .] . Good God, give us all a death like his!84

Having gone through a “baptism of blood,” Michał Landy not only enters the pantheon of the defenders of Christianity, but is also commemorated by means of Christian symbols. Some of the most popular memorial objects of this revolutionary period were medallions, usually worn as a sign of passive dissent. Many of them were dedicated to the demonstration casualties. They often featured a broken cross, a crown of thorns, or Our Lady of Częstochowa – all 82 83

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Giller, Manifestacye Warszawy, 80. Though the category of civic nationalism envisages a collective identity of all citizens, regardless of their ethnicity or religion, here, the inclusive idea of citizenship-based national community propagated by the “Red” revolutionaries was, paradoxically, expressed by means of a religious symbol. Karol Baliński, Hasło polskie: Poemat (Poznań: Księgarnia Jana Konstantego Żupańskiego, 1862), 9–11.

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symbols deriving from the Catholic pictorial tradition.85 A medal designed by Bolesław Podczaszyński to commemorate the victims of the demonstrations of February 27 and April 8, 1861 is perhaps the only such memorial object bearing the name of Landy. It pictures a grieving woman, symbolizing Poland, leaning against a sarcophagus adorned with a large crucifix. Leaning on a pedestal adorned with the names of thirty-one fallen demonstrators, she points upwards to the cross.86 Landy was not the only Jewish victim of the skirmishes whose name is carved onto this Christian sarcophagus. From Henryk Landy’s correspondence, we know of another young Jewish boy killed on that day and buried at the citadel, called Ryng (Ring).87 His and a few other Jewish-sounding names are listed underneath the cross. This memorial initiative indicates, on the one hand, an inclusive gesture of commemorating all victims regardless of their

Fig. 5. Bolesław Podczaszyński’s medal commemorating the casualties of the antiRussian demonstrations of February 27 and April 8, 1861, bearing the name of Michał Landy. Photo courtesy of Antykwariat Dawid Janas.

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Kowalski, Medale, odznaki, biżuteria, 14; Giller, Manifestacye Warszawy, 86. Kowalski, Medale, odznaki, biżuteria, 9. Henryk Landy, quoted in Getter, Schall, and Schipper (eds.), Żydzi bojownicy o niepodległość Polski, 243.

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faith, as children mourned by “Mother Poland.” On the other hand, however, burying Landy figuratively in a Christian tomb is also an act of symbolic violence, as he is denied any agency in this posthumous act of “conversion.” This tendency to Christianize Landy in Polish literature and memorial culture reveals how the progressive Polish gesture of including Jews as co-nationals comes with a set of expectations, conditioned by the existing power relations. First, acknowledging the Jewish difference but subsuming it into a superordinate category of Polish civic identity, Polish progressives redefined the boundaries of the in-group to serve their political agenda of a broad anti-Russian mobilization. Including Jews and other ethnic minorities in a community of action defined by the symbol of the cross, the “includers” – Christian Poles – did not allot equal standing to those they chose to include. Catholic Poles, even if deprived of political sovereignty, still enjoyed majority status, were economically privileged, and were empowered by a history of previous dominance in the region. The gesture of inclusion, therefore, implied a sense of Polish (Catholic) superiority and a degree of psychological pressure on the included.88 And indeed, a number of historians doubt the voluntary character of the Jewish participation in the patriotic demonstrations altogether, stating, “Poles of the Mosaic persuasion were gently cajoled into attending.”89 In Vilnius, for example, Polish students sent a delegation to the Rabbinical School with the message that the Poles “are ready to treat [the Jews] like colleagues, on the condition that they translate the ‘revolutionary anthem’ (most probably ‘Boże coś Polskę’) into Yiddish and then sing it.”90 Walery Przyborowski, a historian who minutely describes the Warsaw patriotic demonstrations of 1861 in his five-volume History of Two Years 1861–1862 [Historya dwóch lat], is also among the skeptics of the Polish-Jewish rapprochement. Not entirely free from anti-Jewish bias himself, he is weary of the “theatricality” of the patriotic manifestations framed by the Catholic idiom and notices that the participating Jews appear ill at ease: In the cities and small towns, to the great astonishment of the common folk and the indignation of the cool-headed, Jews were appearing in the churches, often tattered and dirty, belonging to the lowest class, with hats on their heads, slightly apprehensive themselves and not quite understanding what was expected of them nor why they were there. The propensity to exaggeration, so characteristic of this period, led to many tasteless scenes of this kind.91 88

89

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In fact, some sources mention that Jews were pressured by Poles to participate in patriotic celebrations. See Wojciech Dutka, “Żydzi w historiografii i piśmiennictwie rocznicowym powstania styczniowego w latach 1864–1918,” Kwartalnik Historii Żydów 2 (2008): 145; Nadel, “O stosunku Żydów,” 51. Lisicki quoted in Wojciech Dutka, “Żydzi w historiografii i piśmiennictwie rocznicowym powstania styczniowego,” 145. Nadel, “O stosunku Żydów,” 51. Przyborowski, Historya dwóch lat, 212.

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This spectacle of inclusion under the sign of the cross was inspired by the progressive idea of Jewish emancipation and social equality that, in 1861, fueled the mass protests in the streets of Warsaw. Though some Jews joined the Poles, neither group was unanimous in supporting the practical implications of this inclusion. One problem was that the includers and the included had different understandings of what this process entailed. Simplifying the spectrum of political views on each side, we could say that Jews, Belarusians, and Ukrainians who were attracted to the rebels welcomed the promise of a more egalitarian society, where antisemitism and Polish colonialist ambitions in the East would be eradicated. They expected the includers, in other words, to rectify their past wrongs. For Poles, inclusion of ethnic Others, if at all desired, was contingent on these Others joining the struggle and making sacrifices for the benefit of a Polish state. One Polish memoirist verbalized this social contract quite openly in 1861: “Now that Jews stood up for the national cause, we sincerely extended our brotherly hands even to them, embracing them into our bosom.”92 The included, from this perspective, needed to prove themselves worthy of membership at considerable personal risk. For this reason, among others, some Polish attempts at mobilizing support for the uprising under the banner of civic inclusion met with skepticism or even outward rejection and hostility on the part of some of the targeted communities.93 While a large part of the wealthy assimilated Reformed Jews of Warsaw did support the Polish nationalist project, they made up just a fraction of the country’s Jewish population. The most vocal supporters of Polish–Jewish brotherhood constituted a specific group within Polish Jewry that included the “new economic elite, [. . . t]he bourgeoisie, and members of the free professions”; but a broad majority of Jews, even those who welcomed the idea of Jewish emancipation, did not necessarily identify with, were indifferent toward, or were even hostile to Polish political aspirations.94 Many assimilating Jews in places like Vilnius opted for a pro-Russian position, while the Orthodox majority was attached to the traditional Jewish patterns of life and eyed the rebels with great suspicion.95 As one Jewish historian points out, the “broad masses found the idea of rapprochement alienating, unable to trust such a sudden spirit of union and forget their past in a moment of frenzy.”96 92 93

94

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J. S. Sawicki quoted in Komar, Warszawskie manifestacje patriotyczne, 57–58. The best-known case is the incident in Sołowijówka (Solov’ivka in Ukrainian) in 1863, in which a group of rebel envoys, Polish students of Kiev University, were murdered by Orthodox peasants whom they tried to mobilize with the promise of emancipation. See Agaton Giller, Historja powstania narodu polskiego (Warsaw: Graf_ika, 2016), 208–211. Bartal, The Jews of Eastern Europe, 86. See also Weeks, “The Best of Both Worlds,” 7; Theodore R. Weeks, From Assimilation to Antisemitism: The “Jewish Question” in Poland, 1850–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 48; Wodziński, Oświecenie żydowskie, 198, 280; Nadel, “O stosunku Żydów,” 61–63. Bartal, The Jews of Eastern Europe, 86. Gelber, Die Juden und der polnische Aufstand 1863, 39.

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The consequences of the armed conflict that ensued also played a role for Jewish attitudes. While an estimated number of 2,000 Jews fought in the January Uprising, the Jewish shtetl population still suffered from the attacks of the insurgent units, which looted Jewish property, confiscated large sums of money, or executed Jews suspected of aiding the Russians.97 There was a spectrum of positions on the Polish side, too. While some, like Przyborowski, openly disdained Polish–Jewish fraternizing, many other contemporaries’ commitment in reciprocating the generous gestures of the local Jews was lukewarm. Thus, the fundraising for the memorial menorah, to be presented to the Jewish community as a token of Christian–Jewish friendship, took an embarrassingly long time to complete, and a local paper had to publish an appeal to the public for more generosity.98 The lack of support for the Polish rebellion on the part of the Catholic hierarchs also had a bearing on the popular response to the radical political demonstrations in town. While many Catholics disobeyed their bishops, the Catholic leadership actually tried to curtail anti-tsarist protests and banned some practices, such as singing patriotic songs during mass.99 Archbishop of Warsaw Zygmunt Feliński, appointed at the peak of the protests in 1861, not only forbade the use of ecclesiastical venues for any political activity, but also expressed his displeasure at the presence of Jews and Protestants at the funeral of his predecessor, Antoni Fijałkowski.100 When the January Uprising broke out, Catholic bishops, likewise, “remained unanimous in urging the rebels to lay down their arms and consent to Russian rule.”101 Ninety percent of the Catholic clergy also refused to take an oath of loyalty to the chief organ of the rebels, the National Government.102 Similarly, the local conservative press in Warsaw also called for moderation in using religious symbolism in the political realm. Kurier Warszawski at one point even appealed to its readers in a very biblical tone, “Let us not take the name of the Lord in vain in the streets of our city, let us not use His images as a shield against the bullets, which we can easily avoid otherwise – especially when the Church, our Mother, does not approve of such marches.”103 97 98 99

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101 102 103

Bartal, The Jews of Eastern Europe, 86. Przyborowski, Historya dwóch lat, 213. The Vatican officially reproached those Polish clergymen who supported the January Uprising. See Danuta Waniek, Orzeł i krucyfiks: Eseje o podziałach politycznych w Polsce (Toruń: Adam Marszałek), 2011, 161. Even the conservative Agaton Giller points out that the high clergy in Poland, vis-à-vis the tsarist authorities, acted in the interest of the Church rather than that of the national movement, Giller, Manifestacye Warszawy, 39. Brian Porter-Szücs, Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity and Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 214, 276. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 165. Przyborowski, Historya dwóch lat, 213.

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If ambivalence about the radical political agenda of the rebels existed in large parts of the Polish society, even at the peak of the Polish–Jewish “fraternity,” so did antisemitic sentiments. In the spring of 1861, the year in which Michał Landy died carrying a cross, Rabbi Dov Ber Meisels had to intervene on behalf of Jews accused of a ritual murder in the town of Szawlany (Šiaulėnai, in today’s Lithuania).104 Violent acts against Jews took place also in 1863 in Lwów, which forced the revolutionary Polish National Government to issue a condemning statement and intervene with the local theater, prohibiting the staging of antisemitic plays.105 After the failure of the Uprising, antisemitic attitudes surged. The resulting deep disillusionment led many Jews to question the sincerity of the Polish intentions during the period of “Polish–Jewish brotherhood.” In 1906, when the Polish–Jewish rapprochement had already been overshadowed by a new wave of antisemitism, the Yiddish writer Issac Leib Peretz (1852–1915) looked back at the period of the patriotic outburst in Warsaw and could not restrain his biting sarcasm: So long as Poles asked us to pity them, to weep for the golus of the Polish Shekhina, to protest [. . .] against oppression, they gladly permitted us the title of Pole. Wail, Jew! Cry with us! You also have ears in Europe, and what’s the harm? Lament our golus too! [. . . Now] the golden times of kindness and love are over.106

By the 1880s, when a wave of pogroms was sweeping across the Russian Empire, reaching Warsaw on Christmas Day 1881, the short-lived period of Polish–Jewish patriotic frenzy seemed long-forgotten history.107 As the antisemitic Russian propaganda framed Jews as responsible for the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, the older Christian portrayals of Jews as deicides gained more salience again. As modern antisemitism started taking shape in the Polish lands and Polish political and cultural influence over Jews waned, the story of Polish–Jewish rapprochement and the legend of Michał Landy as the guardian of the cross became increasingly incompatible with the negative image of the Jew that was taking hold of the Polish imagination at the turn of the twentieth century.108 When Countess Maria Jehanne Wielopolska, born in 1882 and hence with no direct memory of the period, penned a panegyric novel 104 105 106

107

108

Żyndul, Kłamstwo krwi, 100. Getter, Schall, and Schipper (eds.), Żydzi bojownicy o niepodległość Polski, 70. I. L. Peretz, quoted in Michael C. Steinlauf, “Hope and Fear: Y. L. Peretz and the Dialectics of Diaspora Nationalism, 1905–12,” in Warsaw: The Jewish Metropolis: Essays in Honor of the 75th Birthday of Professor Antony Polonsky, edited by Glenn Dynner and François Guesnet (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015), 249. For more on the 1881 pogrom in Warsaw, see Alina Cała, Asymilacja Żydów w Królestwie Polskim (1864–1897): Postawy, konflikty, stereotypy (Warsaw: PIW, 1989), 271; Weeks, From Assimilation to Antisemitism, 79–86. Weeks, From Assimilation to Antisemitism, 68–108; Bartal, The Jews of Eastern Europe, 88.

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about the January Uprising in 1913, the story of Landy’s death was in stark dissonance with the language of prejudice that permeates the novel. “It all began so wonderfully,” writes Wielopolska, “[when] the young yid (Żydek) Landy carried a cross at the head of the march in Warsaw.”109 Half a century after his death, Landy was no longer a patriarch-like national martyr, but merely a “Żydek,” a familiar, inferior, perhaps even ridiculous, “little Jew,” who does not inspire awe, but rather disbelief. This skepticism towards the figure of the Jewish patriot becomes particularly visible in the novel’s key scene, where Wielopolska introduces a counterpart to Michał – the Jewish rebel Symcha, who betrays the hideout of his commander, bringing about the latter’s death at the hands of the Russians.110 Yet, despite the disenchantment of the 1880s and the wave of antisemitic violence that the decade brought, the memory of the “strange days” in Warsaw kept inspiring the next generations of Polish Jews. “Two Fatherlands” (1938) by the Polish Jewish poet, translator, and columnist Antoni Słonimski (1895–1976) may be one of the last echoes of Landy’s death in Polish literature. Responding to a wave of xenophobia on the part of the Polish National Democrats (Endecja), who grew in popularity in the 1930s with their anti-Jewish slogans, Słonimski published a powerful manifesto of Jewish patriotism, “Two Fatherlands,” which uses two already familiar topoi: that of martyrdom for the nation and that of the cross as a symbol of inclusion. In your fatherland, to foreign thrones you bowed and went pleading. In my fatherland, if someone budged, T’was only if wounded and bleeding. In your fatherland, God does not condescend To others in faith. In my fatherland the whole world is embraced By the arms of the cross.111

The status of the cross as the emblem of an inclusive national identity, juxtaposed here with the ethno-nationalist, xenophobic vision of Polishness embodied by the Endecja, has its roots in the period of the January Uprising. Słonimski’s frame of reference here is the ideal of equal rights and an open civic 109

110 111

The author uses the belittling diminutive of the Polish word Żyd (Jew) – Żydek – to refer to Landy. Maria Jehanne Wielopolska, Kryjaki: O sześćdziesiątym trzecim roku opowieść (Kraków: Dziennik Ludowy, 1913), 167–168. Wielopolska, Kryjaki, 137–151. Antoni Słonimski “Dwie ojczyzny” (1938). In the original: “W twojej ojczyźnie, gdyś hołdy składał / Przed obce trony. / W ojczyźnie mojej, jeśli kto padał, / To krwią zbroczony. / W ojczyźnie twojej do obcych w wierze / Bóg się nie zniża. / Moja ojczyzna świat cały bierze / W ramiona krzyża.”

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national identity that constituted the agenda of the 1861 demonstrations. The memory of the Warsaw demonstrations under the symbol of the cross and the narrative of Polish–Jewish brotherhood, epitomized by Michał Landy, were still vivid in Jewish memory on the threshold of World War II. This inclusive vision, embodied by the all-embracing cross and rooted in the legacy of the Romantic rebellions, is juxtaposed with a brand of exclusionary ethnic chauvinism that surged in the 1930s, propagated by the right-wing nationalist National Democrats (Endecja). The fact that Roman Dmowski (1864–1939), the chief ideologue of the National Democrats, belonged to the opponents of the national uprisings and, in the time leading up to the establishment of the Polish nation state, promoted cooperation with the tsarist authorities, disqualified his camp, in Słonimski’s eyes, as those who “bowed to foreign thrones.” Brandishing the symbol of the cross as the emblem of a Polish national identity alternative to that of Endecja, which enjoyed the widespread support of the Polish Catholic Church in the interwar years, did not go down well with the right-wing circles and, soon after its publication, the author of “Two Fatherlands” was assaulted in the street for “slandering the Polish nation.”112 If the legend of Michał Landy faded with time, cherished only by Jews who still strongly identified with Polish patriotism, the episode of 1861 and the revolutionary content that the symbol came to embody in that period continued to inspire the future generations of Poles. Providing a “safe” emblem to voice protest and mobilize for action, as well as to discredit the Russian Other as culturally alien, and morally corrupt, the cross emerged in this period as a core national symbol.113 Because it could now be widely circulated as a visual symbol and more easily reproduced as an artifact of protest, for example in the form of patriotic jewelry, the cross successfully entered what Geneviève Zubrzycki termed the “national sensorium” – a set of shared symbols and practices that mediated the abstract concept of “the nation” and made it tangible by addressing different senses.114 The time of the 1860s upheaval was, however, transformative for the revolutionary potential of the symbol, which now became employed to signify a set of progressive principles and to rally support for radical social change.

Conclusions The time of the last, and the most tragic, nineteenth-century Polish insurrection was a watershed not only for the Polish national project, but also for the country’s modernization. The abolition of serfdom by the 112 113

114

Adam Michnik, “40 lat bez Słonimskiego,” Gazeta Wyborcza, September 3–4, 2016, 29. See also Geneviève Zubrzycki, The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 46. Geneviève Zubrzycki, “History and the National Sensorium: Making Sense of Polish Mythology,” Qualitative Sociology 34 (2011): 21–57.

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revolutionary National Government and the promise of social equality extended to Jews, at least in the short period of Polish–Jewish rapprochement, meant an epochal change of social relations. The vision of the new Polish civic identity that promised equal rights to nobility, peasants, and Jews, as well as the insurgents’ aim to endorse the Lithuanian, Belarusian and Ukrainian struggle for independence, were two far-reaching steps that meant a radical departure from the state model represented by the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, based on Polish cultural supremacy, the institution of serfdom, and the idea that only the landowning szlachta constitutes and represents the republic.115 After the January Uprising, the vision of a Polish state that would grant full civic rights only to the nobility and disregard the emergent nationalisms of its eastern neighbors was no longer a viable option. Not only did conservative Polish landowners, the upper ranks of Catholic clergy, and Orthodox Jewish circles fear the consequences of this change, but also the aspirations and the promise of social advancement that this national upheaval triggered caused ambivalence and a sense of tension in large parts of the society. To be sure, these emancipatory ideas remained contested even among the 1863 rebels themselves, split between the revolutionary and progressive “Reds,” who believed that the fight for independence should be related to radical social reforms, and the conservative “Whites,” who were less determined to part with the privileges of the nobility.116 Social anthropology predicts that whenever a community faces a similar challenge to the existing social order and group boundaries, the “symbolic behavior” of that group intensifies in the attempt to reconstitute the boundary.117 The symbolic frenzy that came on the heels of the anti-Russian demonstrations of the early 1860s, however, was an exercise in redrawing the nation’s boundaries that in no way aspired to conserve the old order. On the contrary, it sought to draw them anew. And this redefinition of boundaries, especially of the realm of the political, the preoccupation with freedom and autonomy, and the idea that the nation is a collective that needs to be actively constructed (by means of mobilizing hitherto excluded groups), rather than a “preordained” collective identity, qualify the demands of the 1863 rebels as a distinctly modern project.118 115

116

117

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For a wider discussion on how class defined the boundaries of the Polish nation and citizenship in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and after its demise, see Kacper Pobłocki, Chamstwo (Wołowiec: Czarne, 2021), 159–161. Jasienica, Dwie drogi, 190–191; Andrzej Szwarc, Pod obcą władzą 1795–1864 (Warsaw: Historia pro Futuro, 1997), 120–121. Anthony P. Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community (London: Routledge, 2001), 70. I am inspired here by the idea of modernity as defined by Shmuel Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129 (2000): 6–7.

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And even though the emancipatory promise that the symbol of the cross must have carried for Michał Landy eventually found realization by means of tsarist decrees and not by the Polish state envisioned by the rebels, it is hard to deny that the upheavals of the early 1860s generated the impulse that accelerated the imperial reforms.119 In this historic moment, the symbol of the cross became articulated as an emblem of subjugated Poland, a body politic that was both developing modern nationalism and seeking to amend social inequalities. At this dramatic juncture, the cross became coupled with the notion of defiance against an oppressive and unjust regime, but also with the ideas of social emancipation and interethnic solidarity. Thus, paradoxically, it came to denote some of the core “rational secular values” of what we understand today as civic nationalism: inclusion, citizenship, equality, and multiculturalism.120 As a symbol of “antistructure,” it came to define a collective “we” as an inclusive, multiethnic alliance of nations protesting imperial tsarist rule and striving toward a new social order. The choice to deploy religious imagery to voice the political demands of 1861, however, was neither self-evident nor generally accepted. While the Catholic hierarchy expressly opposed introducing any protest elements into the religious context, many conservative observers were likewise scandalized about demonstrators using crucifixes as weapons in the skirmishes with the gendarmes.121 Brian Porter-Szücs even goes as far as to say that the 1863 rebellion was “an act of defiance against the Church as well as against the tsarist regime.”122 Placing Catholic religious symbols on the banners of a progressive political movement whose agenda clashed both with the Church’s policy of appeasing the tsar and, insofar as the emancipation of the 119

120

121

122

The grassroots striving to end serfdom appeared already during the mass street demonstrations in April 1861 and was followed by the first tsarist edict from May 1861 that abolished serfdom in the Kingdom of Poland. With the outbreak of the 1863 revolt, on January 22, however, the manifesto of the insurgents went further, promising peasants legal ownership of the land in their use. On top of that, landless peasants were promised land, if they actively joined the rebellion. Some rebel units made sure these promises were carried out, administering punishment to landlords who did not comply with the new laws. Legal changes expanding the civil rights of Jews came into force in June 1862, when a tsarist decree abolished special taxation of Jews, giving them freedom of settlement and the right to assume public offices. The rebel manifesto of January 22 proclaimed equal civic rights for all citizens, regardless of their denomination and social class. See “Komitet Centralny jako Tymczasowy Rząd Narodowy” (1863); Stefan Kieniewicz, Historia Polski 1795–1918 (Warsaw: PWN, 1998), 237–250; Władysław Pobóg-Malinowski, Najnowsza historia polityczna Polski, vol. I: 1864–1914 (London: B. Świderski, 1963), 17. Michael Keating, cited in Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 138. Giller, Manifestacye Warszawy, 39; Przyborowski, Historya dwóch lat, 213; Waniek, Orzeł i krucyfiks, 161. Porter-Szücs, Faith and Fatherland, 166–167.

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serfs was concerned, the Church’s economic interests as a landowning institution, the rebels definitely made a paradoxical choice. Investigating the story of Michał Landy’s death and the way it reverberated in Polish literature, Konrad Matyjaszek argues that the use of Catholic symbols “to signify the modern revolution”123 in Poland resulted in an exclusionary vision of “the nation of Christ,” which stigmatized its Others and favored the values of patriotism and brotherhood in arms over “the ideas of emancipation, tolerance, individualism, laicism, [and] equality.”124 This choice of iconography, in his view, not only allowed the survival of pre-modern antisemitic topoi, but also hindered the modernizing process in Poland, rendering it incomplete, insufficient, and inferior to those taking place elsewhere in Europe. While the Christianizing impulse of symbolically burying Landy in a Christian grave and interpreting his death for the Polish cause as a baptism reveal prejudice and oppressive power relations behind the project of Polish– Jewish rapprochement, this is not to say that the protests of 1861 and the ensuing uprising did not contain authentically progressive demands. The “antistructure” emerging in 1861 did not incorporate Catholic symbols to venerate old traditions or to conserve any past social order. Landy joined a demonstration marching under the symbol of a crucifix because the symbol denoted change. The reason why the rebels of the 1860s resorted to religious symbolism, rather than any other vocabulary of protest, can be seen in purely utilitarian terms. The cross was an extremely efficient symbol. It carried an enormous emotional charge, could instantly establish a sense of difference between the contested Orthodox rulers and their predominantly Catholic, Polish subjects, and symbolized the power of the underdog. At the same time, it was simple, easy to procure, reproduce, and disseminate, and safe to use. Unlike other national icons, such as the Polish eagle, the cross was not outlawed, and it possessed a materiality that enabled its performative and spatial use: as a national emblem carried during demonstrations, as a piece of patriotic jewelry worn as a sign of passive protest, or as a memorial wayside cross marking the landscape as Polish. This potential to both embody protest and relate it to the body certainly contributed to the success of the cross as a popular rallying sign of anti-tsarist dissent. But what was even more important was the liminal character of the symbol, which, by that time, both functioned as an established political symbol and remained a religious cult object. This allowed participants in patriotic demonstrations to recoil into a devotional mode when threatened with reprisals or violence. A sense of taboo attached to the symbol likewise gave the protesters a degree of 123

124

Konrad Matyjaszek, Produkcja przestrzeni żydowskiej w dawnej i współczesnej Polsce (Kraków: Universitas, 2019), 255. Ibid., 252–253.

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protection, given that their direct adversaries might have been reluctant to physically attack a religious emblem. The period of the January Uprising thus saw the ascendance of a political symbol that was not entirely new in the Polish context, but that had now been decontextualized and secularized to an extent that secured its wide appeal. It was the new, socially progressive meaning attached to the symbol of the cross during the Warsaw demonstrations of 1861 that not only enabled the rebels to incorporate it in the national insignia, but also made Michał Landy willing to march with it in protest against Russian rule. The new media and reproduction methods developing at the time additionally enhanced the mobilizing potential of the symbol, securing its resonance and rendering it ubiquitous. Industrially produced medallions, patriotic jewelry, photographs of national martyrs, mass-printed flyers, brochures, and songbooks, as well as widely circulating lithography and wood engraving illustrations, made the symbol of the cross much more salient in the public sphere and domesticated it as a political symbol.125 And though the January Uprising failed and was followed by decades of disillusionment with the Romantic rhetoric of sacrifice and martyrdom, the symbol of the cross remained in the visual arsenal of political communication. As we will see in the following chapter, the cross reemerged as a politically charged symbol after Poland finally regained its independence in 1918. This time, however, it came to signify a new set of political ideas and was deployed on different frontlines.

125

Anna Grochala, “The January Uprising in Press Illustrations in the 19th Century: Some Sidenotes to the Catalogue of the Collection of Krzysztof Kur,” in Powstanie Styczniowe w europejskiej ilustracji prasowej: Grafika z kolekcji Krzysztofa Kura, edited by Anna Grochala, Ewa Milicer, and Kamilla Pijanowska (Warsaw: Muzeum Historii Polski, 2014), 32–37.

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2 Colonization in the Shadow of the Cross

“On the ground soaked with blood [. . .] where the fearless troops rest [. . .] a cross is standing,” reads the preface to a glossy album published by the Ministry of Public Works in 1929. “A small crucifix, it seems, but it stretches its arms above the whole of Poland, from the Carpathians to the gray waves of the Baltic Sea.”1 The elegantly published volume, which features over 300 photographs of crosses, documents a mass commemoration project, launched for the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the Polish state in 1928. In an unprecedented search campaign, between 1927 and the outbreak of World War II, Poles managed to identify, renovate, and commemorate with crosses hundreds of military cemeteries, mass graves, and sites of battles, including those of the November and January Uprisings.2 Marking the countryside with crosses, the Ministry of Public Works did more than map the historic events that provided a foundation myth for the new state. It also symbolically delineated the boundaries of Poland, legitimizing the territorial reach of the Second Republic. Six decades after the painful defeat of 1864 had traumatized Poles into abandoning armed struggle against the imperial powers, the memory of the January Uprising returned as a powerful myth. Its last veterans were still alive when the new Polish state began to memorialize this last national rising as a milestone on the way to national independence.3 But, although the Romantic imagery of the crucifixion still served as a visual shorthand for the rebellion, the meaning, resonance, and use of the symbol of the cross had changed diametrically. The jubilee album made this very clear. Poland’s new crosses were symbols of triumph and power. Having freed itself from captivity after a hundred years of ordeal, the Polish nation will now embrace these holy graves and crosses with full affection. They shall never be forgotten, but will last as visible scars of the past years, testifying to the enormous stamina of the nation that guided it 1

2

3

Henryk Mościcki, Pomniki bojowników o niepodległość 1794–1863 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Ministerstwa Robót Publicznych, 1929), 5. Tomasz Czerwiński, Kapliczki i krzyże przydrożne w Polsce (Warsaw: Sport i Turystyka Muza, 2012), 20–22. Jerzy Maliszewski, Powstanie styczniowe: Notatki biograficzne uczestników (Warsaw: selfpublished, 1932), 13.

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colonization in the shadow of the cross through fire and blood, forests of gallows, the snows of Siberia, through sacrifice and heroism towards the dawn of Independence.4

The new monuments and shrines that appeared across the state reinforced the overarching narrative of national glory. They were meant to provide a collective identity to the citizens of Poland – divided not only by the aftereffects of partitions, but also, increasingly, by the new state policies that alienated its various minority groups. The project of consolidation required a politics of symbols, which the state apparatus did not fail to deliver.

The Borderland Crosses In 1928, as the new Polish state was celebrating the tenth anniversary of its existence, the inhabitants of Puzieniewicze, a small military settlement in the easternmost strip of Polish territory, feted the occasion, likewise, by planting a large wooden cross. It became a central meeting place of the village, which still did not have a church; but the cross embodied more than a cult site. It was a visible statement of loyalty to the Polish state. After Marshal Piłsudski’s death in 1935, it was at the foot of the cross, lit up by a bonfire, that the inhabitants would hold the annual vigil to honor the “Father of the Nation.” An urn with soil collected from underneath the cross was even transported to Kraków, to be deposited on Piłsudski’s Mound. With the outbreak of World War II, the cross of Puzieniewicze shared the fate of many other signs of Polishness in the eastern borderlands. As the Red Army invaded across Poland’s eastern border in September of 1939, it was felled “by unknown aggressors.”5 The cross of Puzieniewicze was one of hundreds that marked the new boundaries of the Polish state, reconstituted in the aftermath of World War I. As soon as the dramatic geopolitical changes in Europe opened the possibility for the partitioned Polish territories to be reunited, the task of mapping the new state captured the imagination of military leaders and civilians alike. Dreaming of a revival of the Polish state, the question of the country’s new borders, especially in the volatile East, occupied the minds of nationalists from different political camps. And although so-called krajowcy, advocating a Slavic federation, and the National Democrats, who campaigned for an ethnically Polish state, did not see eye to eye about where the border should run, both factions succumbed to the fever of symbolic territorial marking. The young state’s borders remained in a state of flux even after Poland declared its independence in 1918. The Polish–Soviet war and the peace treaty of Riga in 1921 may have drawn the final line on the map, but the process of domesticating and Polonizing the so-called Kresy – the eastern borderlands – had only just begun, and the multiethnic borderland was turning 4 5

Ibid., 7. Stanisław Świercz’s testimony in Henryka Łappo (ed.), Z Kresów wschodnich RP na wygnanie: Opowieści zesłańców 1940–1946 (London: Ognisko Rodzin Osadników Kresowych, 1998), 108.

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into “the most fiercely embattled turf of Central Europe in the twentieth century.”6 The symbolic campaign launched already during the war was only to intensify in the years to come, and the Latin cross became one of its most powerful tools. Already during World War I, Polish military units and civilian authorities were thinking of ways to mark the newly imagined Poland and its territorial aspirations. Planting new crosses, especially in the contested borderland areas, became a popular form of manifesting the will to Poland’s independence. In the two decades to come, these markers embodied Polish colonialist ambitions and the symbolic hegemony of ethnic Poles and Catholics in the multiethnic state that emerged in 1918. The story of the borderland crosses well illustrates the development of Polish nationalism in the Second Republic and the way the consolidating Polish state narrated its past at the threshold of a new future. But it also allows us to trace the way symbols and rituals served to “tie the periphery to the center” within a new nation that constantly feared disintegration and where other elements of the “political infrastructure” were still relatively weak.7 Monuments marking the new Polish hegemony in the East mushroomed in the 1920s and 1930s, the motif of the cross playing a prominent role. Replicated in hundreds of new military cemeteries and mausoleums, marking the sites of battles and adorning new monuments and plaques celebrating Poland’s independence and its heroes, the cross became one of the most dominant symbols of the new Polish state. Throughout the whole interwar period, memorials featuring Polish national symbols, most typically an eagle or a cross, were being erected on a mass scale in the main squares and prominent public spaces of the eastern borderlands.8 They commemorated military victories and great men, but also more mundane events, such as the completion of a road connecting Kobryń and Pińsk in 1938.9 A new genre of monuments that was gaining particular popularity throughout the 1920s was also Tombs of the Unknown Soldier, which were built in at least twenty locations in the eastern territories alone.10 6

7

8

9 10

Jochen Böhler, Civil War in Central Europe 1918–1921: The Reconstruction of Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 191. David Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 23. On the grassroots processes of tying the eastern borderlands to the Polish nation state, see Kathryn Ciancia, On Civilization’s Edge: A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). Jarosław Komorowski, Kresowym szlakiem: Kapliczki, pomniki, groby, vol. I: Polesie (Świdnica: Polskie Towarzystwo Turystyczno Krajoznawcze, 1997), 5; Jarosław Komorowski, Kresowym szlakiem: Kapliczki, pomniki, groby, vol. II: Nowogródczyzna (Świdnica: Polskie Towarzystwo Turystyczno Krajoznawcze, 2000), 31 and 43. Komorowski, Kresowym szlakiem, vol. I, 31. Czesław Skiba, “Kult Nieznanego Żołnierza na Kresach Wschodnich,” in Przegląd Historyczno-Wojskowy 3 (54), 1 (2002): 58; Christoph Mick, “Der Kult um den Unbekannten Soldaten in der Zweiten Polnischen Republik,” in Nationalisierung der Religion und Sakralisierung der Nation im östlichen Europa, edited by Martin SchulzeWessel (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006), 181–200.

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It is notable that, even though many of these new landmarks were born of local grassroots initiatives and were built in times of economic crisis, the choice of building materials indicated a strong desire to leave a permanent mark on the landscape. In Darewo, near Nowogródek, for example, local inhabitants recycled armored concrete blocks from a German bunker to build a four-meter-high wayside cross.11 Indeed, these new memorials were often so robust that many of them survive to this day, despite multiple attempts at dismantling them. In Postawy, the memorial to the fallen Polish soldiers at the center of the town, a four-meter-high concrete pillar crowned with an iron eagle, was armored with ten steel rails, so that repeated Soviet attempts to fell it after the war all failed.12 A case in point is also the massive monument at the edge of the forest near the village of Arabowszczyzna, north of Baranowicze (Baranavichy, in today’s Belarus).13 A ten-meter-high pedestal of armored concrete features a Polish eagle with three crosses towering above it. Dedicated to three major Polish military campaigns against Russia – Hetman Żółkiewski’s expedition to capture Moscow (1609–1610), the Napoleonic war of 1812, and the victorious Polish– Soviet war of 1920 – the memorial is one of the most original and sophisticated structures of its kind. The unorthodox location of the monument, three kilometers from the nearest settlement and very much off the beaten track, is significant too. According to a local legend, it marks the place where Piłsudski was saved from Soviet captivity by a local Jew, who escorted him to a safe place in the forest.14 Despite the Soviets’ vigorous attempts to dismantle the monument, this structure, too, remained intact apart from minor damage. Monuments commemorating the battles of Piłsudski’s Legionnaires and the Polish–Bolshevik war were popular across the whole country,15 but they had their greatest symbolic weight in the eastern regions, where sizeable populations were 11 12

13

14

15

Komorowski, Kresowym szlakiem, vol. II, 9. The story of the Postawy monument and the attempts to dismantle it are related in Yahor Surski’s documentary Zahodniki, BelSat, 2015. See also an oral history interview with a witness, Marian Bumblis, AHM, AHM_PnW_1310. Komorowski dates the monument to circa 1928; other sources suggest 1935. See Anatolij Šarkov and Vjačeslav Selemenev, Soldatengräberanlagen aus dem ersten Weltkrieg in Belarus (Minsk: NARB, 2010). According to the account quoted by a number of authors, a local Jew called Lickiewicz lent Piłsudski his wife’s clothes and told him to milk a cow to hide from the pursuers. As a sign of gratitude, Piłsudski issued Lickiewicz a special pass to enter the presidential residence in Warsaw, and helped him finance the construction of a steam mill that stands in Baranavichy to this day. See Krystyna Węglicka, Kresowym szlakiem: Gawędy o miejscach, ludziach i zdarzeniach (Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza, 2005), 211; Komorowski, Kresowym szlakiem, vol. II, 5. Šarkov and Selemenev give an alternative, and rather unlikely, interpretation of the monument, suggesting that the three crosses commemorate the losses of the Russian, German, and Austrian armies in World War I. See Šarkov and Selemenev, Soldatengräberanlagen, 20. Tadeusz Swat, “Listopad 1918 roku: Miejsca upamiętnione i pomniki,” in Niepodległość i Pamięć 10, 1 (2003): 95–105.

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Fig. 6. The three crosses of Arabowszczyzna, 2020. Photo: John Kunstadter, www.radzimaphoto.com.

not Polish. It was precisely for this reason that the will to stamp the landscape as Polish engaged both local and national authorities there more than elsewhere. In Lwów, the memorials devoted to the Polish combatants of the Polish–Ukrainian war of 1918–1919 included, alongside the flagship project of the Cemetery of the Eaglets, over twenty plaques adorned with the Cross of the Defense of Lwów, marking some of the city’s most important buildings, such as the railway station, the main post office, the Technical University, and a number of schools.16 Some memorials that were less accessible to the public, especially those marking battlefields, were given more prominence by means of large-scale events such as sporting occasions, open-air mass prayer services, guided tours, etc. The so-called Polish Mountain in Volhynia and the Legionnaires’ Pass in 16

Witold Szolginia, Tamten Lwów, vol. III: Świątynie, gmachy, pomniki (Wrocław: Sudety, 1993), 212.

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Bukovina attracted large numbers of visitors by offering annual programs, including competitions involving military units. In 1928 alone, over 2,000 participants and 3,000 spectators took part in the annual march on the Polish Mountain where Piłsudski’s Legionnaires fought a particularly bloody battle against the Russians in 1915.17 Visits to excavated fortifications and a local military cemetery, a Catholic field mass, and an evening bonfire vigil supplemented the sporting event.18 The construction work to expand the Polish Mountain memorial, supervised by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, continued until the outbreak of World War II.19 The engagement of the highest state authorities in the symbolic marking of the Polish Kresy indicates the high priority given to this project. The intensity with which new obelisks, mounds, and crosses were mushrooming in the borderland territories reflected the political mood in Warsaw. As the National Democrats (Endecja) started pushing for a vision of the country in which, despite the constitutional equality of all denominations, the ethnic Poles and Catholics were to enjoy the position of hegemony, these symbolic policies became a tool to give visual expression to this principle in public space. The urgent motion by Endecja in 1923 to hang a cross in the parliamentary building marked the beginning of a campaign for the “victory of Christian values” that soon spilled out into the streets, engaging large sections of Polish society and, with time, leading to a more repressive policy and even violence towards ethnic minorities.20 The cross thus became employed as a boundary marker, signifying the supremacy of ethnically Polish Catholics, their values, and their symbolism over the country’s religious minorities, but it also helped define internal lines of conflict. In the bitter political struggle between Piłsudski’s “Patriotic Left” and the right-wing nationalist Endecja, religious symbols and a certain religious ostentatiousness came to signify the political program of the latter. Many Piłsudskiites, who pursued the republican traditions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and placed their emphasis on civic nationalism and social equality, had an ambivalent attitude to religion, while the National Democrats, who promoted social Darwinism and ethnic nationalism based on the idea of blood and race, employed religious symbols to carry their ideas.21 And, 17

18

19 20

21

Adam Rafał Kaczyński, “Historia pobojowiska Legionów Polskich pod Kostiuchnówką w okresie II RP,” Niepodległość i Pamięć 23, 2 (2016): 143. Konrad Jotemski “Legionowe uroczystości na Wołyniu,” Żołnierz Polski, August 1, 1936, 410–411. Kaczyński, “Historia pobojowiska Legionów Polskich,” 140. Sonderling [Władysław Tołłoczko], “Walka o zwycięstwo ideałów chrześcijańskich,” Przegląd Wileński, no. 1, January 14, 1923, 213, cited in Czesław Miłosz, Wyprawa w dwudziestolecie (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011), 213–216. For more on the ideological conflict between Piłsudski and Dmowski and the ideological overlaps between the two camps, see Paul Brykczynski, Primed for Violence: Murder, Antisemitism, and Democratic Politics in Interwar Poland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016), 3–17; Paul Brykczynski, “Reconsidering ‘Piłsudskiite

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although, in 1920, the Catholic hierarchs issued an instruction to the clergy advising them not to engage in partisan politics, a great majority did support the National Democrats, showing open disdain for Piłsudski and the socialists.22 Thus, although Polish socialists did not refrain from instrumentalizing Catholic religious symbols in their pre-World War I rhetorics and performativity, too, the symbol of the cross soon came to denote only one side of this political antagonism, and both sides recognized it as a visual shorthand for right-wing positions.23 Tadeusz Boy Żeleński, an author and physician, one of the leading advocates of women rights and ardently anticlerical, spoke of “crusades” organized by the Catholic Church in the 1930s to prevent him from delivering public lectures.24 After the first democratically elected president of the Second Republic, Gabriel Narutowicz, supported by the socialists and the Block of National Minorities, was assassinated in 1922 just seven days after he was voted into office, Julian Tuwim penned an accusatory poem addressing the National Democrats: The cross was on your neck, but a rifle in your pocket, With God allied, you made a pact with a murderer.25

Although the President Elect was killed by a mentally ill artist who apparently acted alone, a large part of public opinion ascribed moral responsibility for the assassination to Endecja, which fiercely opposed Narutowicz as “the Jewish president” and had launched a hate campaign and massive street protests against him.26 In the same year, the Catholic weekly Przewodnik Katolicki mapped the political polarization in Poland with the help of the same symbol. “[T]here are two factions in [Polish] society,” wrote an anonymous author, “one that stands under the sign of the cross, another that comes out against it.”27 Instrumentalized to

22

23 24

25

26 27

Nationalism,’” Nationalities Papers 42, 5 (2014): 771–790; Kathryn Ciancia, “The Local Boundaries of the Nation: Borderland Guard Activists in Polish-Occupied Volhynia, 1919–1920,” Slavic Review 78, 3 (2019): 674. Although Endecja was initially anticlerical and the idea of “national egoism” conflicted with the Christian ideals of love and brotherhood, the Catholic clergy and Catholic press almost unanimously supported Dmowski’s camp and his ideology in the interwar period. See Brian Porter-Szücs, Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity and Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 159, 232–240; Robert E. Alvis, White Eagle, Black Madonna: One Thousand Years of the Polish Catholic Tradition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 193. Andrzej Chwalba, Sacrum i rewolucja (Kraków: Universitas, 1992), 208–271. Tadeusz Boy Żeleński, Nasi okupanci (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2008 [1932]), 15. Julian Tuwim, “Pogrzeb Prezydenta Narutowicza,” in Wiersze zebrane, vol. 1 (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1975), 331. In the original: “Krzyż mieliście na piersi, a brauning w kieszeni. / Z Bogiem byli w sojuszu, a z mordercą w pakcie.” Brykczynski, Primed for Violence, 18–60. “Potęga prasy,” Przewodnik Katolicki 28, no. 25, 1922, 10, cited in Porter-Szücs, Faith and Fatherland, 248.

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denote friend and foe in this fundamental ideological clash, the symbol of the cross thus came to signify both a particular political vision for the nation’s future and the nation itself. Nowhere was it as visible as in the country’s multiethnic eastern borderlands, where the Polish nation state faced the greatest challenge to its authority and the state apparatus needed to establish its rule over areas where a substantial part, or even a majority, of the population was not ethnically Polish.28 Here, irrespective of whether they were representatives of the Polish state, members of the military, new settlers, or autochthonous residents, Polish actors made use of the cross to make a statement vis-à-vis the country’s Others. The cross, in service of the coalescing structure, carried a message of the Polish claim to this contested territory, connoted power and control, and was an exclusionary symbol vis-à-vis the region’s Jewish and Orthodox populations, in particular. In its structure-affirming role, it was also, ultimately, an ambivalent symbol for Catholics who were not ethnically Polish. That it did not signify religion alone, but rather a territorial claim of a nation state, made it hard for Catholic Lithuanians or Belarusians to feel subsumed into the community it denoted, especially as other repressive policies towards these national minorities carried an unmistakable message that the borderland crosses only amplified.

Polish Colonialism in the East “The emerging Poland, circled by foes, is gathering its lands torn apart in battle,” wrote one military historian in the wake of World War I.29 Although there was a relatively widespread realization that not all the territories that Poland came to control after World War I were ethnically Polish, the notion that Poland was merely reclaiming “its lands” defined the official discourse. What Poles saw as reunification of perennially Polish territories was, however, a project that entailed a very clear colonialist ambition.30 The new Poland presented itself as a direct heir of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. As such, Poles saw themselves as predestined to enlighten, lead, and rule their eastern neighbors: Lithuanians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians, deemed culturally inferior and unable to govern themselves. This rhetoric of a “civilizing mission,” however, was merely an attempt to legitimize Poland’s territorial claims that far outstretched the areas populated by an ethnically Polish majority. And as Kathryn Ciancia aptly noted in her analysis of the Polish-led civilizing endeavors in Volhynia, the 28 29

30

See Ciancia, On Civilization’s Edge. Marjan Kukiel, Zarys historji wojskowości w Polsce (Kraków: Krakowska Spółka Wydawnicza, 1929), 312. On the early modern roots of the Polish colonization in the East, see Jan Sowa, Fantomowe ciało króla: Peryferyjne zmagania z nowoczesną formą (Kraków: Universitas, 2011), 323–334.

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idea of modernity served particularly well as a “label to be mobilized politically.”31 Needless to say, there was hardly a more compelling symbol than the cross to embody this “civilizing mission” in public space. Poles imagined their supremacy in the multiethnic eastern borderlands as peaceful, tolerant, and benign.32 “It was through a natural evolution and close cohabitation,” as one popular guidebook to the Wilno area put it, “that the bellicose Lithuania yielded to the appeal of Polish culture, which was spreading its influence across the northern and eastern territories not by means of conquest and violence, but solely by the power of its spiritual superiority.”33 What this national mythology glossed over was that the new Polish state did not differ very much from the falling empires that it replaced in this part of Europe. Much like the old “prisons of nations,” the Second Republic also subsumed minorities, whose right to their own state was being denied.34 It was not only the eastern borderlands that inspired the Polish expansionist ambitions of the time. Warmia and Masuria in the north and Spiš and Orava in the south also triggered similar sentiments.35 In 1920, the illustrated monthly Ziemia urged a plebiscite in the Czechoslovak borderland, where our art and monuments of Polish heritage dot the landscape everywhere you look and the stones call forth that these villages, churches, and wayside crosses were built by a Polish carpenter, adorned by a Polish artist [. . .] For we took these borderlands in our possession not by the sword, but by the hard work of the most virtuous among us, who spread this blessing.36

And, although the young Polish state was clearly failing to guard the rights of its minorities and eventually faced mounting violence in the east, including armed attacks on Polish colonists, acts of terrorism, and punitive army raids, the colonialist dream continued to inflame many Polish intellectuals until the very last days of the Second Republic.37 Thus, as late as May 1939, the political 31 32 33

34

35

36

37

Ciancia, On Civilization’s Edge, 17. On the early modern history of this myth, see Sowa, Fantomowe ciało króla, 334–340. Tadeusz Łopalewski, Między Niemnem a Dźwiną: Ziemia Wileńska i Nowogrodzka (Kraków: Drukarnia Wydawnicza Anczyca, 1990 [1938]), 8. Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 133. The plebiscite in Warmia and Masuria took place on July 11, 1920, with an overwhelming majority of voters opting for Germany. Jan Wiktor, “Południowe Kresy,” Ziemia: Miesięcznik Krajoznawczy Ilustrowany no. 4, April 1920, 98. On the situation of Lithuanians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians under Polish jurisdiction in 1918–1939, see Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). For more on the situation of the Belarusian minority, see Per Anders Rudling, The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism 1906–1931 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). On the subject of antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence in interwar Poland, see

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activist and journalist Kazimierz Studentowicz wrote, in a fiery article, “Unlike the Germans, Poles possess a great imperial potential, thanks to their traditional religious and national tolerance.”38 In the wake of the pogroms in Przytyk (1936) and Brześć (1937) and the campaign of demolishing Orthodox churches in the Chełm district (1938), this staunch belief in “traditional” Polish tolerance was clearly nothing less than demagogy.39 But the persistence of Poland’s imperial ambitions in relation to the eastern borderlands is definitely worth a closer look. As soon as World War I sparked Polish hopes for an independent state, Polish nationalists began to map the territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as Polish. The tendency only intensified after 1918. The 1920s and 1930s witnessed a plethora of writings about the Kresy that extolled the region’s Polish character. Popular ethnographies, guidebooks, and literary anthologies celebrating the history, landscape, and great men of the eastern borderlands were in particular demand. Their ostensible aim was to popularize the Kresy as a tourist destination. But, by painting an idealized image of an eastern Arcadia, where ethnic minorities constituted but a colorful addition to the beautiful landscape, they conflated the myth of the Jagiellonian Empire with the exigencies of the modern nation state. One such highly popular publication was The Wonders of Poland, a series of richly illustrated editions devoted to the country’s most important sights. It hardly seems a coincidence that the first volumes of the series are almost exclusively devoted to Poland’s borderlands (including editions on Pomerania, Silesia, Lwów, Wilno, Polesie, and Huculszczyzna). The volume on the Wilno and Nowogródek regions, which featured traditionally ornamented Lithuanian wayside crosses on its cover, is a model example of the genre. Mapping one of the most bitterly contested districts of the Second Republic as quintessentially Polish, the author, Wilno-based journalist and translator Tadeusz Łopalewski, created a pantheon of great men that was to legitimize the Polish predominance in the east.

38

39

Krzysztof Jasiewicz (ed.), Świat NIEpożegnany: Żydzi na dawnych ziemiach wschodnich Rzeczypospolitej w XVIII–XX wieku/A World We Bade No Farewell: Jews in the Eastern Territories of the Polish Republic from 18th to 20th Century (Warsaw: Rytm, 2004); Joanna Beata Michlic, Poland’s Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 109–130. Kazimierz Studentowicz, “Imperiotwórcze zdolności Polski,” Polityka, May 7, 1939, quoted in Miłosz, Wyprawa w dwudziestolecie, 470. Wojciech Śleszyński, “Zajścia antyżydowskie w Brześciu 13 V 1937,” in Świat NIEpożegnany: Żydzi na dawnych ziemiach wschodnich Rzeczypospolitej w XVIII–XX wieku/A World We Bade No Farewell: Jews in the Eastern Territories of the Polish Republic from 18th to 20th Century, edited by Krzysztof Jasiewicz (Warsaw: Rytm, 2006), 596–604; Mirosława Papierzyńska-Turek, Między tradycją a rzeczywistością: Państwo wobec prawosławia 1918–1939 (Warsaw: PIW, 1989).

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These lands gave Poland its magnificent royal dynasty, which turned the Republic into one of the strongest and most powerful states in fifteenthand sixteenth-century Europe, the greatest bard to guide the nation through the period of captivity and struggle, Adam Mickiewicz, and the foremost knight of the reborn Poland and the creator of the Polish state, the Great Marshal Józef Piłsudski. These lands, shrouded in the charm of great memories and a living tradition, are, legitimately, a source of pride and an object of the greatest affection for every Pole.40

Overlooking that the founder of the Jagiellonian dynasty, Jogaila, was a pagan Lithuanian prince and the First Republic was a union of two states, both of which retained a degree of independence, and forgetting that Mickiewicz considered “Lithuania” his homeland and that Piłsudski’s original idea was a federation of Poland with autonomous Eastern Slavic nations, Łopalewski creates a nationalist narrative that abolishes any ambiguity. Poland is synonymous with an ethnically Polish state in which minorities, if acknowledged at all, are expected to assimilate fully. While the author’s rebuke of the Jews for their supposed resistance to assimilation and disparaging comments about the Lithuanians reveal prejudice and ignorance, his racist remarks about Belarusians expose the Polish orientalizing discourse at its worst.41 If we should describe a trueborn Belarusian as [. . .] helpless and uncreative, the blend of Belarusian and Polish blood, with some admixture of the Lithuanian [. . .] usually results in personalities of value, often above the ordinary. The type of the Polish borderland knight [. . .] is a product of this meld, the fruit of grafting the Belarusian trunk with the qualities of the Polish nature.42

A superiority complex, stereotypes, and racist ideology speak through these popular attempts at domesticating the Kresy. Sometimes, the elated language of landscape descriptions slips here into a jargon of the colonizing mission, revealing the sinews of power behind the emotional invocations. In a 1927 anthology published by the Polish Red Cross we read: How many times have we heard these days the words of love and admiration for the southeastern bastion of the Republic, for its beautiful, fertile, and densely populated land, stretching between the moors of Prypeć and the dark massif of the Carpathians! [. . .] The Lwów division of the Red Cross, devoted, as is publicly known, to a humanitarian and strictly peaceful activity [arcypokojowa działalność] in this territory, wishes to

40 41

42

Aleksander Przystor, “Przedmowa,” in Łopalewski, Między Niemnem a Dźwiną, 4. For Łopalewski’s remarks about Lithuanians, see Łopalewski, Między Niemnem a Dźwiną, pp. 31–33; about Jews, p. 28; about Belarusians, pp. 36–41. Ibid., 41.

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colonization in the shadow of the cross make it known in the whole of Poland what a precious outpost it is defending.43

Cities like Lwów and Wilno were precious outposts indeed. Around them stretched a territory where national affiliation was far less straightforward and homogeneous than Polish officials were ready to admit. The first Polish national census of 1921 revealed that ethnic minorities made up nearly a third of the country’s population.44 In large parts of the Kresy, however, Poles were only a minority. Even though the biased methodology and proven cases of falsifications during the two interwar censuses make them a rather unreliable source of information, especially as to the national identification of the respondents, the data are still sobering.45 In 1921, Poles made up less than a quarter of the population in Polesie and the Stanisławów Voivodship, while in Volhynia they constituted merely 16.8 percent.46 In the forty-four administrative districts of eastern Galicia, Poles had a majority in just one: the city of Lwów.47 And, although the interwar censuses in the districts of Wilno, Nowogródek, Lwów, and Tarnopol indicated the Polish population at around 50 percent,48 critics sounded the alarm that the numbers of Belarusians and Ukrainians were grossly misrepresented.49 The numerical predominance of Belarusians and Ukrainians in large parts of the eastern borderlands went hand in hand with Polish economic hegemony. As Timothy Snyder points out, “By 1900, only about 3 percent of the population in the tsar’s Volhynian, Podolian, and Kievan provinces reported 43

44

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47 48

49

Seweryn Przybylski, Kresy Wschodnie Rzeczpospolitej: Opisy i obrazy przeszłości (Lwów: Polski Czerwony Krzyż, 1927), 5. Pierwszy powszechny spis Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej z dnia 30 września 1921 roku: Mieszkania. Ludność. Stosunki zawodowe: Tablice państwowe (Warsaw: GUS, 1927), 56. Paweł Pulik, “Województwo stanisławowskie w latach 1921–1939 – wybrane aspekty,” Szkice Podlaskie 17–18 (2009–2010): 181; Rudling, The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 171. Pierwszy powszechny spis Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej z dnia 30 września 1921 roku: Mieszkania. Ludność. Stosunki zawodowe: Województwo poleskie (Warsaw: GUS, 1926), 60; Paweł Pulik, “Województwo stanisławowskie,” 175–186; Pierwszy powszechny spis Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej z dnia 30 września 1921: Mieszkania. Ludność. Stosunki zawodowe: Województwo wołyńskie (Warsaw: GUS: 1926), 62. Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations, 134. According to the 1931 national census, which recorded native language, but not national identity, speakers of Polish amounted to 59.7 percent in Wilno Voivodship, 52.4 percent in Nowogródek Voivodship, 14.5 percent in Polesie Voivodship, 16.6 percent in Volhynia Voivodship, 57.7 percent in Lwów Voivodship, 22.4 percent in Stanisławów Voivodship, and 49.3 percent in Tarnopol Voivodship. Critics point out, however, that many respondents, fearing repercussions, declared their native language as Polish. Some Belarusian scholars claim that while Polish statistics set the number of Belarusians inhabiting eastern Poland at around 1 million, the actual number exceeded 3 million, see Rudling, The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 171; Konstanty Srokowski, Sprawa narodowościowa na Kresach Wschodnich (Kraków: Czas, 1924), 6.

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Polish as their first language. At this time, about four thousand Polish families owned as much land as three million former serfs.”50 While there were some old Polish economic interests to defend in the Kresy, new ones quickly emerged, too. The new state apparatus constituting itself in the East offered thousands of stable jobs in the administration, for which ethnic Poles were favored. The project of military settlements brought thousands of new Polish landowners to the contested border areas, while the reclamation of Orthodox ecclesiastical property enriched the Catholic Church. As Piłsudski’s initial idea of a federation of the eastern Slavic nations faded away, the Polish government began a comprehensive campaign of Polonizing the Kresy with all the means available to the state apparatus. Minority groups objected to these attempts from the very beginning. In a 1924 report commissioned by the Polish government, the journalist and activist of Ukrainian descent Konstanty Srokowski criticized the “ruthless Polonizing tendency,” pointing to chaos, underinvestment, and the suppression of Ukrainian and Belarusian national movements in the East.51 The disappointment of ethnic minorities in the Polish state was heartfelt and related not only to daily hardships, but also to the sense of being excluded from the grand narrative of national resurrection that so engrossed contemporaries. Aleksandr C’vikevich, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Soviet Belarus in the early 1920s, made this point in a very poignant way: Poland – the Crucified – was a model for us, our elder brother in the difficult struggle; it gave us strength and faith. We hoped that, together with Poland’s freedom, freedom would come for our nation as well. And what happened? Come freedom, come revolution, Poland has revived itself . . . and the Polish whip fell upon Belarus’ back [. . .] The worst about it was that it came so unanticipatedly.52

One of the first blows consisted in remapping the sacral landscape of the Kresy. Already in 1918, an executive order ruled that unused Orthodox churches be closed and their keys deposited at the local police stations.53 The same year, a local bishop issued a decree to reconsecrate as Catholic the Orthodox churches that used to be Catholic or had been erected by recycling the building material from demolished Catholic churches.54 By 1924, the Catholic 50 51 52

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Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations, 120. Srokowski, Sprawa narodowościowa. Cited in A. M. Krotov, “‘Dostoianie kul’turnoıˇ raboty tselyh vekov gibnet v plameni ognia’ ob anatomii belarussko–pol’skogo konflikta 1918 g.,” Izvestiia Gomel’skogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta imeni F. Skoriny no. 5 (2011): 41–47, 46. Papierzyńska-Turek, Między tradycją a rzeczywistością, 325. See also Konrad Sadkowski, “From Ethnic Borderland to Catholic Fatherland: The Church, Christian Orthodox, and State Administration in the Chełm Region, 1918–1939,” Slavic Review 57, 4 (1998): 813–839. Papierzyńska-Turek, Między tradycją a rzeczywistością, 332.

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authorities had reclaimed more than 300 such places of worship.55 Other sites of the Orthodox cult, often abandoned by the local populations that took refuge from the World War I German lines in the interior of Russia, would be shut down permanently, even after the wartime refugees came back.56 Some of them were put to profane use as storage buildings, cinemas, or even stables or toilets.57 Many were plundered and profaned. Even those minority representatives who saw the numerical reduction of Orthodox parishes as legitimate and commensurate with the actual needs of the Orthodox faithful, like Konstanty Srokowski, were shocked at the “degree of fanaticism and rabidity” that the campaign unleashed.58 For the local Orthodox communities, the new policy was incomprehensible and brought with it the realization that non-Catholics were second-class citizens now. There were multiple local conflicts over the use of reclaimed cemeteries, which sometimes led to skirmishes. The chaotic takeovers left some wounded. The local parishioners, deprived of access to their churches, demonstrated, wrote petitions, or occupied buildings. In 1926, the Orthodox metropolitan ordered services to be held in front of the closed temples, as a sign of protest. At the same time, local Catholics petitioned the government to close down more “monuments of [Russian] oppression” in their locales.59 The symbolic battle over space was to continue throughout the entire interwar period. The author of a popular guidebook to Wilno bemoaned in 1929 how the cityscape was defiled by over a century of Russian domination, with its “palaces disfigured beyond recognition, its churches forcibly converted into Orthodox temples with their bloated cupolas, the new gaudy Orthodox monstrosities sitting triumphantly in the highest spots of the town, with this whole new barbarically oriental architecture of Wilno.”60 The architectonic imprint of the partition period was a thorn in the flesh of Polish patriots, most of all in central and eastern Poland, where the Orthodox sacral architecture substantially changed the look of urban spaces. The zeal to remove it, though, had particularly grave consequences in the eastern borderlands. The campaign to expunge what was seen as “Orthodox monstrosities” in major Polish cities began shortly after the war and initially affected around thirty churches. Demolitions of buildings with the highest symbolic status, 55 56

57

58 59 60

Ibid., 343. Aneta Prymaka-Oniszk, Bieżeństwo 1915: Zapomniani uchodźcy (Wołowiec: Czarne, 2016), 296; Papierzyńska-Turek, Między tradycją a rzeczywistością, 388. Papierzyńska-Turek, Między tradycją a rzeczywistością, 326; “System polskiej okupacji w Galicji Wschodniej,” quoted in Miłosz, Wyprawa w dwudziestolecie, 97. Srokowski, Sprawa narodowościowa, 44. Papierzyńska-Turek, Między tradycją a rzeczywistością, 326–378. Juljusz Kłos, Wilno przewodnik krajoznawczy (Wilno: Wydawnictwo Oddziału Wileńskiego Towarzystwa Krajoznawczego Touring-Klubu, 1929), 12.

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such as the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral on Saxon Square in Warsaw, were a priority. And, although the destruction of this richly decorated temple raised controversies, the symbolic cleansing of the landscape continued in the years to come.61 In 1938, a large-scale demolition campaign began in the Chełm region. Orchestrated by the army, with the participation of firefighters, prisoners, and youths, it took a terrible toll on Orthodox architecture. Ninety-one churches, ten chapels, and twenty-six prayer houses were destroyed in the Lublin Voivodship.62 Meant to curtail the influence of Ukrainian nationalists in the region, the campaign achieved quite the opposite, however, leading to a further deterioration of Polish–Ukrainian relations.63 The requisitions and demolitions of churches were clearly a tool of oppression or even, as Mirosława Papierzyńska-Turek puts it, of “religious terror.”64 But, while they ostensibly aimed at debilitating irredentist movements, their greatest impact was in the symbolic realm. The takeover or removal of Orthodox places of worship was an act of symbolic overwriting. The ethnic composition of the Kresy remained the same, but the minorities were rendered less visible, strengthening the Polish claim to the territory.

Bastions of Polishness Polish military settlements in the eastern borderlands had a similar significance. The project of granting land to the veterans – recent heroes, who had established and defended the country’s new borders – initially met with great enthusiasm. The parliamentary bill of December 1920, passed in a unanimous vote, stipulated that land in the possession of the Russian state treasury, the Orthodox Church, or private owners who had abandoned their estates in twenty-two eastern districts was to be taken over by the Polish treasury and redistributed among the most distinguished defenders of the nation.65 As early as in January 1921, the Ministry of Defense dispatched over 300 military units into these territories, tasked with finding appropriate plots of lands and organizing the first settlements.66 Over the next two years, 7,343 settlers received 133,146 hectares of land along Poland’s eastern border.67 The colonies they founded, usually located off 61 62 63 64 65

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Papierzyńska-Turek, Między tradycją a rzeczywistością, 354. Ibid., 373–374; Sadkowski, “From Ethnic Borderland to Catholic Fatherland,” 836. Sadkowski, “From Ethnic Borderland to Catholic Fatherland,” 836. Papierzyńska-Turek, Między tradycją a rzeczywistością, 450. Janina Stobniak-Smogorzewska, Kresowe osadnictwo wojskowe 1920–1945 (Warsaw: Rytm, 2003), 27–29. Ibid., 38–40. Z Kresów Wschodnich Rzeczypospolitej: Wspomnienia z osad wojskowych (London: Ognisko Rodzin Osadników Kresowych, 1992), 13; Janina Stobniak-Smogorzewska, “Osadnicy wojskowi a ludność żydowska na Kresach Wschodnich 1920–1940,” in Świat NIEpożegnany:

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the main track and isolated from the surrounding communities, were meant to be bastions of Polishness in the still precarious borderland. The colonists were almost exclusively ethnically Polish (only three Jewish veterans benefited from the campaign), armed and devoted to the “Polish social and cultural mission in the Kresy.”68 The shortage of land among the local Belarusian and Ukrainian peasants, as well as the privileged status of the settlers, caused a wave of resentment towards the newcomers. In the first few years, Soviet-armed guerrillas would systematically raid the Polish colonies before proper border guard outposts effectively sealed the border. The colonists were also the first target of violence after the invasion by Soviet troops in 1939. Although a wave of protests by the disappointed peasants and local landowners forced the lawmakers to eventually abandon this colonizing project in 1923, faits accomplis had a considerable symbolic impact. New settlements with patriotic names, such as Kościuszków, Piłsudy, and Hallerowo, were the destinations of official visits by Marshal Piłsudski, General Haller, and President Mościcki.69 Colonists actively participated in major patriotic events, such as the anniversary commemoration of Piłsudski’s death. The colonist youth even received military training from the Border Protection Corps. While having the role of foreign bodies, especially in the areas where Poles constituted just a minority, the settlements provided both a pool of reliable conscripts in a region marked by ethnic tensions and visible symbolic outposts of Polishness. The colonies in Volhynia alone erected twelve new churches in the barely two decades of their existence.70 Latin crosses marking each settlement were likewise a statement in the local landscape. The military colonies comprised less than 2 percent of the arable land in the eastern voivodships, so their impact on the local economy and the structure of land ownership was rather negligible.71 Yet, their presence on the map was a visible symbol of Polish attempts to modify the ethnic composition of the Kresy. The changes introduced to the school system were a much more efficient colonizing policy. State schooling was meant to be a Polish realm and to imprint on the pupils not only the language, but also the rituals, values, and historic narratives of the country’s majority.72 Even where there were no

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Żydzi na dawnych ziemiach wschodnich Rzeczypospolitej w XVIII–XX wieku/A World We Bade No Farewell: Jews in the Eastern Territories of the Polish Republic from 18th to 20th Century, edited by Krzysztof Jasiewicz (Warsaw: Rytm, 2006), 561. Z Kresów Wschodnich Rzeczypospolitej, 18. Ibid., 19. Stanisław Świerszcz, “Osada Puzieniewicze,” in Z Kresów Wschodnich Rzeczypospolitej: Wspomnienia z osad wojskowych (London: Ognisko Rodzin Osadników Kresowych, 1992), 111; Stobniak-Smogorzewska, Kresowe osadnictwo wojskowe 1920–1945, 237–38. Calculation based on data from Mały Rocznik Statystyczny 1939 (Warsaw: GUS, 1939), 72. Only 2 percent of schools in the Wilno region had Belarusian as the language of instruction; in Polesie, there was not a single one left by 1923. Belarusian schools, which had been opened by the Germans during World War I, were closed down by the Polish authorities, and their teachers were interned. The situation in the areas with

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Catholics, Catholic prayers would be recited at the beginning and end of the school day.73 Syllabi of history classes emphasized the military history of 1914– 1920. Didactic manuals for teachers recommended relating these historic events to local landmarks: “Battlefields, soldiers’ graves, monuments, churches, crosses, chapels, tombstones and memorial plaques, etc.,” read one such instruction, “lend themselves particularly well to instilling the love of the fatherland and developing the cult of greatness and heroism in youngsters.”74 National history was to be mapped onto the local (Catholic) landscape, and the local landscape shaped to correspond to these new narratives of sacrifice and glory. Spaces connected to the Catholic cult and Catholic symbols played a particularly prominent role in molding the young generation of Polish citizens, regardless of their religion. Although Jewish, Protestant, and Muslim sites are listed as possible destinations of school excursions, too, they feature only on the margin of official curricula. And the introduction of minorities’ heritage is prefaced with the remark that visits to such sites will serve as “an irrefutable proof of our tolerance towards them [ethnic minorities] now and in the past.”75 Keeping up appearances, especially after Poland renounced the Minority Treaty signed at Versailles in 1919, might have motivated the educators more than did any real spirit of inclusion. Instilling patriotism into Poland’s minorities by means of ethnocentric and religious symbols was also counterproductive and often gave pupils a sense of alienation rather than belonging.76 From the perspective of Poland’s ethnic minorities, Polish (and Catholic) symbolic, spatial, and ideological domination was evident and often hurtful, but ethnic Poles did not necessarily see it this way. Catholic Church officials, in particular, were not quite satisfied with Poland’s 1921 constitution, which neither guaranteed that the Polish head of state be Catholic, nor sanctioned confessional schools. Prelate Zygmunt Choromański (1892–1968) expressed this stance most bluntly when he said, “It is not enough for us to have crucifixes in our churches, schools, hospitals, and courtrooms. The cross of Christ has to

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a Ukrainian majority was initially slightly better. “Lex Grabski” from 1924, however, replaced Ukrainian-language schools with bilingual ones, where in fact Polish was the dominant language. For more on the Polish schooling system in the Kresy, see Rudling, The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 272; Srokowski, Sprawa narodowościowa, 15; Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations, 144. Prymaka-Oniszk, Bieżeństwo 1915, 295. Witold Malczyk, Zabytki Wilna a nauka historii w szkole powszechnej (Wilno: Kuratorium Okręgowe Szkolne, 1936), 9. Malczyk, Zabytki Wilna, 113. Kamil Kijek, “Between a Love of Poland, Symbolic Violence and Antisemitism: The Idiosyncratic Effects of the State Education System on Young Jews in Interwar Poland,” in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 30: Jewish Education in Eastern Europe, edited by Eliyana R. Adler and Antony Polonsky (Liverpool: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2018), 253.

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expand its rule over all of public life: national upbringing, education, lawmaking, and all the legal codes.”77 And even though the interwar Polish state may have left some areas of its political and legislative activity outside of the direct supremacy of the Catholic Church, the cross became indeed the symbol that came to signify the policies of Polonization of the eastern borderlands. The following part of this chapter will examine three major cross-planting projects along Poland’s eastern border, discussing the way the symbol was deployed to place a political claim on the territory, to imprint Polishness on the landscape, and to embody “invented traditions” in public space.78 The Three Crosses monument in Wilno, the Legionnaires’ Cross in the Carpathian Mountains, and the Cross of the First Corps in Bobrujsk were all planted in the transitory moment when Poland stood at the threshold of regaining its independence. Placed by different civilian or military groups in very different urban and rural locations, these crosses all embodied a single political project. The history of their construction (and demolition, for that matter) is emblematic of the Polish attempts to domesticate the Kresy. But the celebratory practices that these monuments attracted and discourses that accrued around them also reveal a great deal about the way Poles defined their collective “we” and conceived of their Others.

The Three Crosses in Wilno The winter of 1915 was a harsh one. The German troops that arrived in September depleted the city and its surroundings of food supplies, and, by the advent of winter, Vilnians were facing famine. “In the beginning, it was the elderly who started collapsing in the street from hunger,” noted in his diary Stanisław Aleksandrowicz, who supervised a manor on the city’s outskirts. “Soon, the hospitals filled up and I saw with my own eyes people dying of exhaustion on the streets of the Jewish district.”79 While the city’s poor were struggling to survive the second winter of the world war, the arrival of the Germans raised the hopes of the Polish elites for an independent Polish state. Despite the dreary winter, therefore, Polish nationalists mobilized for action. In April 1916, a civic committee filed a request to the German authorities to replace three crosses that used to stand on one of the hills surrounding 77

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Quoted in Danuta Waniek, Orzeł i krucyfiks: Eseje o podziałach politycznych w Polsce (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek, 2011), 190. Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1. Stanisław Aleksandrowicz, “Pamiętnik Stanisława Aleksandrowicza 1914–1918,” in Wilno i Wileńszczyzna w pamiętnikach z lat pierwszej wojny światowej, edited by Małgorzata Przeniosło and Marek Przeniosło (Kielce: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jana Kochanowskiego, 2014), 67.

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the town with a new monument. The original wooden crosses, which collapsed in 1869 and, due to a Russian ban, could not be renewed, marked the place where legend maintained that seven Franciscan missionaries were killed in a pagan raid in the fourteenth century.80 The motivation for erecting the monument was thus ostensibly purely religious. The petitioners explained that they wished to supplicate the holy martyrs to end the bloodshed and “return peace to our city.”81 As soon as the Germans granted permission, work on the monument proceeded swiftly.

Fig. 7. The Three Crosses of Wilno on a postcard from the 1930s. Source: Polona Collections. 80

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Jan Kurczewski, Pamiątka zbudowania i poświęcenia Trzech Krzyżów w Wilnie na Górze Trzykrzyskiej w roku 1916 (Wilno: Drukarnia Ks. A. Rutkowskiego, 1916), 11–12. Letter of the Civic Committee, quoted in Józef Poklewski, “Wileńskie trzy krzyże,” Acta Universitatis Nicolai Copernici (2013): 168.

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While some contemporaries criticized the costly initiative as “improper” in a starving city where “whole families were dying of famine in the streets,”82 the enterprise also enjoyed much support. If we are to believe the reports of the coordinating committee, Vilnians welcomed the project, made generous donations and volunteered for the construction work.83 On July 19, 1916, the foundations were laid, a half-clandestine religious celebration was held at the site, and a foundation document was walled into the structure.84 Its Latin script read that Vilnians, “deprived of a large part of their fatherland,” planted these crosses supplicating God’s help to “protect the city and the remnants of the ruined country.”85 Three weeks later, the monument was finished, the scaffolding removed, and Vilnians saw three white crosses towering over their city. Although on the surface the monument conveyed a politically neutral message – commemorating the martyrdom of Franciscan friars – both its initiators and other contemporaries were well aware of the memorial’s true function as a grassroots enterprise to mobilize ethnic Poles to claim Wilno as a Polish city. “The entirety of Polish Wilno is participating in the construction,” noted in his diary Władysław Zahorski, a member of the supervising committee. “People of all backgrounds: ladies, gentlemen, youngsters, priests, artisans, seamstresses, and servants all hoist gravel, sand, stones, and cement up the hill,” he reported.86 Count Wincenty Łubieński, likewise a member of the committee, wrote in his diary that hundreds of volunteers worked with a great enthusiasm while singing national hymns.87 Alfred Döblin, who passed through Wilno in 1924, registered, not without a touch of mockery, how fast the monument was erected: “Already during the occupation the Poles, forgetting nothing, busied themselves with the putting up of these crosses.”88 What is more, in Döblin’s interpretation, the three crosses were a monument commemorating Poles executed at the order of the Governor of Vilna, Mikhail Murav’ëv, in 1863. This very fact – that the Hill of Three Crosses was the burial site of a number of Poles executed for their participation in the January

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Countess Maria Ogińska, quoted in Poklewski, “Wileńskie trzy krzyże,” 171. Poklewski, “Wileńskie trzy krzyże,” 171. Wincenty Łubieński, “Trzy Krzyże w Wilnie: Fragment z pamiętnika Hr. Wincentego Łubieńskiego z czasów niedalekiej przeszłości p.t. ‘Niemcy w Wilnie,’” Słowo no. 223, August 14, 1937, 3. Poklewski, “Wileńskie trzy krzyże,” 170. The genre of votive crosses referencing Poland’s loss of independence was not new. As soon as the Russian authorities revoked Murav’ëv’s ban in 1906, crosses and chapels with supplications reading “God save Poland” or “God, return us our free fatherland” mushroomed in central and eastern Poland, see Czerwiński, Kapliczki i krzyże przydrożne w Polsce, 25. Quoted in Poklewski, “Wileńskie trzy krzyże,” 169. Łubieński, “Trzy Krzyże w Wilnie,” 3. Alfred Döblin, Reise in Polen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2016), 122.

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Uprising – was a frequent argument for contemporaries to underscore the monument’s status as a symbol of Polishness.89 To Łubieński, the three-cross monument was “a new memorial of our national ideology.”90 This became apparent even in the very choice of materials used for its construction. Although some critics insisted that wooden crosses would better fit into the local landscape, the civic committee opted for armored concrete.91 They wished the monument to be “a lasting monolith, able to withstand centuries” and leave a permanent mark of Polish national aspirations on the cityscape.92 The author of the monument, Antoni Wiwulski, likewise saw the bold form of the crosses as a statement of national resilience. “We are a nation in struggle, a subjugated nation,” he wrote, “our faith is also constantly being attacked; therefore we [. . . should] go ahead with full force, without turning back [. . .] Let’s be young, confident, like our nation: loud, proud, dashing forward.”93 The three concrete crosses towering over Wilno were to embody both the Polish spirit of dissent and the dream of Polish prepotency on the territories of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania. At a time when the Russian retreat ignited both Polish and Lithuanian national aspirations, marking the contested city with a major memorial embodying Poland’s claim to Wilno was certainly an astute move on the part of Polish nationalists. When the Russians withdrew from Vilna, the natural foe of Polish statehood was removed from the equation. Yet, the city where ethnic Poles made up barely 50 percent of the population was still full of Others, who had now come to be portrayed as a threat to Polish national interests.94 Given that the three crosses aimed to mobilize Poles for the national cause, the campaign required both defining what was Polish and identifying the new Other. Wiwulski’s design reinforced the identity compound of Polak-katolik, and the narratives of religious and national martyrdom surrounding the Hill of Three Crosses were conflated into a compelling frame of Polish sacrifice and heroism. “Our Polish initiative,” noted Łubieński in his diary, was a “thorn in the flesh of the 89

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Jan Obst, Imć Pana Rotmistrza Józefa Karpowicza powstańca z r. 1863 wspomnienia (Wilno: Dziennik Wileński, 1928); Malczyk, Zabytki Wilna, 48. Łubieński, “Trzy Krzyże w Wilnie,” 3. The photographer Jan Bułhak protested against the concrete structure of the crosses in an open letter. Quoted in Poklewski, “Wileńskie trzy krzyże,” 174. Poklewski, “Wileńskie trzy krzyże,” 173. Wiwulski, quoted in Poklewski, “Wileńskie trzy krzyże,” 174. The German census of 1916 listed Poles as the largest ethnic group, amounting to 50.2 percent, followed by Jews (43.5 percent), Lithuanians (2.6 percent), and Russians (1.5 percent). Data from Völker-Verteilung in West-Russland (Hamburg: Friederichsen, 1917). See also Theodore R. Weeks, “Jews and Others in Vilna–Wilno–Vilnius,” in Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands, edited by Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 81–99.

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clashing multinational elements” in Wilno.95 It was because the civic committee expected opposition from “anti-Polish elements” that it pushed for a very prompt realization of the monument.96 Taking advantage of the initial German benevolence towards Polish national ambitions in Wilno, Polish nationalists knew how to create faits accomplis. At the same time, Polish confidence in demonstrating national sentiments went hand in hand with rising anxiety about losing the game in Wilno. “Germans in Wilno are getting along very well with the Jews,” wrote Stanisław Cywiński, a local teacher, in his diary from 1916, “if this continues, it is the worst that can happen to us – a hundred times more dangerous than the return of the Muscovites.”97 His contemporary, Stanisław Maciejewicz, a Catholic priest and later a senator, also painted a dim picture of the future, should Lithuanians receive the city as their capital. “Having gained Vilnius as the capital [. . .] they would transform this Polish city into a Lithuanian–Belarusian–Jewish one.”98 Clearly, a scenario in which other ethnic minorities would have the upper hand in Wilno was seen as nothing less than a defeat. General Żeligowski’s “mutiny” in 1920 and the arrival of his troops in the city finally dispelled these Polish fears, securing Poland’s control over Wilno. In the two decades to come, Wiwulski’s monument served as one of the icons of Polish rule in the city and as a national memorial.99 The Three Crosses would feature on multiple postcards, and become a visual signature of Wilno during the Northern Trade Fair (1928–1939), a flagship annual event meant to showcase local industry and facilitate the economic growth of Poland’s north-eastern borderlands.100 During the regal funeral of Marshal Piłsudski’s heart in Wilno in 1936, the last patriotic mass event on this scale in the Second Republic, the three crosses provided perhaps the most dramatic backdrop to this spectacle of the nation celebrating itself. On the day of the funeral, at the hour of Piłsudski’s death, a quarter to nine in the evening, twenty-one cannons were fired from the Hill of Three 95 96 97

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Poklewski, “Wileńskie trzy krzyże,” 169. Łubieński, “Trzy Krzyże w Wilnie,” 3. Stanisław Cywiński, Kartki z pamiętnika 1914–1920 (Wilno: Drukarnia Dziennika Wileńskiego, 1931), 29. Stanisław Bogoria, Co każdy Polak powinien wiedzieć? (o wileńszczyźnie) (Wilno: Komitet Zjednoczenia Kresów Wschodnich z Rzecząpospolitą, 1921), 7–8. Wilno had more such crosses commemorating the victims of the January Uprising. One of them, likewise of Wiwulski’s design, was placed on Castle Hill during World War I, but the Germans removed it. During the time of the German occupation, local inhabitants would make a floral composition in the shape of a cross on the site. The actual cross, safeguarded by the local firefighters, was put up again in 1921. See Skiba, “Kult Nieznanego Żołnierza,” 73; Malczyk, Zabytki Wilna, 60. Targi Północne w Wilnie: Czym były – czym są – czym mają być (Wilno: Towarzystwo Targów Północnych, 1939), 25.

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Fig. 8. The Three Crosses of Wilno illuminated during the Northern Trade Fair. Photo by Edmund Zdanowski and Bolesława Zdanowska from the collection of the National Museum in Gdańsk.

Crosses.101 The illustrated press featured pictures of Wiwulski’s monument “ruling above Wilno” in special issues dedicated to “The Marshal’s Beloved City.”102 Until the very eve of World War II, the three crosses continued to embody the nation’s need for pathos and served as a visual reminder of Polish supremacy in this multiethnic region. For the local Lithuanian intelligentsia, also Catholic, the crosses turned into a bitter symbol. In 1923, the priest and journalist Petras Kraujalis (1882–1933), an important local activist in the Lithuanian national movement, published a brochure on the Hill of Three Crosses. This short history of the Franciscan missionaries and their martyrdom gives us an idea of how ambiguous the Lithuanian attitude towards the monument was. On the one hand, Kraujalis recognized the three crosses as a Polish project and disavowed the supposed pacifist character of the memorial. Quoting the Polish daily Dziennik Wileński, which had celebrated Wiwulski’s crosses as a sanctuary of peace, Kraujalis commented bitterly: “Sadly, until now Vilnius did not attain true tranquility, mostly because of those who, when building the crosses, desired tranquility 101

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“Program dzisiejszych uroczystości pogrzebowych w Wilnie,” Kurjer Wileński, May 12, 1936, 3. “Jak się odbędzie pogrzeb serca Marszałka,” Żołnierz Polski, May 11, 1936, 282–283; “Serce Wodza spoczęło wśród żołnierskich mogił u stóp Matki,” Żołnierz Polski, May 21, 1936, 299.

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and peace so much.”103 Expressing sarcasm about the intentions of the Polish activists who erected the monument and criticism of the Polish rule that the crosses came to represent, Kraujalis at the same time performed a rhetorical feat by reclaiming them as “Lithuania’s crosses [that] will defend the capital of Gediminas from all dangers.”104 Embracing the three crosses as “Lithuanian,” the author thus elegantly solves the dilemma of Lithuanian Catholics vis-à-vis a site of their cult but also shows remarkable farsightedness. Over the course of the following decades, the three crosses did indeed gain quite a new significance for Lithuanians and their national narrative. The three crosses survived World War II unscathed, witnessing the annihilation of the city’s Jewish population and the postwar mass deportations of Poles.105 The new Vilnius, repopulated with ethnic Lithuanians and Russians, quickly expunged the traces of Polishness, but Wiwulski’s crosses remained. It was only in 1950, as the city was preparing for a visit by Soviet Foreign Minister Viacheslav Molotov, that the crosses were removed – demolished furtively in the middle of the night, their debris buried in the ground.106 When they were rebuilt in 1989, based on Wiwulski’s design but two meters higher, they already symbolized another struggle for independence – that of Lithuanians. Petras Kraujalis’ vision of over half a century before finally came true. Vilnius was Lithuanian, and it regained its tranquility.

The Cross at the Legionnaires’ Pass The Carpathian Mountains defined the historic Polish–Hungarian border. So, when they became a theater of war in late 1914, the military events in the region raised the hopes of Polish nationalists. Polish Legions, freshly created in the Austro-Hungarian army, triggered the imagination of many. Especially after, thanks to a spectacular feat of engineering, they traversed the mountains and began fighting the enemy on home ground. Using 5,000 cubic meters of timber and a workforce of 1,000 men, the Polish Legionnaires managed to complete a seven-kilometer-long road through the mountains, including twenty-eight bridges, in just fifty hours. This enabled a quick passage of artillery and cavalry across the Carpathians, from Hungary to Galicia, bringing a major breakthrough in the military situation.107 The 103

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P. Viestautas, Trijų Kryžių kalnas Vilniuje (Vilnius: Švyturio spaustuve, 1923), 8. Translation from the Lithuanian by Mindaugas Kelpša. Ibid. On World War II in Vilnius, see Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations, 73–89; Theodore R. Weeks, Vilnius between Nations 1795–2000 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2015), 155–188. Poklewski, “Wileńskie trzy krzyże,” 164; Weeks, Vilnius between Nations, 181. Henryk Lewartowski, Bolesław Pochmarski, and J. A. Teslar, Szlakiem bojowym Legionów: Krótki zarys organizacyi i dziejów 2. Brygady Legionów Polskich

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story of the Legionnaires’ Road became a popular trope in the state celebrations of interwar Poland, but the myth of the heroic passage through the mountains began to be venerated already during the war. Crossing the Carpathians and fighting the Russians, the Polish units believed they were now contributing to the liberation of Poland. Lieutenant Stark, who coordinated the construction of the Legionnaires’ Road, was aware of the symbolic weight of the moment. And as the Polish units reached the mountain pass (which from then on was to be known as Legionnaires’ Pass), he ordered his soldiers to plant a wooden cross. The military chroniclers reported this scene with inevitable pathos: Lieutenant Stark was among the last ones to descend into the land where they were going to face the deadly enemy, and the momentous nature of this fact was dawning on him. Standing at the end of the freshly built “Legionnaires’ Road,” he pondered its significance. Suddenly, he felt the need to immortalize this moment with some memorial [. . .] “Listen!,” he addressed the troops, “here, at the end of our road, we need to leave a lasting sign. We will plant a cross on this clearing!” The soldiers followed the order immediately. They found the idea so natural and self-evident. They got down to work on the spot.108

In just two hours, a seven-meter-high wooden cross was ready. Private Adam Szania, a butcher by profession, etched a few verses at its foot: “Children of Poland look at this cross! / The Polish Legions put it up high / Traversing mountains, valleys, and ramparts / For your glory, our Motherland!”109 The cross was to embody the “profound feelings of those who blazed a trail of new achievements,” but it also marked what the troops hoped would become the future Polish state border.110 The Polish-controlled zone in this remote and multiethnic territory of Huculszczyzna (Ukrainian: Hutsul’shchyna) was celebrated as the dawn of Polish independence. After the Polish troops descended via the Legionnaires’ Pass into the previously inaccessible valley of Rafajłowa (Bystrytsia, in today’s Ukraine) and, in the months to come, succeeded in defending it against the Russians, the myth of the Polish Thermopylae and of Rzeczpospolita Rafajłowska was born.111 These first battles of the Polish Legions on home

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w Karpatach, Galicyi i na Bukowinie (Lwów: Fundusz Wdów i Sierot po Legionistach, 1915), 198–200; Jan Dunin Brzeziński, Rotmistrz Legionów Polskich: Wspomnienia z lat 1914–1919 (Pruszków: Ajaks, 2004), 39–40. Lewartowski, Pochmarski, and Teslar, Szlakiem bojowym Legionów, 201. Ibid. According to some sources, the initial verse had a slightly different content and was subsequently censored by the members of staff: “Children of Poland, look at this cross! / The Polish Legions put it up high / As a sign of their struggle and toil / For Poland and for the masses.” See Jan Skłodowski, “Krzyż Legionów,” Spotkania z zabytkami 4 (2006): 16. Lewartowski, Pochmarski, and Teslar, Szlakiem bojowym Legionów, 202. Ibid., 88–118.

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ground fired the collective imagination and remained an important reference point for the future Polish state and its “invented traditions.” The great symbolic significance of the border cross was evident already to those who spontaneously planted it on that remote forest clearing. Back in 1915, the military chronicler noted: When the war comes to an end in the, God willing, free Fatherland, the nation will replace the wooden cross, withered by the Carpathian winds, and, having conserved its remains in its hallowed sanctuary, will erect at that border pass, surrounded with the majestic mountains that witnessed the martyrdom of the Legions, a monument in stone. On its surface, they will carve in letters of gold the Legionnaire’s venerable verses, born amid the storm of the Great War.112

The Legionnaires’ dream came true. Poland’s new border in the southeast stretched down to the Hutsul region in Czarnohora (Ukrainian: Chornohora). And, in 1931, the Legionnaires’ Cross was indeed replaced with a more permanent iron structure that crowns the (now Ukrainian) valley to this day. Unlike the other monuments marking Poland’s new borders, the Legionnaires’ Cross was located far from urban centers and in rather inaccessible terrain, but it came to play an important symbolic role in interwar Poland. On February 15, 1934, a special train reached the small station of Nadwórna, a few kilometers south of Rafajłowa. The mayor and the most prominent citizens of the town welcomed the arriving passengers with bread and salt. After a holy mass had been held in a local church, the visitors were festively accompanied to Rafajłowa. Thirty-nine cross-country skiing teams from different parts of Poland thus reached the start of the first Hutsul Route March of the Second Brigade of the Polish Legions.113 The three-day sporting event was a tribute to the Legionnaires who, twenty years earlier, had constructed the mountain road and withstood the Russian offensive in the Carpathians. To re-enact their feats in the historic spaces where they fought and under the weather conditions they had to suffer, an annual cross-country skiing race was initiated. To reference military efforts, the competition was to take place in teams and include shooting at human silhouette targets.114 Popularized by the media, the annual Hutsul March became an enormously successful winter event, attracting scores of spectators and fueling the development of the local tourist infrastructure. Using the 112

113

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Emphasis in the original. Lewartowski, Pochmarski, and Teslar, Szlakiem bojowym Legionów, 203. Konrad Jotemski, “Śladami Legjonistów Żelaznej Brygady,” Żołnierz Polski I Marsz Narciarski Huculskim Szlakiem II Brygady Legjonów Polskich no. 7, March 1, 1934, 131–133. Dariusz Dyląg, “Marsz zimowy ‘Huculskim Szlakiem II Brygady Legionów Polskich’ 1934–1939,” Prace Naukowe Akademii im. Jana Długosza w Częstochowie 12, 2 (2013): 78.

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Fig. 9. A competing team laying a wreath at the Legionnaires’ Cross, 1934. Photo: Witold Pikiel. Source: the National Digital Archives in Warsaw (NAC).

traditional practice of a physical contest and adapting it for a new national purpose, the march offered a popular ritual that permitted people to celebrate the Polish state and its heroes in the volatile multiethnic borderlands that, by the 1930s, had already witnessed armed Polish–Ukrainian clashes. Eric Hobsbawm defined “invented traditions” as “a set of practices [. . .] of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by repetition.”115 Given its annual character, the Hutsul March lent itself particularly well to this purpose. And, although only six such events were held before the outbreak of the next war, the practice had considerable impact and visibility nationwide.116 The Cross of the Legionnaires played a crucial role 115 116

Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” 1. One event in local history suggests that this “invented tradition” might have nurtured pro-Polish attitudes in the local population. In August 1939, a group of Jews urged the Jewish MPs in the Polish parliament to issue an open call to Polish Jewry to fight in

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in this “invented tradition.” Each ski patrol departing from Rafajłowa would carry a wreath with the name of the team. When the patrol reached the Legionnaires’ Pass, its commander had to lay it down at the foot of the cross and collect a sample of soil into a special receptacle. During this operation, the whole team was obliged to stand at attention. After completion of the race, all the patrols would gather in the village of Worochta for another ceremony, depositing the soil from the Legionnaires’ Pass at the foot of another cross.117 All these symbolic gestures were carefully orchestrated and prepared well in advance. For example, the list of required equipment for the participating teams included “wire and a ribbon in the national colors” for wreath making. Fir branches were to be delivered by the race organizers.118 In 1936, after the death of Marshal Piłsudski, the procedure was slightly modified, and the winning team went to Kraków instead, to bring the urn with soil from the Legionnaires’ Pass to Piłsudski’s Mound.119 The presence of the cross at the center of this ritual was not coincidental. Mounted at the Legionnaires’ Pass, it served as a symbolic border marker and a powerful statement of Catholic supremacy over a multiethnic area where Poles were only a minority.120 The memorial component of the race established a symbolic linkage between the soil (soaked with the blood of the heroes) and the cross (as a national symbol). The ceremony was thus a symbolic performance of Poland’s territorial integrity. These symbolic rituals aimed to present the eastern Carpathians, where the Polish military units shed their blood, as essentially Polish. By spotlighting its geographical peripheries, Poland was reaffirming its core values. But, since the race was being reported nationwide by the illustrated press, these remote margins could also be mapped in the collective imagination as an integral part of the country.121

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119 120

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defense of Poland in the inevitably approaching war. The remarkable petition came from the small Jewish community of Nadwórna. See Jerzy Kochanowski, “W obliczu wojny: Apel Żydowskiej Gminy Wyznaniowej w Nadwórnej do Żydowskiego Koła Parlamentarnego (25 VIII 1939),” in Żydzi w obronie Rzeczypospolitej: Materiały konferencji w Warszawie 17 i 18 października 1993, edited by Jerzy Tomaszewski (Warsaw: Cyklady, 1996), 131–137. Jotemski, “Śladami Legjonistów,” 131; Dyląg, “Marsz zimowy,” 79–80; Patrice M. Dabrowski, “Multiculturalism Polish Style: Glimpses from the Interwar Period,” in Understanding Multiculturalism: The Habsburg Central European Experience, edited by Johannes Feichtinger and Gary B. Cohen (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 91. VI Marsz Zimowy Huculskim Szlakiem II Brygady Legionów (Stanisławów: Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Huculszczyzny, 1939), 21. Dyląg, “Marsz zimowy,” 81. According to the Polish 1921 census, Stanisławów Voivodship was inhabited by a population of 69.8 percent Ruthenians, 22.2 percent Poles, 6.8 percent Jews, and 1.2 percent Germans. Pulik, “Województwo stanisławowskie,” 181. Benedict Anderson emphasizes the role of the media in generating a sense of an “imagined community,” thus facilitating the rise of nationalism. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006), 33–35.

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The region of Hutsul’shchyna, where the Legionnaires’ Pass was located, lent itself particularly well to such symbolic integration. Although the Hutsuls were Greek Catholic and spoke an Eastern Slavic dialect, with their distinct folklore and less exposure to Ukrainian nationalism, they gained the status of a picturesquely native and state-loyal minority. As Patrice Dabrowski points out, the Hutsul March “explored the myth of Polish–Hutsul brotherhood, and their favorable disposition towards the Polish state.”122 Orientalized and presented as “free of the artificially cultivated neo-Ukrainian chauvinism,”123 the Hutsuls were lionized as Polish patriots and veterans of the Polish independence struggle. Although memoirs of the period give a much more nuanced picture of the relations between the Polish troops and the local population, for the purpose of state-sanctioned “invented traditions,” Poland’s “beautiful savages,” the Hutsuls, became a model ethnic minority.124 Fusing the national mythology with popular culture and imbuing the search for native authenticity with a political agenda, the winter celebrations around the Legionnaires’ Cross served many different purposes. They commemorated the Polish struggle for independence, marked a contested borderland as inherently Polish, offered a counterpoint to the manifestations of Ukrainian nationalism in the region, and showcased an ethnic minority that was loyal to the state. The annual national pageants at the Legionnaires’ Pass under the auspices of the Polish military authorities illustrate well the mechanisms of “inventing” a nation. Carefully orchestrated rituals created a vision of a multiethnic national community united around its heroes – defenders of the Polish borders. Alternative narratives – of Polish predominance in the East, ethnic animosities, or religious persecution – were entirely expunged from this script.

The Cross of the First Corps in Bobrujsk Bobrujsk (Babruıˇsk, in today’s Belarus) belonged to one of the easternmost areas that Poles managed to temporarily gain control over in the Polish–Soviet war. In the months preceding the great Bolshevik offensive of 1920, which pushed the frontline back to the outskirts of Warsaw, the fortress of Bobrujsk constituted one of the most symbolic Polish strongholds in the East. It ignited the Polish colonialist imagination and, for a time, inspired a vision of Poland that stretched over the entire territory of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania. A visible symbol of these territorial aspirations was a massive cross planted in 1918 on top of a commemorative mound in one of the fortress’s courtyards. A crown of thorns adorned the center of this ten-meter-high monument, encircling the inscribed date of its construction. Given that nearly 60 percent 122 123 124

Dabrowski, “Multiculturalism Polish Style,” 90. Ibid., 91. Dunin Brzeziński, Rotmistrz Legionów Polskich, 84.

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of the town’s inhabitants were Jewish and roughly 30 percent were Orthodox Belarusians, the Latin cross towering over the fortress was a particularly poignant statement of Polish supremacy.125 “It faced the East,” recalled one soldier then stationed in Bobrujsk. And the intention with which it was planted, evident from his words, is unambiguous: The cross topping the mound symbolized our intentions concerning the future eastern borders of the Republic. It was an emblem of Christianity, under whose banner we went to war with the Bolshevik heathens. It was to be both an ominous memento to the enemies of Poland, reborn in the roar of cannons of the great offensive of the Western Allies, and our pledge to them that we are ready to become the bulwark of Christian Europe against Asia.126

At a time when, in the eyes of Polish troops, Asia was seen to begin at the Berezina River, Bobrujsk was to be an outpost of Western civilization. The Polish military might not have spent a long time in Bobrujsk, but their stay impressed an indelible mark on the local memory. In 1918, they left behind the cross. When they returned a year later, they committed a series of pogroms

Fig. 10. The Bobrujsk Mound of the First Corps. Source: Collection of Major Stanisław Nowicki, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

125

126

According to a Polish census of 1919, the inhabitants of Bobrujsk were 57.4 percent Jews, 31.3 percent Orthodox, and 6.7 percent Catholics. See Eugeniusz Romer (ed.), Spis ludności na terenach administrowanych przez Zarząd Cywilny Ziem Wschodnich (grudzień 1919) (Lwów and Warsaw: Książnica Polska T-wa Naucz. Szkół Wyższych, 1920), 46. “Na Placówce . . . Dopełnienie ślubowania,” Placówka no. 2 (1933): 26.

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that Polish historiography, cherishing the victors of the Polish–Soviet war as saviors of the nation, is only beginning to address.127

The Temporary Capital of Poland: Poles in Bobrujsk, Act One The revolution of 1917 dealt a serious blow to the condition of the Russian army and created a window of opportunity for the formation of Polish military units. The First Corps, created in the first post-revolutionary impulse of the Russian Provisional Government of 1917, was a formation gathering ethnically Polish soldiers who had either served in the Russian Army or been taken prisoner by it. This national unit, which assembled roughly 30,000 men by 1918, was intended to fight against the Germans alongside Russia and, in the future, constitute the nucleus of the Polish national armed forces.128 As the formation consolidated, however, it turned against the Bolshevik troops, signing a pact of neutrality with the Germans. The First Corps, under the command of General Józef DowborMuśnicki, thus soon found itself in a precarious situation. Having received permission to relocate from the area of Moscow westwards, 800 Polish troops gathered around Bobrujsk in the beginning of February 1918 and took control of the fortress.129 The Polish units thus received a strategic base and a foothold closer to “home.” The area between Mohylew (Belarusian: Mahiliouˇ ), Żłobin (Zhlobin), and Słuck (Slutsk) that the Polish military temporarily controlled became the breadbasket for the troops. But, symbolically, this enclave under Polish jurisdiction had far greater significance than that. Historical and literary accounts have referred to it as “Dowbor’s Poland” or “Rzeczpospolita Bobrujska” (The Bobrujsk Republic), and to Bobrujsk as the “temporary capital of Poland.”130 127

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129 130

Atrocities committed against Jews by the Polish military during the Polish–Bolshevik war, if mentioned at all, are noted only on the very margin of the Polish historiography of the period. We can find references to the pogroms in the Belarusian territories in Jerzy Tomaszewski, “Polskie formacje zbrojne wobec Żydów 1918–1920,” in Żydzi w obronie Rzeczypospolitej: Materiały konferencji w Warszawie 17 i 18 października 1993 (Warsaw: Cyklady, 1996), 97–111; Aleksander Smoliński, Morale i dyscyplina Wojsk Wielkopolskich w latach 1918–1919: Przyczynek do dziejów Powstania Wielkopolskiego (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek, 2009), 82–87; Andriej Czerniakiewicz, “Ekscesy antyżydowskie wojsk polskich na Kresach Północno- wschodnich RP (IV–VIII 1919 r.),” in Świat NIEpożegnany: Żydzi na dawnych ziemiach wschodnich Rzeczypospolitej w XVIII–XX wieku/A World We Bade No Farewell: Jews in the Eastern Territories of the Polish Republic from 18th to 20th Century, edited by Krzysztof Jasiewicz (Warsaw: Rytm, 2006), 581–589. Michlic, Poland’s Threatening Other, 109–130. Henryk Orleański and Napoleon Józef Hertz, I Korpus Polski: Szkic historyczny (Warsaw: Sekcja Historyczna Związku Żołnierzy I Korpusu Polskiego, 1938); Böhler, Civil War in Central Europe 1918–1921, 43; Andrzej Chwalba, Wielka wojna Polaków 1914–1918 (Warsaw: PWN, 2018), 346–354. Kukiel, Zarys historji wojskowości w Polsce, 310. Orleański and Hertz, I Korpus Polski; Piotr Bauer, Generał Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki 1867– 1937 (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 1988); Przemysław Boguszewski, “Twierdza

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The island of Polish rule was no safe haven, though. Surrounded by Soviet formations and treated as outlaws, the First Corps fought a series of bloody battles, trying to secure its position. The situation was volatile also among the troops, as many soldiers felt attracted by the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary ideas and were leaving the Corps. The military chaplains, report Polish chroniclers, had a hard time eradicating the “Bolshevist infection” and training the soldiers in obedience and “national awareness.”131 The approaching German lines additionally complicated matters, although General Dowbor-Muśnicki decided to maintain neutrality vis-à-vis the German army.132 Stationing Polish troops in the region did not bring tranquility to the local inhabitants, either. Even those historians who hold Dowbor-Muśnicki and his Corps in high esteem do not fail to mention the “numerous conflicts with the local community triggered by the food requisitions.”133 Dowbor-Muśnicki himself, in a later memoir, openly reveled in the extent of his power in Bobrujsk and the terror he inflicted. “Though I was sole ruler of a territory equaling the Kingdoms of Galicia and Lodomeria and the lord of life and death over nearly half a million inhabitants,” he reminisced, “my power rested only on the fear and the recognition of my authority by several thousand soldiers.”134 Within the limits of the Polish-controlled territory, Dowbor-Muśnicki and his troops were not subject to any authority. When peasants, who received worthless receipts instead of cash, tried to resist the requisitions and withhold supplies, Dowbor-Muśnicki’s soldiers would punish them by whipping them in public or even carrying out arbitrary executions.135 The outcome of this brutal policy was increasing tension between the local population and the Polish armed forces. “The attitude of the Belarusian population vis-à-vis the Polish landowners is unfriendly and even hostile,” reported the Polish press in 1918. “It has deteriorated even further due to the activities of the First Corps and because of Belarusian demands for compensation for the damage inflicted in the name of Poland.”136 The situation of local peasants was further aggravated by the fact that the First Corps, recruited in large part from the Polish gentry, took local landowners under their protection, reclaiming the land that the Soviets had distributed among the peasants.137

131 132 133 134 135 136

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Bobrujsk,” Muzealnictwo Wojskowe 8 (2005): 43–68. See also the 1942 novel by Florian Czarnyszewicz, who was a native of the Bobrujsk region and a soldier in the Polish–Soviet war himself. In Nadberezyńcy, he describes the arrival of Dowbor-Muśnicki and his troops from the perspective of the local Polish minority: Florian Czarnyszewicz, Nadberezyńcy (Kraków: Arcana, 2011), 237, 241. Orleański and Hertz, I Korpus Polski, 28. Ibid., 25. Bauer, Generał Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki, 75–76. Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki, Moje wspomnienia (Poznań: Zysk i Spółka, 2013), 311. Bauer, Generał Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki, 95. Głos Narodu, August 24, 1918, quoted in “Na Białorusi,” in Krotov, “Dostoianie kul’turnoıˇ raboty tselyh vekov gibnet v plameni ognia,” 43. Bauer, Generał Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki, 75–76.

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Relations between the First Corps and the town’s majority population – the Jews – were likewise tense. Dowbor-Muśnicki was an obsessive antisemite who believed Jews were unsuitable for the army, untrustworthy, and supportive of the Communists.138 He was also of the opinion that the Jews themselves were to blame for the pogroms directed against them. “Forming a closed caste, performing backward practices, cheating and exploiting other people, they themselves create a hostile atmosphere around them,” he wrote in his memoir published in 1935.139 Jewish sources report that the local community suffered under Polish jurisdiction in 1918 and was relieved to see Dowbor’s troops leave.140 The Polish writer Melchior Wańkowicz, who was stationed in Bobrujsk at that time, does not mince words, noting that “the officers were getting more and more arrogant and the rank and file soldiers had one liberty only – that of pillaging the local population.”141 Wańkowicz also reports acts of sexual violence against Jewish women.142 That was, however, to be a mere prelude of much darker times to come for Jews under the second Polish occupation a year later. The local population welcomed the withdrawal of the First Corps from Bobrujsk in the summer of 1918. After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed on March 3, 1918, when the Germans took over full control of the area, the German military authorities solved the awkward problem of having to tolerate a Polish-controlled enclave by disarming Dowbor-Muśnicki’s troops and granting 23,000 Polish soldiers passage westwards.143 DowborMuśnicki’s soldiers note in their memoirs the joy of the Jewish community, celebrating the arrival of the Germans.144 This spontaneous reaction was not to be forgotten. To translate the humiliating demobilization by the Germans into a celebratory moment of closure for his troops, who were on the brink of mutiny, Dowbor-Muśnicki ordered the building of a burial mound crowned with an iron cross at the site where the Polish fallen had been buried. Veterans of the First Corps reminisced that soldiers, from rank and file to officers, all participated in building the mound.145 By June, the project was completed. On July 7, 1918, the last Polish soldiers left the fortress. DowborMuśnicki was among the last to depart and, before he left, he gave a speech at the cross and knelt down to kiss the mound, bidding farewell to the “Sleeping 138 139 140

141 142 143 144 145

Dowbor-Muśnicki, Moje wspomnienia. Ibid., 377. “Bobruisk,” in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, https://yivoencyclope dia.org/article.aspx/Bobruisk (accessed March 30, 2017). Melchjor Wańkowicz, Strzępy epopei (Warsaw: Rój, 1936), 116. Ibid., 108. Boguszewski, “Twierdza Bobrujsk,” 60. Michał Piwowar “Wspomnienia strzelca,” Placówka no. 6 (1935): 76. Orleański and Hertz, I Korpus Polski, 37.

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Knights, who did not live to return to the free Poland.”146 General DowborMuśnicki also announced that the Bobrujsk mound was to be just the first one – urging his soldiers to plant others on the Polish western border and in Warsaw.147 The iconic cross of Bobrujsk was indeed replicated, but only as a miniature in the Powązki Military Cemetery in Warsaw. But the image of this by then already nonexistent memorial site still circulated in the Polish collective memory. After Józef Piłsudski’s death, an urn in the shape of the Bobrujsk mound crowned with a cross was used to transport soil from the battlefields of the First Corps to the newly erected Piłsudski’s Mound in Kraków.148 The Bobrujsk cross was also replicated in the form of a badge for the First Corps veterans.149 Dowbor-Muśnicki traced the genealogy of the Cross of the First Corps back to the Polish uprisings. Recalling how impressed he was in his childhood by a lone cross at the grave of the January insurgents, he linked the Bobrujsk cross and the badge that it inspired to the tradition of national resistance. The practice of wearing patriotic jewelry, which had been popular during the time of the national upheavals, was continued by his veterans, who displayed the cross-shaped badge. [A]fter the decisive and bloody battle of Olszynka Grochowska in 1831, when our nation lost hope of regaining independence in any near future, Varsovians would peregrinate to the battlefield to collect twigs of alder soaked with the heroic blood of the insurgents and make little crosses out of them. They would then wear them around their necks. To curtail these patriotic reminiscences, the Russians ordered the alder forest to be cut down. But Varsovians kept their crosses in an even greater reverence, treating them as national relics.150

Although the monthly organ of the First Corps veterans, Placówka (The Post), repeatedly published panegyrics to Dowbor-Muśnicki and encouraged his veterans to wear the badge with pride, the Cross of the First Corps never won the status of a popular patriotic keepsake. The appeals Placówka made to the veterans suggest that many former Corps members actually avoided publicly displaying the symbol.151 This could have been because the memory of the First Corps and its battles around Bobrujsk was being increasingly politicized in interwar Poland. For Dowbor-Muśnicki, who bitterly opposed 146 147 148

149 150 151

Piwowar, “Wspomnienia strzelca,” 76. K.H. [untitled editorial], Placówka, nos. 11–12 (1934): 140. Wacław Lipiński “Łamanie praw moralnych: O książce gen. Dowbora-Muśnickiego,” Gazeta Polska, May 21, 1936, 3. “Poświęcenie kopca-pomnika na cmentarzu Dowborczyków,” Placówka no. 8 (1935): 98. Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki, “Krzyż Dowborowy,” Placówka no. 6 (1935): 69. Walenty Zieliński, “Dowborczycy,” Placówka no. 4 (1936): 62–63; “Pamięci Marszałka Focha,” Placówka no. 2 (1934): 12; Józef K., “Nowa książka J. Podoskiego,” Placówka nos. 6–7 (1934): 97.

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Piłsudski and was associated with the right-wing Endecja, the heritage of the First Corps embodied the vision of “Poland for Poles”: Catholic, ethnically monolithic, and xenophobic. Marginalized by Piłsudski and seeking recognition for his struggle against the Soviets, Dowbor-Muśnicki profiled himself also as a strong opponent of the socialist idea. And as the Polish Endecja was falling under the increasing influence of fascism, Placówka also started to present Dowbor-Muśnicki’s troops as crusaders against Marxism: It is with pride that we wear the Catholic cross, given to us by General Dowbor-Muśnicki. All the more so today, as the civilized world is opening its eyes to the true nature of Bolshevism, derived from Marxist ideas. Not only Poles, but the whole civilized world needs to appreciate the role of General Dowbor and his troops in the history of the world as the first crusading knights in ages to fight for Christianity.152

With time, the anti-socialist narrative of the First Corps veterans was gradually transforming into downright racist language imported straight from Nazi Germany. “The moral principles of the First Corps are embodied by our emblem: the cross and the eagle,” said one high-ranking officer in an address to the veterans in 1936: The cross – reminds us of God; the national emblem – of the fatherland. [. . .] Dowbor’s soldier cherishes the principles of militarism [. . .] He follows the rules of inborn Aryan honesty, so characteristic of our Nordic tribe. [. . .] Dowbor’s soldier is aware of his racial belonging and respects the values of the Aryan race, remembering the words of Julius Streicher: “The nation that does not respect its race will perish. Marching under the symbols of our faith, race, and nationality, you shall triumph!”153

That the Bobrujsk cross, erected to spite the Germans, was in time to be associated with German National Socialist ideology is ironic, but hardly surprising. The message of Polish ethnic supremacy that Dowbor-Muśnicki’s mound embodied paved the way for spiraling ethnic violence and abuse to unfold in Bobrujsk and beyond in the years to come. While Dowbor-Muśnicki never returned to Bobrujsk, assuming command of the Wielkopolska Uprising in December 1918 and soon afterwards retiring from all military functions, his legacy continued to haunt the town. As the Lithuanian–Belarusian front gained momentum, Dowbor-Muśnicki’s troops, trained in Wielkopolska and equipped with excellent Prussian weapons, were dispatched eastwards again.154 Under the command of First Corps officers, 152 153

154

Tuhan, “Żołnierze Madonny,” Placówka no. 1 (1937): 6. “Podstawy moralne I Korpusu: Streszczenie przemówienia mjr. J. Żychowskiego,” Placówka no. 4 (1936): 61–62. Kukiel, Zarys historji wojskowości w Polsce, 313.

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these new Polish formations took Minsk in 1919. On August 28, 1919, they marched into Bobrujsk again, headed for the fortress. Dowbor-Muśnicki’s cross was still there to greet them.

In the Shadow of the Cross: Poles in Bobrujsk, Act Two At five o’clock in the afternoon, the 3rd Wielkopolska Rifle Regiment marched into the city. The regiment’s chroniclers reported an “enthusiastic reception” by the local inhabitants, who allegedly welcomed the troops with an orchestra.155 A contemporary historian goes as far as to say that no other town welcomed the Polish troops with greater enthusiasm than Bobrujsk.156 A few days later, a full-fledged welcoming ceremony was held, beginning with a holy mass and finishing with a military parade through the town.157 The welcome address directed to the Polish troops on that day celebrated them as God-sent liberators: Our breasts and hearts cannot accommodate our limitless joy and happiness at seeing and welcoming you here – our dearest knights. After the dark days, days of heavy sadness and a yoke of bondage, the dawn of freedom has finally shone on us. We heard the wings of the White Eagle from afar and a miracle has happened, a long-awaited one; the White Eagle has arrived and landed among us. It brings us the Fatherland, Freedom, the Sun, a New Life!158

If local Poles in Bobrujsk might have authentically rejoiced at the return of Polish troops, they constituted no more than 7 percent of the local population. The remaining townspeople had good reasons to receive the new Polish units with apprehension. Polish military historiography, celebrating the Polish territorial gains in the Minsk region, not only glosses over such demographic details. Concentrating on the Polish–Soviet clashes, it pays very little attention to the experience of civilians under Polish jurisdiction.159 These lacunae, when contrasted with the 155

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157 158 159

J. Podwapiński, Ilustrowany zarys historji 57 P.P. Wlkp. (3 P. Strzelc. Wlkp.) dla szeregowych (Poznań: 57 P.P. Wlkp., 1927), 78. The 3rd Wielkopolska Rifle Regiment (3 Pułk Strzelców Wielkopolskich) was renamed the 57th Wielkopolska Infantry Regiment in 1920. Michał Krzyżaniak, Zwycięskie bitwy Polaków: 1919 Bobrujsk (Warsaw: Bellona, 2016), 80. Ibid., 80–81. Ibid. In his study devoted to discipline problems in the Wielkopolska units, Aleksander Smoliński mentions acts of antisemitic violence committed by the troops on the eastern front, but lists them next to gambling and drinking as instances of random insubordination and not as acts of systematic, mass-scale violence. Smoliński, Morale i dyscyplina Wojsk Wielkopolskich, 82–87. A number of recent studies have begun to fill this gap, addressing the issue of violence against civilians committed by Polish troops: William W. Hagen, Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University

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Belarusian, Russian, or Jewish histories of the period, demonstrate, on the one hand, to what an extreme extent the Polish narratives mythologized the activity of the Polish troops in the East. On the other, they testify to the efficiency of the symbolic practices performed by the Polish authorities in the eastern borderlands. Building mounds, planting crosses, and staging parades were ways of colonizing the landscape, but also a memorable activity that left a trace in historiographic records. Monuments and pageants were photographed and reproduced on postcards. Acts of violence remained invisible. According to the military chroniclers, the main activity of the Bobrujsk divisions consisted in organizing short raids on the Soviet positions behind the frontline. The commander of a regiment would personally lead such expeditions or dispatch other experienced officers. Such forays would “inflict great damage on the enemy, bring hundreds of prisoners, and return with enormous spoils,” noted the regiment’s historian in 1927, concluding self-assuredly that “We can look back on the past with pride.”160 A closer look at other Polish sources reveals that not all the Polish troops shared this opinion. An unpublished diary of Stanisław Pinkowski, a member of the Polish Legions participating in the Polish–Soviet war, reveals how uncomfortable some rank-and-file military were with the activities of the Polish units in the East. I desired it with all my heart that our march eastwards, crushing the bloodthirsty and barbarian Bolshevism, would bring with it the rule of law, respect for private property, and the dignity of the local inhabitants, but most of all, European civilization. We were, however, so very, very far removed from any principles of civilization.161

As autumn arrived in Bobrujsk in 1919 and the weather got worse, activities on the frontline nearly came to a halt.162 Soldiers stationed at the fortress were growing bored. As one of them noted, “life in a small-town barracks and uncomfortable lodgings could satisfy neither higher military ambitions, nor

160 161

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Press, 2018); Grzegorz Gauden, Lwów: Kres iluzji: Opowieść o pogromie listopadowym 1918 (Kraków: Universitas, 2019); Böhler, Civil War in Central Europe 1918–1921, 77– 79, 146–179; Eva Reder, Antijüdische Pogrome in Polen im 20. Jahrhundert: Gewaltausbrüche im Schatten der Staatsbildung 1918–1920 und 1945–1946 (Marburg: Herder-Institut, 2019), 28–36; Ciancia, On Civilization’s Edge, 33–36. Podwapiński, Ilustrowany zarys historji 57 P.P. Wlkp., 81. Stanisław Pinkowski, quoted in Andriej Czerniakiewicz, “Ekscesy antyżydowskie wojsk polskich na Kresach Północno-Wschodnich RP (IV–VIII 1919 r.),” in Świat NIEpożegnany: Żydzi na dawnych ziemiach wschodnich Rzeczypospolitej w XVIII–XX wieku/A World We Bade No Farewell: Jews in the Eastern Territories of the Polish Republic from 18th to 20th Century, edited by Krzysztof Jasiewicz (Warsaw: Rytm, 2006), 589. Grzegorz Łukomski and Bogusław Polak, W obronie Wilna, Grodna i Mińska: Front Litewsko–Białoruski wojny polsko–bolszewickiej 1918–1920 (Koszalin and Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Uczelniane Wyższej Szkoły Inżynierskiej w Koszalinie, 1994), 64.

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the inclination of young soldiers to have fun.”163 A bored regiment in a Jewish shtetl did not bode well for its inhabitants, especially because the troops, some of whom – especially officers – had been stationed in Bobrujsk with DowborMuśnicki’s First Corps, had a very negative attitude to the local Jews, accusing them of supporting the Bolsheviks. The fact is that Polish troops had been regularly committing pogroms on their way eastwards, long before they reached Bobrujsk. Anti-Jewish violence took place in Przemyśl (November 1918), Pińsk, Lida, and Wilno (all in April 1919).164 The farther east the front extended, the more anti-Jewish “incidents” happened and the less they resonated with public opinion in Poland.165 During the pogrom in Minsk that took place on August 8, 1919, shortly before the Polish takeover of Bobrujsk, 31 Jews lost their lives and 377 shops were plundered.166 The pattern was repeated in Borysów, Kojdanów, and Słuck. What is worth noting, however, is that the pogroms generally took place without the collaboration of the locals.167 According to the estimates of the Belarusian historian Mikola Ivanouˇ , 235 pogroms took place on Belarusian territory between 1918 and 1919. More than half of them were committed by Polish troops.168 The memorial book of the Jewish community in Bobrujsk, published in 1967 in Tel Aviv, describes the ten months of renewed Polish presence in the city as “months of terror.”169 As the Poznantshikes, or troops from Poznań, marched 163 164

165 166 167

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Józef Weyssenhof, “Noc i świt,” Placówka no. 3 (1927): 21. The American Peace Delegation, headed by Henry Morgenthau, investigated some of the anti-Jewish acts of violence carried out in Polish territory in 1919. Its final report speaks of 230 casualties in eight major pogroms. See Frank Golczewski, Polnisch–jüdische Beziehungen 1881–1922 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1981), 219–233; Sarunas Liekis, Lidia Miliakova, and Antony Polonsky, “Three Documents on AntiJewish Violence in the Eastern Kresy during the Polish–Soviet Conflict,” in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 14: Jews in the Polish Borderlands (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2001), 116–149; Tomaszewski, “Polskie formacje zbrojne wobec Żydów”; Przemysław Różański, “Wilno 19–21 kwietnia 1919 roku,” Kwartalnik Historii Żydów 1 (2006): 13–34; Michlic, Poland’s Threatening Other, 109–130; Szymon Rudnicki, “Pogrom wileński: 19–21 April 1919 roku,” Midrasz no. 4 (2017): 14–29; Gauden, Lwów: Kres iluzji; Böhler, Civil War in Central Europe 1918–1921, 160; Reder, Antijüdische Pogrome in Polen; Irina Astashkevich, Gendered Violence: Jewish Women in the Pogroms of 1917 to 1921 (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2018); Hagen, Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland. Czerniakiewicz, “Ekscesy antyżydowskie wojsk polskich,” 582–589. Ibid., 588. Elissa Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 30. Mikola Iwanou, “Die jüdische Welt bis zum Holocaust,” in Handbuch der Geschichte Weißrußlands, edited by Dietrich Beyrau and Rainer Lindner (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2001), 402. Yehuda Slutsky (ed.), Bobruisk; sefer zikaron le-kehilat Bobruisk u-veneteha (Tel Aviv: Tarbut ve-hinukh, 1967), 200. ˙

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into the city, they announced a three-day ban on movement and started looting Jewish houses and shops, a number of which were set on fire. An eyewitness of these events, Shimon Agin, described the atmosphere of those first days: The Jews had been locked up in their houses until they finally dared to step out to the streets and tend to their businesses. We were met with persecution and coercion. Bearded Jews were afraid to cross the street, lest their beards be cut with a razor, a blunt knife, or a pair of scissors. Girls were taking care not to be outside after dark, to avoid being harassed by the soldiers.170

According to the account of David Shimoni (1891–1956), a Bobrujsk-born poet and Zionist, persecutions and public humiliations of Jews began as soon as the soldiers took their quarters in Bobrujsk, and they continued over the months to come.171 On Yom Kippur (October 4), Polish troops raided the Bobrujsk synagogues, defiling the Tora scrolls and detaining the men. Such acts of publicly damaging religious objects were typical elements of a pogrom and constituted a form of symbolic violence that “desacralized” Judaism and, as William Hagen notes, “sublimated human slaughter.”172 Suffering beatings and humiliations, the Jews were taken to the outskirts of the town, where they were forced to perform mock exercises, dance around, and chant “Long live Poland!” The weak and elderly were beaten and forced to work in the fields.173 As soon as they took control over the city, the Polish military began investigating and prosecuting pro-Bolshevik activities in Bobrujsk. A number of Jews suspected of sympathizing with the Bolsheviks were arrested. On October 19, nine members of the Gekler (Gleckel) family were detained, including women and small children. All were executed; their belongings were looted by the soldiers who had killed them.174 A Polish military court later acquitted all the 170

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Shimon Agin, “In the Days of the Polish Occupation,” in Bobruisk; sefer zikaron lekehilat Bobruisk u-veneteha, edited by Yehuda Slutsky (ed.), 704. Translation from the Hebrew by Ilay Halpern. David Shimoni, “The Poles in Bobriusk,” in Bobruisk; sefer zikaron le-kehilat Bobruisk u-veneteha, Yehuda Slutsky (Tel-Aviv: Tarbut ve-hinukh, 1967), 703. Translation from ˙ the Hebrew by Ilay Halpern. Hagen, Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 466 and 164. On violence against sacred objects, see also Reder, Antijüdische Pogrome in Polen, 121–122. “Zaiavlenie postradavshih v sovet evreıˇskoıˇ obshchiny g. Bobruıˇska Minskoıˇ gub. ob ekstsessah so storony pol’skih voennosluzhashchih 4 oktiabria 1919 g.,” in Kniga pogromov: Pogromy na Ukraine, v Belorussii i evropeıˇskoıˇ chasti Rossii v period Grazhdanskoıˇ voıˇny 1918–1922 gg.: Sbornik dokumentov, edited by L. B. Miliakova (Moscow: Rossiıˇskaia Politicheskaia Entsiklopediia, 2007), 553–554. Slutsky, Bobruisk, 201; “Doklad Komissii po rassledovaniiu zverstv i nezakonnyh deıˇstviıˇ pol’skih voıˇsk pri Bobruıˇskom revkome ob ubiıˇstve sem’i Geklerov i ekstsessah v g. Bobruıˇske Minskoıˇ gub. v. sentiabre–oktiabre 1919 g.,” in Kniga pogromov: Pogromy na Ukraine, v Belorussii i evropeıˇskoıˇ chasti Rossii v period Grazhdanskoıˇ voıˇny 1918–1922 gg.: Sbornik dokumentov, edited by L. B. Miliakova (Moskow: Rossiıˇskaia Politicheskaia Entsiklopediia, 2007), 551–552.

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perpetrators.175 The final acts of violence in Bobrujsk took place as the Poles were leaving the town, at the beginning of July 1920. The retreat lasted three days and three nights, during which the Polish soldiers pillaged the town, committed multiple cases of rape, and set parts of the town on fire.176 None of these facts appear in the chronicles and memoirs of the military formations stationed in Bobrujsk.177 But it is perhaps telling that many reminiscences of veterans from Bobrujsk revolve around the question of unblemished honor of the Polish troops. The First Corps monthly, Placówka, thus often eulogizes the troops’s “purity that cannot be defiled” and the “Knights of the Sun” whose honor “no mud, no dirt, no stain” can blemish.178 The only victim and the subject of mourning in this Polish narrative is the cross, destroyed when the Soviets recaptured the city. During the opening of a memorial to the First Corps in Warsaw in 1930, in a sermon addressed to the veterans, one military chaplain bemoaned this loss: Come here [. . .] our brothers in arms, who obediently stood in line at the battlefields of Warsaw, Wilno, on the Vistula and Niemen, and show the bright cross on your chest, stained with your own blood [. . .] With your bodies, you enriched the soil of this great land, crying for freedom, and mourning over the grave into which we deposed you for eternal rest with our brotherly hands. We built you a high kurgan, and the cross on its top embraced you lovingly; on the cross hangs a crown of thorns, symbol of your harsh fate [. . .] Yet your grave in Bobrujsk was defiled and the earthly peace of your remains was disturbed.179 175

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178 179

Because of its bestiality, the murder of the Gekler family resonated considerably in both Jewish and Russian historiography and even in popular culture. Fictionalized accounts and even poems about the murder still appeared decades after the killing. The Gekler case, as well as other pogroms committed by the Polish troops, was also instrumentalized by Soviet anti-Polish propaganda well into the 1930s. See Aleksandr Friedman, “Geklery: Tragediia evreıˇskoıˇ sem’i iz Bobruıˇska,” Moe Mestechko, http://shtetle.com/shtetls_mog/ bobruisk/gekler.html (accessed March 30, 2017); Alexander Friedman, “‘Strana, kotoroıˇ praviat fashisty i antisemity’: Sovetskaia propaganda ob antisemitizme i evreıˇskih pogromah v Pol’she v 1920–1930-e gody,” in Przemoc antyżydowska i konteksty akcji pogromowych na ziemiach polskich w XX wieku, edited by Konrad Zieliński and Kamil Kijek (Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS, 2016), 201. Agin, “In the Days of the Polish Occupation,” 704–705. Translation from the Hebrew by Ilay Halpern. For more on anti-Jewish violence in Bobrujsk, see Magdalena Waligórska, “Anti-Jewish Violence of Polish Troops 1918–1920: The Case of Bobruisk,” East European Jewish Affairs 52, 1 (2022): forthcoming. Podwapiński, Ilustrowany zarys historji 57 P.P. Wlkp.; Łukomski and Polak, W obronie Wilna, Grodna i Mińska; Krzyżaniak, Zwycięskie bitwy Polaków; Kukiel, Zarys historji wojskowości w Polsce; Zbigniew Zieliński, “Generał broni Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki,” Niepodległość i Pamięć 11 (1998): 143–149. “Bez skazy i zmazy,” Placówka no. 2 (1934): 12. “Spiżowy Dowborczyk: Kazanie ks. Dr. I. Jachomowskiego, Kapelana II Dyw. Strz., w czasie poświęcenia Pomnika Poległym Dowborczykom, wygłoszone w Warszawie dn. 1.XI.1930 r.,” Placówka no. 3 (1934): 38.

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The kurgan in Bobrujsk was a burial site, so the presence of the cross was sanctioned there by the Christian funerary traditions. Yet, at the same time, its significance transcended that of a grave marker. The fortress of Bobrujsk in 1918 was seen as a “miniature of [Polish] independence.”180 And the Bobrujsk cross symbolized Polish territorial ambitions in the East and at the same time embodied a vision of the new state. The large cross, planted ostentatiously in a Jewish town, was a sign of exclusion: Jews were not considered equal citizens under Polish jurisdiction. The armed conflict against the Soviet Union was understood as a holy war, and the symbolic means the First Corps used to assert Polish (and Catholic) superiority in the town was a form of symbolic violence that both served community-building among the Polish troops and helped to frame violence against civilians as just and legitimate. Thus, Dowbor-Muśnicki’s First Corps’s symbolic articulation of domination and moral superiority prepared the ground for physical violence during the second Polish occupation. The pogroms in Bobrujsk were a direct result of the symbolic exclusion and verbal discrimination that preceded it. The cross, enclosed by the walls of the fortress, marked a dystopic miniature of Poland as envisaged by the National Democrats: Great Poland was to be a “Poland for Poles,” a bulwark of Catholicism, and a micro-empire, imposing its supremacy on its minorities with military force.181 The Polish dream of domination over the Eastern provinces that stretched beyond ethnically Polish territory, and the accompanying sense of loss and humiliation that this mission was eventually doomed to fail, underlies the violence that Polish troops committed in Bobrujsk and other towns farther into the Belarusian heartland and the way they sought to justify it. In this script, the symbolism framing the war for Poland’s eastern border as a Godsanctioned crusade plays a central role. The dominant rhetoric of the holy crusade, which served to legitimize both the Polish–Soviet war as such and violent acts against presumably Bolshevik-supporting civilians near the frontlines, provided an additional rationale for violence against an otherwise already very vulnerable group. If the destruction of “Bolshevik barbarism” was a God-sanctioned mission in defense of Christian civilization, the exceptional status of the cause justified particularly far-reaching measures also against Jews. Poles never returned to Bobrujsk. The Treaty of Riga put an end to Piłsudski’s federation idea and the dreams of controlling all the former territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. To the Soviets, the cross in Bobruisk that the Polish troops left behind was a visible symbol of “white” Polish supremacy. To the local Jews, it was a bitter reminder of the 180 181

Wańkowicz, Strzępy epopei, 191–192. I borrow the idea of a micro-empire from Pieter M. Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), 451.

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antisemitic violence inflicted in its name. Its disappearance was welcomed with relief by most.

Conclusions In the interwar period, the cross continued to be shorthand for the Polish nation and its rebirth, but the message it embodied changed fundamentally from what it had been in the period of the national uprisings in the nineteenth century. Together with its regained independence, Poland entered the phase of “maintaining” nationhood. Practices that once served “antistructure” were now harnessed to the exigencies of the new “structure,” routinized, turned into monuments, and appropriated as the official language and ceremonial code of the state. The cross was no longer a sign of defiance by an oppressed ethnic group, but a tool of domination by a colonizing power over multiethnic areas, where other groups were expected to abandon their own irredentist ambitions. Replicated in hundreds of new monuments, military cemeteries, and public squares, it not only became a border marker, but also helped to sustain the internal boundary between “us” and “them,” especially as a new array of Others – Bolsheviks, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Belarusians – entered the stage. Ostensibly, the direct reasons for planting the crosses were apolitical – Wiwulski’s crosses in Wilno commemorated historical martyrs, the Legionnaires’ Cross memorialized a military campaign, and the cross in the fortress of Bobrujsk marked a military burial site. All three of them, on some level, also performed the pre-modern ritual function of protective symbolic border markers, akin to the wayside crosses that would traditionally be planted on the perimeter of a settlement to fend off dangerous influence from without.182 Domesticating spaces that were exposed to the influence of “threatening Others,” the border crosses of the interwar period were such symbolic buttresses of the still vulnerable borders, but they also communicated a powerful statement vis-à-vis non-Catholics. They were monuments of national pride and unmistakable signals of triumphalism towards the other ethnic groups on Polish-controlled territory. The Wilno crosses aimed to communicate the Polish claim to the city, primarily to Lithuanians, who considered the city their rightful capital. The Legionnaires’ Cross in the Carpathians carried a clear message to Ukrainians. The Polish patriotic 182

Grażyna Holly, “Krzyże i kapliczki przydrożne na pograniczu polsko–słowacko– ukraińskim,” Roczniki Bieszczadzkie 20 (2012): 336; Jan Adamowski, “Motywacje stawiania krzyży i kapliczek przydrożnych,” in Krzyże i kapliczki przydrożne jako znaki społecznej, kulturowej i religijnej pamięci, edited by Jan Adamowski and Marta Wójcicka (Lublin: Uniwersytet Marii Curie Skłodowskiej, 2011), 35–36; Kamila Gillmeister, Krzyże i kapliczki przydrożne, czyli opowieść o świętych i przestrzeni (Tczew: Fabryka Sztuk, 2015), 7; Piotr Drapkiewicz, “Krzyże wsi Żegary,” Almanach Sejneński 6 (2008): 19–27.

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pageants, showcasing the local Hutsuls as natives loyal to the state, undermined Ukrainian irredentism. The cross of Bobrujsk was a message to the “godless” Bolsheviks, but also a powerful sign of exclusion vis-à-vis Orthodox Belarusians and, most of all, the local majority, the Jews. The sojourn of the Polish troops in Bobrujsk poignantly communicated to the Jews that they were at best to enjoy the position of second-class citizens in the future Polish state, as designed by the National Democrats. What is more, symbols such as the cross in Bobrujsk were not only tools of othering and of humiliating the non-Catholic minorities, but also a way of legitimizing violence. Once the territory under Polish control had been visually marked as Catholic and the struggle against the Soviets framed as a modern crusade, suffering inflicted on the other “infidels,” the Jews, appeared more justified. Once excluded from the national community as non-Catholics, they could also be more easily classified as the enemies not only of the cross, but also of the Polish state. Herbert Jäger, who examined the dynamics of collective violence, observed that, unlike individual violent acts that constitute a breach of social norms, violence committed by groups is actually a conformist behavior, following the dominant collective’s script, whose norms are stringently obeyed.183 The role of symbols and dominant narratives that define the norms and express the hierarchies in the symbolic organization of space is thus crucial in the process of legitimizing the existing power relations and, at times, physical violence. The crusading imagery in the form of massive crosses planted in the ethnically contested regions helped to frame the Polish colonialist project as an act of legitimate defense. By referencing the legacy of Polish struggles for independence and its ultimate teleology, national resurrection, the cross offered more than just a national symbol; it bestowed on Poles a sense of moral superiority over the enemies of their new state. If Poland was the Christ of Nations that had risen from the dead, what rival claims by other groups could possibly have precedence over the Polish national interest? Although the cross signified an emerging structure, the symbol did not come to reference the pre-partition ancien régime or any continuity of tradition, but instead came to denote, yet again, a set of new concepts and ideas. For one, the eastern frontier that the new borderland crosses came to delineate was an arbitrary one that had no historical precedent. It corresponded neither to the eastern border of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth of 1772, nor to the furthest extent of the Polish offensive in the victorious war against the Soviets in 1920. Instead, it was a demarcation line drawn in a process of political negotiation and arbitrary annexation184 – a fully “invented” border, running 183

184

Herbert Jäger, Verbrechen unter totalitärer Herrschaft: Studien zur nationalsozialistischen Gewaltkriminalität (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982). According to the Suwałki Agreement between the Entente and Poland of October 7, 1920, the area around Vilnius was to become part of the newly constituted Republic of

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through the territories inhabited by ethnic Lithuanians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians.185 The idea that this particular borderline defined the perimeter of Poland needed a powerful symbolic articulation because it was so new, random, inconsistent, and uncertain. The cross thus helped to mark and designate that state border as legitimate, stable, and sanctioned by tradition. Like the period of the January Uprising, the time of the consolidation of the new state was one of massive social change. Modernization, revolution, mass migrations, and the dissolution of empires shook the social order. The definition of what “the nation” was likewise shifted in new directions. As Eric Hobsbawm observed, between 1870 and 1918, nationalism “mutated from a concept associated with liberalism and the left, into a chauvinist, imperialist and xenophobic movement of the right.”186 This new brand of nationalism went hand in hand with a growing enthusiasm for imperial expansionism.187 In the Polish context, we can see how this shift led the symbol of the cross to embody both the exclusionary ideas of ethnic nationalism and the new expansionist politics in the East. The symbol’s new semantic field was also influenced by changes within the Catholic Church. After Poland regained its independence, the institutional Church became an active agent in the consolidation of the Polish state and the efforts to Polonize its minorities. At the same time, the rise of socialism and secularism, as well as the new technological, economic, and intellectual transformations in the society at large, posed an increasing challenge to the traditional religious authorities, which now confronted “growing anti-clerical and secularizing forces” and had to fear a loss of power.188 In response, Church authorities abandoned the passivity and loyalism that had characterized them in the partition era and, by World War I, “a much more combative, publicly engaged Church emerged.”189 This Ecclesia Militans, which, unlike the

185

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Lithuania. The military intervention by General Żeligowski, who marched into Vilnius with his troops in October 1920 in an act of staged mutiny against Piłsudski and occupied the contested territory, proclaiming a puppet state of “Central Lithuania,” created a fait accompli. Two years later, in a plebiscite boycotted by Lithuanians and Jews, the population of “Central Lithuania” voted to be incorporated into Poland. See Rudling, The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 118–19. On the local understandings of the Polishness of these borderland areas and the Polish “civilizing mission” in the East, see Kathryn Ciancia, “Borderland Modernity: Poles, Jews and Urban Spaces in Interwar Eastern Poland.” The Journal of Modern History 89 (2017): 531–561. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 121. Ibid. Konrad Sadkowski, “Clerical Nationalism and Antisemitism: Catholic Priests, Jews, and Orthodox Christians in the Lublin Region, 1918–1939,” in Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland, edited by Robert Blobaum (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 177, 182; Alvis, White Eagle, Black Madonna, 193. Porter-Szücs, Faith and Fatherland, 168.

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Catholic Church of the nineteenth century, did not on principle reject democracy as an illegitimate form of power, engaged in a new project of “mak[ing] democracy Christian” and “instil[ing] democratic bodies with respect for divine authority.”190 This new process resulted not only in a stronger ideological link between Catholicism and the nation state, but also in a brand of “clerical nationalism” that was increasingly exclusionary, militant, and omnipresent in the public space.191 The symbol of the cross helped to convey this alliance of “faith and fatherland,” occluding how new these ideological links were and what political agendas stood behind them.192

190 191

192

Ibid., 171–172. Sadkowski, “Clerical Nationalism and Antisemitism”; Porter-Szücs, Faith and Fatherland, 9. Porter-Szücs, Faith and Fatherland, 9.

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3 Female and Furious: The Invention of the “Defense of the Cross”

Janina Kantorowicz was on her way back from a morning church service, when she noticed that the cross was being removed. She ran towards her apartment building and started alerting other women that they needed to do something.1 Janina Drąg was going to the grocer’s to fetch some milk when she saw passers-by and policemen gather around the cross. She went back home, fetched a copy of the Constitution, and quickly made a placard saying “The Polish People’s Republic guarantees its citizens freedom of religion.” She returned to the cross and nailed it onto the wood.2 It was April 27, 1960 – a quiet Wednesday morning in Nowa Huta, Poland’s model socialist city, when a miscalculated attempt by the local authorities to clear a wayside cross triggered a series of events that ended in a day-long riot and a mass demonstration against Communist rule. The Nowa Huta protest that played out around the cross marked a watershed for how the symbol’s significance changed in the aftermath of World War II. In the Second Republic, the borderland crosses epitomized the change that came together with the new Polish state, whereas in postStalinist Nowa Huta it stood for the defense of tradition. Connoting masculine demonstration of power and perseverance in the interwar Polish state, it came to articulate the female voice in post-war socialist Poland. Most importantly, however, the events in Nowa Huta showed how the symbol of the cross transformed, again, into a vehicle of antistructural protest. In this new old role, it returned as a rallying sign – much like in the partition era – used to mobilize dissent against illegitimate power-holders. But it also enabled new scripts of protest, inspiring an entirely novel genre – the defense of the cross.

1

2

Janina Kantorowicz, oral history interview, February 22, 2010, Collection “W imię wolności Nowej Huty ’60.” Archiwum Muzeum Historii Polski, Warszawa / Archive of the Museum of Polish History, Warsaw (henceforth abbreviated AMHP). Cited in Jerzy Ridan, Krzyż Nowohucki: Dzieje walk o wiarę i wolność (Krzeszowice: Dom Wydawniczy Ostoja, 2006), 28–29.

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The Defense of the Cross in Nowa Huta Nowa Huta, the industrial district of Poland’s historic capital Kraków, initially created as a separate city in 1949, was designed as a model socialist metropolis – with modern housing projects, urban infrastructure, and cultural institutions, but without churches.3 What happened in Nowa Huta in 1960 was therefore particularly poignant and shook public opinion within the country and abroad.4 Street riots in defense of a cross symbolized the most spectacular failure of the Communist secularization project in Poland, while providing an inspirational blueprint for how to localize, structure, and sustain anti-systemic protest with the help of religious symbols. The genesis of the confict in Nowa Huta goes back to 1956, when Catholic activists, encouraged by the political thaw, secured permission to build a new church in the district and got assigned a plot of land from the State Treasury.5 In the spring of 1957, in a festive procession, Church authorities planted a cross on the site and began the preliminary groundwork.6 By the time the state apparatus reversed its politics of appeasement towards the Church and launched the new secularization campaign, the “cross square” in Nowa Huta had already been 3

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The district contained a number of old churches that predated the construction of Nowa Huta, having previously served villages that were later incorporated into it, but no new church was built there before 1967, when construction began on the Mary Queen of Poland Church, also known as the Lord’s Arch. Polish media with nationwide circulation did not report on the events in Nowa Huta; only local papers briefly commented on them, condemning the skirmishes as acts of hooliganism. See Anna Kozłowska, “Dwa dni z dziejów PRL: Wydarzenia z kwietnia 1960 roku w Nowej Hucie,” in Stosunki między Państwem a Kościołem Rzymskokatolickim w czasach PRL, edited by Anna Kozłowska, Tadeusz Markiewicz, and Justyna Piasecka (Warsaw: Instytut Historyczny Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 1998), 165–166. The secret police, however, observed that news of the riots spread nationwide via private correspondence and foreign media such as Radio Free Europe and Reuters. See “Notatka informacyjna nr. 9. dot. sprawy krypt. ‘N.H.’ Kraków, 1.05.1960: Do Zastępcy Komendanta Wojewódzkiego MO ds. Bezp.” Karły. Archiwum Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej / Archive of the Institute of National Remembrance (henceforth abbreviated IPN), Kr 010/9467 vol. 8 (9633/II); “Nasłuch Polskiego Radia 30 IV 60.” Karły. IPN, Kr 010/9467 vol. 7, pp. 17–23. The timeline of the Nowa Huta events has been reconstructed almost down to the minute by a number of historians, and we know in a fair amount of detail how the spontaneous intervention in defense of the cross gradually evolved into a violent riot. See Kozłowska, “Dwa dni z dziejów PRL,” 150–165; Jan Franczyk, “W obronie Krzyża: Wypadki nowohuckie – 27 kwietnia 1960 roku,” in Kościół w godzinie próby 1945–1989: Nieznane dokumenty i świadectwa, edited by Tomasz Balon-Mroczka (Kraków: Dom Wydawniczy Rafael, 2006), 215–216; Jan L. Franczyk, Na fundamencie krzyża: Kościół katolicki w Nowej Hucie w latach 1949–1989 (Kraków: Dom Wydawniczy Rafael 2004), 113–117; Ridan, Krzyż Nowohucki, 25–64; Katherine Lebow, Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949–56 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 161–169. Kozłowska, “Dwa dni z dziejów PRL,” 134–135. Franczyk, Na fundamencie krzyża, 92–94; Jadwiga Gierula, oral history interview, February 15, 2010, Collection “W imię wolności Nowej Huty ’60.” AMHP.

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mapped in people’s minds as the future location of the church, with occasional open-air services being held there and a fundraising campaign in full swing.7 Interestingly, however, when the authorities revoked the building permit in 1959, reassigned the plot for the construction of a school, and disbanded the Church Building Committee, it did not provoke any serious outbursts of protest.8 But the mood completely changed once the conflict entered the symbolic realm. When local authorities demanded the removal of the cross from the construction site, and the responsible parish refused to comply, invoking canon law, the atmosphere thickened. On the day before the scheduled removal of the cross a clumsy, hand-painted placard was found in the square, scrawled in black and red ink, bearing a message that the police classified as “incitement to armed struggle.”9 The slogan invoked the 1956 anti-Soviet rising in Hungary and called on the public to mount an “even fiercer resistance.”10 Although the ominous poster, which the police quickly removed from the construction site, portended possible public outcry, the authorities proceeded with their plan of clearing the cross from the square. But when a team of construction workers arrived at the site to collect the cross and transport it back to the parish, alarmed pedestrians and the inhabitants of surrounding houses started to congregate around the cross.11 The secret police records describing the first moments of agitation under the cross are quite rich in ethnographic detail and give us a good picture of the emotions driving the growing crowd. An officer of the Security Service, who was among the first operatives on the ground, recounts the following in his field report: At around 8:50 a.m. several construction workers approached the cross and started, first of all, to remove the fencing around it, and then to dig up the cross itself. Several people halted. Then an elderly woman (about 50 years old) came running [. . .] with some difficulty, screaming “[Y]ou heathens!” and “God will punish you for this!” [. . .] When I came back from the phone booth, I saw women running towards the cross from different directions. On site, I found a sizeable crowd of about 400 persons.12 7

8 9

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Ridan, Krzyż Nowohucki, 14; Wiesław Ciupiński, “Analiza sprawy operacyjnego sprawdzenia krypt. ‘Karły’ Kraków–Nowa Huta, 3.06.1960 r.” IPN, Kr 010/9467 vol. 1 (9633/II). Kozłowska, “Dwa dni z dziejów PRL,” 140–142. “Plan operacyjnych przedsięwzięć do sprawy agenturalnego sprawdzenia krypt. ‘Karły,’ Kraków 6.05.1960.” IPN, Kr 010/9467 vol. 2. The original read as follows: “UWGA! KOMUNŚCI. / BUDJĄ SZKŁĘ TYŚIĄC / LECIE. PANOWIE HYBA / NATO NEPZWOLIMY ŻEBY / NA POŚWIĘNCONYM, / MIEJSCU MIAŁA STAĆ / SZKOŁA BĘDZEMY GOŻEJ / WALCZYĆ JAK WĘGRY Z ROSJĄ.” A possible standardized translation is: “Attention! Communists are building a millenium school. Gentlemen, we will not permit a school to stand on consecrated ground. We will fight even more fiercely than Hungary against Russia.” IPN, Kr 010/9467 vol. 3 (9633/II). “Analiza sprawy operacyjnego sprawdzenia krypt.” Karły. IPN, Kr 010/9467 vol. 1. W. Ciupiński, “Notatka służbowa, Kraków–Nowa Huta 5.05.1960 r.” IPN, Kr 010/9467 vol. 3 (9633/II).

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A report from the District Police Unit, drafted the night following the riots, speaks of women who “verbally abused the workers and attempted to put pressure on them by threatening them with god [sic].”13 Verbal exchanges were soon followed by a direct physical confrontation in which the “excited women [came] out with force against the workers, chasing them away and fixing the cross in its previous position.”14 According to another police report, the “frenzied crowd of mostly women” was “throwing clods of soil at the bulldozer driver, forcing [the operator] to leave the site.”15 Civilian eyewitnesses also confirm that female protesters did not refrain from violence while establishing control over the area of the square around the cross. Stefania Cyganek, a shop assistant in one of the stores surrounding the square, remembers that many women, who were on their way to do the morning shopping, carried milk cans, with which they “pummeled those gentlemen [removing the cross], spilling milk all around.”16 A male participant in the protest recollects that “the broads gave the two workers removing the

Fig. 11. The first moments of the cross defense, photographed by a secret police operative. Source: Archive of the Institute of National Remembrance, Kraków. 13

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“Meldunek specjalny dot. zaistniałych wypadków na terenie Dzielnicy Nowa Huta w dniu 27.IV.1960.” IPN, Kr 010/9467 vol. 8. Wiesław Ciupiński, “Analiza sprawy operacyjnego sprawdzenia krypt. ‘Karły’ Kraków– Nowa Huta, 3.06.1960 r.” IPN, Kr 010/9467 vol. 1 (9633/II). Ciupiński, “Notatka służbowa, Kraków–Nowa Huta 5.05.1960 r.” Stefania Cyganek, oral history interview, February 18, 2010, Collection “W imię wolności Nowej Huty ’60.” AMHP.

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cross such a beating that one of them had to run and hide in a cellar, or else they would have killed him.”17 Women gathering around the cross quickly mobilized others. The news of the attempted cross removal spread to grocery stores, where women waiting in the line could be mobilized to join the protest.18 Some shops closed on that day because the entire female staff left to participate in the cross defense.19 Women mobilized their networks not only to sustain the protest, but also to push their agenda more efficiently. Sylwestra Korfel, a factory worker, took the initiative of telephoning the Office of Denominational Affairs in Warsaw to file a direct complaint. A female postal clerk made sure the protesters were connected to Warsaw within five minutes. And, although the call does not seem to have had any concrete impact on events – the Warsaw authorities insisted that the cross removal had been planned in consultation with the Episcopate – it gave the women a sense of agency and empowerment.20 As soon as the construction workers had withdrawn from the site and the first group of defenders had secured the cross, the lengthy phase of “symbolic occupation” began. But, although the picket around the cross drew on religious aesthetics and performative modes (displays of religious icons, singing of religious hymns), the political character of the gathering was evident. Eyewitnesses recall cries such as “Down with Communism!,”21 “The cross is the symbol of the nation!,”22 “We want freedom!,” and “Down with the people’s police!”23 from the picketing protesters, who also placed two further posters with political demands on the cross. By now, the secret police had a number of plainclothes operational officers and photographers on the ground.24 “In spite of the fact that the cross removal had been aborted,” reports one of them, “a group of about 300 zealots gathered [. . .] hanging various pictures on the cross, singing religious songs, and 17

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Franciszek Kędzior, oral history interview, October 16, 2010, Collection “W imię wolności Nowej Huty ’60.” AMHP. Janina Kantorowicz, oral history interview, February 22, 2010, Collection “W imię wolności Nowej Huty ’60.” AMHP. Stanisław Delikat, “Notatka służbowa, Kraków, dnia 5 maja 1960 r.” IPN, Kr 010/9467 vol. 1. Sylwestra Korfel, oral history interview, February 15, 2010, Collection “W imię wolności Nowej Huty ’60.” AMHP. Stefania Cyganek, cited in Ridan, Krzyż Nowohucki, 32. Mieczysław Dyszy, cited in Ridan, Krzyż Nowohucki, 27. Wiktor Grzelec, “Notatka służbowa, Kraków 29.04.1960 r.” IPN, Kr 010/9467 vol. 4 (9633/II), 82. According to the estimates of various operational officers, at around noon the crowd of protesters numbered between 300 (“Informacja, Kraków dnia 10 maja 1960 r.” IPN, Kr 010/9467 vol. 7) and 1,000 persons (Ciupiński, “Notatka służbowa, Kraków–Nowa Huta 5.05.1960 r.”) Two platoons of armed riot police were stationed 300 meters from the demonstration site at 10:40 a.m. See Kozłowska, “Dwa dni z dziejów PRL,” 150.

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Fig. 12. Women carrying potted plants to decorate the cross with. Source: Archive of the Institute of National Remembrance, Kraków.

lighting candles.”25 Some reports also mention children participating, for example by pinning “devotional pictures” onto the cross.26 Several sources note that money was collected and that picketers threw banknotes into the fenced area around the cross.27 While the gesture was likely motivated by a will to financially support the now thwarted construction of the church, the fact 25

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“Informacja, Kraków dnia 10 maja 1960 r.” See also E. Muszyński, “Raport z wykonania zadania w dniu 27.04.1960 r. na placu budowy szkoły k/Teatru w Nowej Hucie, Kraków– Nowa Huta, 5.05.1960.” IPN, Kr 010/9467 vol. 3. Ciupiński, “Notatka służbowa, Kraków–Nowa Huta 5.05.1960 r.” Janina Kantorowicz, oral history interview, February 22, 2010, Collection “W imię wolności Nowej Huty ’60.” AMHP; Mieczysław Kotyna, “Notatka służbowa, 3.05.1960 r.” IPN, Kr 010/ 9467 vol. 4 (9633/II); Ciupiński, “Notatka służbowa, Kraków–Nowa Huta 5.05.1960 r.”

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that protesters threw money directly onto the ground around the cross suggests a ritual dimension too. In fact, one of the eyewitnesses explains this action as “making a sacrifice to the cross.”28 The seemingly extraneous devotional practices, such as decorating the site, had a deep symbolic significance. By adorning the contested space, the women were replicating traditional female routines inside a Catholic church, where they would typically be responsible for maintenance. By performing these ritual gestures and thus creating a religious soundscape at the site of the cross defense, they recoded the character of the space from profane (prospective school construction site) to sacred (a shrinelike space of religious devotions). This created a protective symbolic buffer zone around the cross and, at the same time, enabled the protesters to defy the spatial order imposed by the Communist authorities. In bringing vividly colored religious icons from their homes and suspending them from the cross, the women were also domesticating an industrial and secular space with the homey aesthetics of folk religiosity and thus challenging the plain and austere socialist design of Nowa Huta. Small devotional objects such as framed icons and rosaries, fixed to the contentious cross, were a means of externalizing private, home-based religious practices into the public space, which was normally ruled by secular and functional principles.29 In this spatial configuration, however, the cross was more than just a religious emblem. It also came to serve as a site of communication. Protesters attached a poster demanding freedom of religion directly to the cross, using the symbol to amplify a purely political demand.30 The canvas of the cross provided a safe space where even a political demand was less likely to be removed, and gave it an additional aura of legitimacy. Perhaps paradoxically, the cross sanctioned (and was sanctioned by) a piece of legislation from the socialist state. 28

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In the Polish original: “Taką ofiarę robią temu krzyżu.” Kazimiera Mroczek-Popławska, oral history interview, March 10, 2010, Collection “W imię wolności Nowej Huty ’60.” AMHP. For more on the aesthetics of folk religiosity in Polish homes, see the monumental project of the Polish photographer Zofia Rydet (1911–1997), who photographed thousands of private Polish homes and their inhabitants between 1978 and 1990: Zofia Rydet, Zapis socjologiczny (Gliwice: Muzeum w Gliwicach, 2016). Police sources quote several different versions of the slogan, including “Katolicy, brońmy wolności sumienia i wyznania” (“Catholics, let’s defend freedom of faith and denomination”) and “Katolicy, chcemy wolności sumienia i wyznania” (“Catholics, we want freedom of faith and denomination”), as well as “Chcemy Boga – katolicy Nowej Huty” (“We want God – the Catholics of Nowa Huta”). See Ciupiński, “Notatka służbowa, Kraków–Nowa Huta 5.05.1960 r.”; “Plan operacyjnych przedsięwzięć do sprawy agenturalnego sprawdzenia krypt. ‘Karły,’ 6.05.1960, Nowa Huta.” IPN, Kr 010/9467 vol. 1 (9633/II); Ciupiński, “Analiza sprawy operacyjnego sprawdzenia krypt. ‘Karły,’ Kraków–Nowa Huta, 3.06.1960 r.” Ridan suggests two different posters were attached to the cross, Krzyż Nowohucki, 29–30.

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It is remarkable that even the most risky stages of the cross defense in Nowa Huta, including its physical recapture and the hanging of the poster, were performed by women. Some female protesters recount that this was a conscious strategy of “shielding men, so that they d[id] not get into trouble at work,” adopted after it had become clear that the secret police were photographing the events.31 There is also evidence, however, that male observers on both sides of the demonstration considered the genre of protest they were witnessing to be essentially female and derided it as such. One male passerby recollects that the women standing under the cross “plastered with those holy pictures, pins, rosaries, and flowers” and singing a single church hymn over and over again “made him laugh.”32 The riot police, calling on the women to disperse, also subjected them to gendered ridicule, reportedly shouting: “Go home, you zealous hens, back to your children! Go cook them some dinner!”33 Yet the female protesters clearly did not just stand in for men out of concern for their safety, but also took the initiative for themselves. They were involved in inciting and even enacting physical violence. According to police reports, women encouraged the crowd to attack officers: “You bandits, you loafers! You didn’t feel like working, so you joined the police,” quotes one field report by an operational officer. “Let’s stone these Hitlerites, or tie a sack on their heads and drown them in the Vistula!”34 In a letter intercepted by the secret police, one woman shares: “I took part in it and I even ended up beating up a guy. I was walking down the street when I saw a motorcyclist dashing by and the crowd yelled, ‘Beat him!’ [. . .] [T]he riots were something beautiful, because even though it is supposedly a socialist city, the government is lying and people were right to start fighting.”35 Even though street riots broke out only in the afternoon, with the crowd checking all passing vehicles in search of plainclothes policemen, the morning hours of the “symbolic occupation” of the site of the cross were not entirely free of violence either.36 As women began to establish a regular picket in front of the cross, several male officials arrived on site in an attempt to dissuade them. According to police reports, three such envoys were

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Sylwestra Korfel, oral history interview, February 15, 2010, Collection “W imię wolności Nowej Huty ’60.” AMHP. Piotr Szadkowski, oral history interview, April 13, 2010, Collection “W imię wolności Nowej Huty ’60.” AMHP. Ridan, Krzyż Nowohucki, 39. Mieczysław Bociek, “Notatka służbowa 3.05.1960.” Karły. IPN, Kr 010/9467 vol. 4 (9633/II). “Notatka Informacyjna nr. 9. dot. sprawy krypt. ‘N.H.’ Kraków, 1.05.1960. Do Zastępcy Komendanta Wojewódzkiego MO ds. Bezp.” Mieczysław Zborowski, “Notatka służbowa, Kraków dnia 28 IV 1960.” IPN, Kr 010/9467 vol. 3 (9633/II).

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Fig. 13. Women pursuing and threatening a state official at the site of the cross defense. Source: Archive of the Institute of National Remembrance, Kraków.

assaulted by protesters.37 “Women took the lead in the pursuit of the chosen victims,” writes one operational officer. “They incited the beatings and attacked themselves, using their handbags and other objects they carried with them.”38 Female weapons also included pocket mirrors, which protesters used to blind the riot police with reflected sunlight.39 Numerous police documents note that “women were behaving aggressively, defiantly, and provocatively.”40 Even the local priest, in a history of the events he penned nearly three decades later, reminisced that “women were constantly on guard, armed with saucepans and pokers to counter every attempt at removing the cross.” “The more vehement among them,” he continued, “would throw potted plants and 37

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One of the officials is identified as “Comrade C.” from the Steelworks Industrial Construction Company (Przedsiębiorstwo Przemysłowe Budowy Huty im. Lenina), the other as an engineer from the Municipal Construction Company. The third man remains unidentified. See Muszyński, “Raport z wykonania zadania w dniu 27.04.1960 r. na placu budowy szkoły k/Teatru w Nowej Hucie, Kraków–Nowa Huta, 5.05.1960.” Ciupiński, “Notatka służbowa, Kraków–Nowa Huta 5.05.1960 r.” Komendant Milicji Obywatelskiej Województwa Krakowskiego, “Sprawozdanie [date illegible], Komenda Rejonowa Policji Kraków Wschód, Materiały operacyjne dot. wypadków w dniu 27.04.1960 przy usuwaniu krzyża na terenie Nowej Huty.” IPN, Kr 619/7. Zborowski, “Notatka służbowa, Kraków dnia 28 IV 1960.”

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pots filled with water from their windows.”41 This was clearly a surprise to the force. In the report written by Kraków’s police chief we even find the self-critical remark that “the aggressive mood among the women was underestimated.”42 But if women sometimes took the initiative in using physical violence against those perceived as a direct threat to their agenda, they also policed themselves and attempted to de-escalate the conflict when needed. They would escort aggressive male protesters out of the crowd and admonish teenagers who joined the protest in the afternoon.43 Additionally, women reacted to police commands with greater obedience than men. When, in the evening, policemen called on the protesters around the cross to disperse, “the majority of the women compl[ied] and le[ft] the site,” notes the police chief’s report.44 Only a dozen women remained on site and consequently faced detention. Women also developed ingenious strategies for warning each other about potential trouble and avoiding arrest. Celina Bogacz, who was training to become a nurse at the time and was among the most active protesters in the first phase of the defense, recounts: Around half past one a woman came up to me and said, “You need to get out of here, child.” She had eavesdropped on a conversation between two men who had been saying they needed to “remove that student in the red coat.” And I was wearing a red coat. So the women surrounded me and I squatted on the ground. One of them took off a dark coat she was wearing and I put it on, on top of my red one. They accompanied me to the sidewalk, where there was a woman with a pram. She gave me her pram and the women escorted me to my house.45

As long as women made up the majority of the protesters and were in control of the forms and strategies of protest around the cross, the picket remained relatively peaceful. Soon, however, as more workers left the factories after their 41

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Józef Gorzelany, Gdy nadszedł czas budowy Arki: Dzieje budowy kościoła w Nowej Hucie (Paris: Éditions du Dialogue, 1988), 65, 68. For eyewitness reports about female brutality, see Ridan, Krzyż Nowohucki, 58. Komendant Milicji Obywatelskiej Województwa Krakowskiego, “Sprawozdanie [date illegible], Komenda Rejonowa Policji Kraków Wschód, Materiały operacyjne dot. wypadków w dniu 27.04.1960 przy usuwaniu krzyża na terenie Nowej Huty.” Ciupiński, “Notatka służbowa, Kraków–Nowa Huta 5.05.1960 r.”; Muszyński, “Raport z wykonania zadania w dniu 27.04.1960 r. na placu budowy szkoły k/Teatru w Nowej Hucie, Kraków–Nowa Huta, 5.05.1960.” Komendant Milicji Obywatelskiej Województwa Krakowskiego, “Sprawozdanie [date illegible], Komenda Rejonowa Policji Kraków Wschód, Materiały operacyjne dot. wypadków w dniu 27.04.1960 przy usuwaniu krzyża na terenie Nowej Huty.” Celina Bogacz, oral history interview, February 17, 2010, Collection “W imię wolności Nowej Huty ’60.” AMHP.

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Fig. 14. Women with children at the site of the cross defense, photographed by a secret police operative. Archive of the Institute of National Remembrance, Kraków.

shift’s end, the events in Nowa Huta slowly evolved into street riots of a magnitude the local police were unable to control. According to police accounts, “hostile cries against the People’s Police and the local authorities” went up from the crowd, which also sang the national anthem.46 The first stones fell on police cars, and protesters began to stop passing vehicles in order to search them for plainclothes operatives.47 By evening hours, there were an estimated 6,000 people in the streets of Nowa Huta, gathering not only next to the cross, but also in the central square (Plac Centralny) and in front of the National Soviet (Rada 46 47

Ibid. Zborowski, “Notatka służbowa, Kraków dnia 28 IV 1960.”

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Narodowa).48 Over 400 policemen were mobilized, but failed to keep the situation under control, although they used water cannons, tear gas, and even sharp bullets.49 By the evening hours the riots resembled urban guerilla fights: civilians dispersed by batons and water cannons hid in passageways and apartment buildings as well as on rooftops, attacking riot police with stones and bricks.50 The rioters vandalized the National Soviet building, setting records on fire and breaking windows. The mob also set a police officer on fire, with the victim suffering some injuries, though he survived the attack.51 It was only late at night that the military started patrolling the area, securing key buildings such as the seat of the Communist Party, the police headquarters, and the Lenin Steelworks.52 Police estimated the material damage that took place in the run of the protests at half a million złoty.53 Nearly forty buildings in Nowa Huta, mostly shops, had been vandalized.54 Eighty-one policemen were reported wounded.55 Civilian casualties are difficult to estimate, but police sources mention six civilians who suffered bullet wounds, seven hospitalized victims, and fourteen demonstrators, including four women and a girl, treated in emergency wards.56 There is also one report of a female detainee miscarrying

48 49 50

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Ibid., 52. Ibid., 53–54. Mieczysław Zborowski, “Zestaw wypadków z terenu Nowej Huty, opartych na podstawie radiostacji Wydziału [illegible] 27.04.1960.” IPN, Kr 010/9467 vol. 3 (9633/II), 398. Komendant Milicji Obywatelskiej Województwa Krakowskiego, “Sprawozdanie [date illegible], Komenda Rejonowa Policji Kraków Wschód, Materiały operacyjne dot. wypadków w dniu 27.04.1960 przy usuwaniu krzyża na terenie Nowej Huty,” 55. The incident is also noted by Antoni Dudek and Tomasz Marszałkowski, Walki uliczne w PRL 1956–1989 (Kraków: Geo, 1999), 102 and Teodor Gąsiorowski, “Walki o nowohucki krzyż w kwietniu 1960 r. w dokumentach Urzędu Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego przechowywanych w archiwum Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej w Krakowie,” in Nowa Huta – Miasto walki i pracy, edited by Ryszard Terlecki, Marek Lasota, and Jarosław Szarek (Kraków: IPN, 2002), 21. Komendant Milicji Obywatelskiej Województwa Krakowskiego, “Sprawozdanie [date illegible], Komenda Rejonowa Policji Kraków Wschód, Materiały operacyjne dot. wypadków w dniu 27.04.1960 przy usuwaniu krzyża na terenie Nowej Huty,” 60. Ciupiński, “Analiza sprawy operacyjnego sprawdzenia krypt. ‘Karły,’ Kraków–Nowa Huta, 3.06.1960 r.,” 53. Wiesław Ciupiński, “Wielkość strat, 11.05.1960.” Karły. IPN, Kr 010/9467 vol. 1 (9633/II). Bolesław Wejner, “Informacja o zajściach w Nowej Hucie, z dnia 3 maja 1960.” IPN, Kr 010/9467 vol. 7, 83. Komendant Milicji Obywatelskiej Województwa Krakowskiego, “Sprawozdanie [date illegible], Komenda Rejonowa Policji Kraków Wschód, Materiały operacyjne dot. wypadków w dniu 27.04.1960 przy usuwaniu krzyża na terenie Nowej Huty.”; “Wykaz osób cywilnych korzystających z pomocy lekarskiej pogotowia ratunkowego w Nowej Hucie w dniu 27.04.1960.” Komenda Rejonowa Policji Kraków Wschód, Materiały

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her pregnancy.57 Many more protesters, however, must have been exposed to police brutality. The anti-riot units, according to their own reports, used 1,630 canisters of tear gas58 and 140 sharp bullets.59 Nearly 400 civilians were temporarily detained in the aftermath of the riots, including 338 men, 36 women, and 24 boys.60 Among the 113 people who eventually faced arrest there were, however, just 5 women.61 As a result of the riots, the state security forces tightened their control over the city. Nationwide media did not report on the events, but the local press condemned the “regrettable occurrences” provoked by “a few primitive, fanatical women” joined by “authentic hooligans” who “gave in to thoughtless vandalism.”62 The events also left a strong impression on Nowa Huta. The authorities tried to contain the situation by staging “spontaneous” demonstrations in support of the police on May 1. At the same time, it was evident even from official reports that the atmosphere in Nowa Huta was still defiant. Police informants reported on construction workers who refused to fence in the school construction site and local inhabitants who declined to decorate their houses or shop windows with flags for May Day.63 Again, women were reported to be active instigators of such behavior.64 The cross remained in its position, but the square was now visibly marked as the prospective location of a “millennium school.”65 Polish national flags and red banners appeared on the fence, alongside the motto “Long live the First of

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operacyjne dot. wypadków w dniu 27.04.1960 przy usuwaniu krzyża na terenie Nowej Huty. IPN, Kr 619/7, 134. “Telefonogram nrm. 1464/60 do v/ce dyr. gabinetu ministra spraw wewnętrznych w Warszawie, Meldunek sytuacyjny nr. 4, nadano 29.04.60 godz. 0:22, ppłk Wejner.” Karły. IPN, Kr 010/9467 vol. 8 (9633/II), 89. Komendant Milicji Obywatelskiej Województwa Krakowskiego, “Sprawozdanie [date illegible], Komenda Rejonowa Policji Kraków Wschód, Materiały operacyjne dot. wypadków w dniu 27.04.1960 przy usuwaniu krzyża na terenie Nowej Huty,” 72. On the basis of individual reports of policemen participating in dispersing the riots, Anna Kozłowska estimates the number of sharp bullets fired at 140. See Kozłowska, “Dwa dni z dziejów PRL,” 162. “Informacja, Kraków dnia 10 maja 1960 r.,” 7. Wejner, “Informacja o zajściach w Nowej Hucie, z dnia 3 maja 1960,” 62. “Po wypadkach w Nowej Hucie,” Echo Krakowa, April 30, 1960, 2. “Do v-ce dyrektora gabinetu ministra msw w / warszawie, nadano godz. 19.20, 29.4.1960.” Karły. IPN, Kr 010/9467 vol. 8 (9633/II), 69; “Notatka obrazująca sytuację na terenie Kombinatu Huty im. Lenina i w mieście Nowa Huta, 29.04.1960.” Karły. IPN, Kr 010/ 9467 vol. 4 (9633/II), 17. “Notatka obrazująca sytuację na terenie Kombinatu Huty im. Lenina i w mieście Nowa Huta, 29.04.1960,” 17. So-called millenium schools (tysiąclatki) were erected as part of a governmental program to construct 1,000 new schools in commemoration of the 1,000th anniversary of Polish statehood, which was officially celebrated in 1966.

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May!”66 Cleaning squads removed broken glass and debris from the streets. Nowa Huta prepared for the May Day festivities. In the information vacuum that followed the riots, with the national media remaining silent on the events and the Church wary of taking a public stance, rumors, exaggerated casualty reports, and even conspiracy theories began to circulate among Cracovians. One day police arrested a thirty-nine-year-old man who had attracted a crowd at a marketplace in Kraków with shouts that the police had killed his wife and child during the riots.67 A suggestion also circulated among the Nowa Huta protesters that Jews may have been behind the withdrawal of the building permit for the church. Referring to Bolesław Drobner, First Secretary of the Provincial Committee of the PZPR (the ruling Polish United Workers’ Party) in Kraków (1956–1957), who had initiated renovation work on the fifteenth-century synagogue in the district of Kazimierz, one member of the public reportedly remarked: “Drobner has restored the synagogue, but for the construction of the church – there are no funds!”68 The emergence of the Jewish trope in this context might have been directly triggered by the fact that, on the day of the unrest in Nowa Huta, the local daily ran a large article about the newly opened Jewish museum in Kraków.69 The idea that Jews pulled the strings within the socialist power apparatus to the detriment of Catholics, however, drew on the old antisemitic cliché of Judeo-Communism. In the days following the protest, local authorities also received a number of anonymous letters from indignant local residents. The National Soviet in Nowa Huta received an unsigned letter, adorned with a large black cross on the envelope, informing the authorities that they had “made enemies among [their] previous supporters” and stating that the next revolt “could be tragic.”70 Similarly, a postcard signed by a “rank and file citizen” (szary obywatel) was sent to the headquarters of the Communist Party in Kraków, demanding that the authorities be held

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Zborowski, “Zestaw wypadków z terenu Nowej Huty, opartych na podstawie radiostacji Wydziału [illegible] 27.04.1960,” 402. Komendant Milicji Obywatelskiej Województwa Krakowskiego, “Sprawozdanie [date illegible], Komenda Rejonowa Policji Kraków Wschód, Materiały operacyjne dot. wypadków w dniu 27.04.1960 przy usuwaniu krzyża na terenie Nowej Huty,” 65. Stefan Mazuga, “Notatka służbowa z Nowej Huty z dnia 27 IV 1960 r.” IPN, Kr 010/9467 vol. 8, 43. There were also voices among the eyewitnesses who accused one, allegedly Jewish, state attorney of dealing with the riot’s participants with particular brutality. See Franciszek Kędzior, oral history interview, October 16, 2010, Collection “W imię wolności Nowej Huty ’60.” AMHP. The Judaica Collection of the National Museum in Kraków was opened in the freshly renovated Old Synagogue in April 1959. See “Powiększa się zbiór eksponatów Muzeum Historii Żydów w Krakowie,” Echo Krakowa, April 27, 1960, 2. Anonymous letter. Karły. IPN, Kr 010/9467 vol. 4 (9633/II), 325–326.

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accountable for the death of “11 women killed by riot police” and numerous casualties among children.71 Rumors of deaths among the Nowa Huta protesters persisted for decades after the riots and eventually became part of the memorial culture around the event.72 An underground opposition periodical from 1980 featured an article about the Nowa Huta cross defense on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary, stating that “many civilians were wounded and there were also deaths.”73 The rumors also made their way into a song about the cross defenders penned by local artist and opposition activist Adam Macedoński: In the defense of the cross, people of Nowa Huta risked their lives. Against police batons, bullets, and grenades, they held to their love of God and Polish song. They won the battle, those fearless daredevils, though so many died from truncheons and bullets. Yet, thanks to them, even God’s greatest foe, will never again raise his hand against the Polish cross.74

While facts merged with myths into a popular narrative of the events in Nowa Huta, one major issue that the authorities, eyewitnesses, and, later, historians struggled to make sense of was the participation of women in the protests.

The Symbolic Insurrection The outburst of discontent in Nowa Huta, with the intensely religious aesthetics of this protest, was remarkable because it played out against the backdrop of the model socialist city. Some of its dynamics, however, can be traced back to the political upheavals that directly preceded it and the nationwide developments in the role religion came to play in the aftermath of World War II. 71

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Postcard addressed to the Regional Seat of the Communist Party in Kraków (Komitet Wojewódzki PZPR), IPN, Kr 010/9467 vol. 8. We find references to fatal casualties, for example, in the memoirs of Mieczysław Satora’s successor as the local priest in Nowa Huta in the years 1965–1985. See Józef Gorzelany, Gdy nadszedł czas budowy Arki, 69. Some historians writing in later publications also suggest there were fatalities, but they do not present any proof of that: Gąsiorowski, “Walki o nowohucki krzyż,” 21; Franczyk, Na fundamencie krzyża, 118; Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 167. Jan L. Franczyk “20 rocznica obrony krzyża w Nowej Hucie,” Krzyż Nowohucki 2 (1980): 20. FSO, GP 262. In the original: “W obronie krzyża, mieszkańcy Nowej Huty, / W obronie krzyża, narażali życie swe, / Na pałki, kule, granaty milicji, / Swą miłość Boga mieli i swój wolny polski śpiew, / I zwyciężyli odważni szaleńcy, choć tak wielu zginęło od pałek i od kul, / Lecz dzięki nim już nigdy, nigdy więcej / Nie zniszczy krzyża w Polsce nawet najpodlejszy krzyża wróg.” Adam Macedoński, oral history interview, March 25, 2010, Collection “W imię wolności Nowej Huty ’60.” AMHP.

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In June 1956, massive workers’ demonstrations ended in bloodily suppressed riots in Poznań. Although dire working conditions and low wages provided the direct trigger for the protests, just as had been the case in the GDR (East Germany) three years earlier, they soon took on a clearly political dimension. Inspiring a wave of further manifestations and social activism nationwide, the Poznań events were the first massive challenge to the social and political system in post-1945 Poland.75 This “Polish Revolution,” as it was labeled by contemporaries, eventually led to a change of power at the highest level of the party, but was also the catalyst for an outburst of symbolic discontent that swept across the country. Given that Soviet military predominance largely deterred mass-scale resistance, anti-Soviet sentiment found its outlet in iconoclastic gestures. Symbols of the Soviet presence in Poland – such as red flags or five-pointed Soviet stars – were removed from factory buildings, Soviet monuments destroyed, and street signs bearing Stalin’s name torn down.76 The year 1956 marked a “symbolic insurrection” that became a reference point for later upheavals and provided templates for mass manifestations of discontent against the socialist power holders in Poland.77 In the years to come, displays of Catholic symbols in the public space continued to convey a subtly nonconformist stance vis-à-vis the socialist state. Much of the symbolic dissent during the revolt of 1956 took place in the realm of popular devotion, with the symbol of the cross again playing a central role. Crosses were hung in public places, especially schools, accompanied by demands for the return of religious education classes to school curricula. In many places, protesters would replace portraits of officials with crucifixes. While in a high school in Poznań students trampled portraits of Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz, in a school in the village of Zalewo, in northern Poland, a photograph of Defense Minister General Konstanty Rokossowski was taken down to make room for a cross.78 In some locales the symbolic revolution went further, with pupils intoning collective prayers or greeting their teachers with Catholic formulae. There were also cases of atheist teachers being openly challenged or even mobbed.79 In employing religious symbols in this first major manifestation of discontent towards the socialist power holders in Poland, the Poznań protesters responded to the secularization measures that the state had introduced over the previous decade. But secularization was definitely not of main concern to the workers. The role of the Catholic Church in Poland, and the place of religious devotion in public life changed after 1945. These changes, however, were slow and, in comparison with the policies in the Soviet Union, rather benign. In fact, in the 75 76 77 78 79

Paweł Machcewicz, Polski rok 1956 (Warsaw: Mówią Wieki, 1993), 237. Ibid., 175. Ibid., 174. Ibid., 175, 177. Ibid., 177.

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immediate aftermath of the war, the position of Poland’s Communist authorities was not entirely adversarial towards the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church was considered instrumental both to the project of Polonizing the former German territories annexed to Poland in 1945 and in granting legitimacy to the new state in what was a turbulent transition phase.80 Michael Fleming goes so far as to state that, in this early postwar period, the Church was the Party’s “most useful Polish ally.”81 The Polish Catholic Church enjoyed concessions that secured its relatively privileged position: it took over nearly 3,000 church buildings belonging to German churches in the west and north of the country, military ministry was instituted in the Polish Army, private Catholic schools and the Catholic University in Lublin were retained, religious education classes became obligatory in all public schools, and Church possessions were excluded from land reform.82 Special church services were held to celebrate the election of the first Communist president, Bolesław Bierut in 1947.83 When he was sworn into office, Bierut finished his oath with the words “so help me God.”84 In these early postwar years, religious symbols would be displayed even at the May Day parades.85 The presence of the Church in the public sphere thus remained very strong, although it was periodically challenged, such as by a series of measures to secularize public schools undertaken after 1948 and 1958. The position of the Church was also bolstered by the renaissance of folk religiosity and popular devotions that followed the years of wartime anxiety.86 Especially in rural areas, an increased craving for spirituality manifested itself in an “epidemic of miracles.” Alleged images of the Virgin Mary appearing on walls or stains of blood surfacing on wayside crosses would lead to spontaneous gatherings of thousands of pilgrims.87 Such practices would only intensify after, in late 1948, the Communist authorities initiated the project of collectivization and launched their first attempts at a secularization campaign. In Chełmek, near Oświęcim, for instance, protesters maintained that an image of the Virgin Mary 80 81

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Włodzimierz Borodziej, Geschichte Polens im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: Beck, 2010), 285. Michael Fleming, Communism, Nationalism and Ethnicity in Poland 1944–50 (London: Routledge, 2010), 124. See also Marcin Zaremba, Wielka trwoga: Polska 1944–1947 (Kraków: Znak, 2012), 501. Fleming, Communism, Nationalism and Ethnicity, 104; Hanna Konopka, Religia w szkołach Polski Ludowej: Sprawa nauczania religii w polityce państwa (1944–1961) (Białystok: Dział Wydawnictw Filii UW w Białymstoku, 1995), 23. Antoni Dudek and Ryszard Gryz, Komuniści i Kościół w Polsce (1945–1989) (Kraków: Znak, 2003), 13, 25. Konopka, Religia w szkołach Polski Ludowej, 27. Zaremba, Wielka trwoga, 493. Ibid., 492–500. Romuald Turkowski, “Władza komunistyczna wobec przejawów religijności w Polsce u schyłku lat 40-tych XX wieku,” in Propaganda antykościelna w Polsce w latach 1945– 1978, edited by Stanisław Dąbrowski and Barbara Rogowska (Wrocław: Oficyna Wydawnicza Arboretum, 2001), 89; Fleming, Communism, Nationalism and Ethnicity, 114.

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had appeared on the window of a school after crosses had been removed from it.88 A similar “miracle” allegedly occurred in Szopienice, where an image of the Virgin was reported to have appeared on the very wall where a removed crucifix used to hang.89 In 1956 rumors of the “miracle of Olsztyn” caused great excitement across the country. A female member of the socialist youth association who had allegedly removed a crucifix from the wall and started dancing with it during a party was reported to have become petrified in punishment.90 Because of the uncontrollable character of the gatherings that such occurrences triggered, the authorities were particularly attentive to them. And, since alleged miracles of this kind could easily be denounced as “intellectual primitivism,” they lent themselves especially well to illustrating the actual need for secularization.91 Although an agreement concluded between the Polish government and the Episcopate in 1950 regulated relations between Church officials and the authorities, obliging the former to loyalty towards the socialist state, and guaranteeing freedom of religious observation, the conflict of interests between the two would become more and more pronounced in the decade to come. After the Constitution of 1952 was passed, and church and state became formally separated, the authorities took more decisive measures towards secularization. Religious symbols were gradually removed from classrooms and collective prayers opening and ending the school day were banned. By 1955, over 80 percent of primary schools nationwide had ceased to offer religious education classes.92 These changes, which led to some local protests,93 signaled that, in the long term, the Communist state would try to limit the influence the Catholic Church exerted over postwar Polish society and that the symbolic realm would emerge as a crucial frontline in this battle. One such symbolic clash concerned a major jubilee – the 1,000th anniversary of the Baptism of Poland in 966, traditioanally considered to be the beginning of Polish statehood – which both the Catholic Church and the state authorities hoped to capitalize on.94 The battle for the contested anniversary took place very 88

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Jan Szczepaniak, “Akcja dekrucyfikacyjna (wrzesień 1958 r.) w świetle meldunków krakowskiej służby bezpieczeństwa,” in Nie ma wolności bez pamięci: Księga jubileuszowa dedykowana Profesorowi Ryszardowi Terleckiemu, edited by Włodzimierz Bernacki, Zbigniew Nawrocki, Wit Pasierbek, and Zbigniew Wójcik (Kraków: Wydawnictwo WAM, 2009), 796. Włodzimierz Ważniewski, Państwo laickie: Polityka ograniczania bazy materialnej Kościoła katolickiego w Polsce przez władze komunistyczne w latach 1945–1970 (Warsaw: Aspra, 2015), 119–120. Machcewicz, Polski rok 1956, 62–63. See, for example, Barbara Zawadzka, “Cud, zjawisko społeczne,” Polityka 46 (1959): 3. Konopka, Religia w szkołach Polski Ludowej, 160–161. Ibid., 54–56. What is commonly understood as the “Baptism of Poland” was the baptism of Mieszko I, the ruler of Polanians, one of the Slavic tribes inhabiting the territory that later became Poland.

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much in the public eye. The Church authorities envisioned a nationwide religious celebration of unprecedented proportions – the so-called Great Novena – which was a nine-year-long series of celebrations initiated in 1957 and centered around a peregrination of the image of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa through every parish of the country.95 The pastoral mobilization of those years had powerful and long-term effects. As Maryjane Osa argues, it generated a range of collective action strategies linking a vision of the Polish nation with the Church and represented an “expressive assertion of collective identity” that facilitated mass mobilization extending into the Solidarity era.96 The convergence of postwar Communist secularization policies with the new outburst of religiosity, rekindled by the Novena celebrations, contributed to the fact that certain religious devotions, including the hanging of crosses in public buildings, and mass pilgrimages, began to acquire a subtly subversive character. For this reason, the protests against the new authorities that began in the second half of the 1950s, and were propelled, in the first place, by economic and political motivations, resorted to the language of religious symbols. Poles discontent with Communist policies used religious emblems as an efficient vehicle to mobilize antistructure and articulate protest against the new political reality. This pattern, which came into view in Poznań, and found its full articulation during the Nowa Huta cross defence, solidified in the postStalinist period into a set of performative practices that were to inspire antiCommunist dissent for decades to come. The political thaw following the Poznań protests of 1956, when the Polish Communist authorities relaxed their grip on freedom of public expression and granted the institution of the Church more autonomy, was relatively short lived. In December 1956, the Communists caved in to the pressure and revoked the secularization measures that the state had launched. Religious education classes were thus reintroduced into public schools and crucifixes reappeared in many public institutions.97 The subject of religion also remained salient in the parliamentary elections of January 1957. During one electoral rally participants confronted the Party candidates, claiming that they could not be considered to represent them if they held the meeting in an assembly hall with no crucifix on the wall.98 95

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The Novena was the brainchild of Primate Stefan Wyszyński, who had been released from a three-year-long internment in the fall of 1956. For an overview of regional festivities included in the Great Novena, see Bartłomiej Noszczak (ed.), Milenium czy Tysiąclecie (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2006). Maryjane Osa, “Creating Solidarity: The Religious Foundations of the Polish Social Movement,” East European Politics and Societies 11, 2 (1997): 339–365, here 363. Dudek and Gryz, Komuniści i Kościół, 107–113; Dominika Jasiak, “Akcja dekrucyfikacyjna w 1958 roku w północno-wschodnich powiatach województwa Krakowskiego w świetle dokumentów,” Zeszyty Naukowe Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego 1 (2014): 149. Machcewicz, Polski rok 1956, 201.

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Soon enough, the crosses in public buildings became the object of secularization measures again. On August 4, 1958, Minister of Education Władysław Bieńkowski passed a decree on the secular character of educational institutions stipulating that religious emblems should be removed from all public schools.99 His directive, which was soon extended to other public spaces, including hospitals, factories, shops, and restaurants, was the catalyst for a nationwide campaign that came to be known as “decrucification.”100 The execution of the new laws met with a number of small protests throughout the country.101 In some areas, groups of protesters, typically women, would gather and attempt to replace removed crucifixes. Such protests were, in a few cases, accompanied by violence against the officials tasked with removing the symbols, and at times had a clearly “anti-systemic character.”102 There was also a notable shift in the rhetoric used by the demonstrators, which came to reflect the specifically Polish brand of “national Communism” that began to take shape under the leadership of First Secretary Władysław Gomułka. Post-1945 Poland was, for the first time in its history, an ethnically homogeneous country. And, as the state began to transition into the “postrevolutionary” phase, ethno-nationalism started slowly creeping back into the official discourse.103 In line with this renewed preoccupation with the nation and the national traditions, anti-decrucification protesters argued that, if most schoolchildren were Catholic, provisions to protect the rights of other denominations and atheists were redundant. During a school picket in Augustów, in north-east Poland, secret police recorded a female protester calling out “No one will touch us, because we are the 80 percent, so if we want to, we will hang crosses and demand religion be taught in school.”104 Some statements made by the cross defenders also had a xenophobic undertone. A teacher in Studzieniczna insisted that Poland “should be proud of having fought against 99 100

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Konopka, Religia w szkołach Polski Ludowej, 216. After 1956 the authorities also adopted a series of other measures designed to limit the social outreach of the Catholic Church. These included censorship of Catholic publications, the lifting of favorable customs tariffs for the Church, and some direct intimidation measures, such as the search for unlicensed publications conducted at the sanctuary in Częstochowa in July 1958. See Dudek and Gryz, Komuniści i Kościół, 133–138. Ważniewski, Państwo laickie; Jan Żaryn, Dzieje Kościoła Katolickiego w Polsce 1944–1989 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Neriton, 2003), 189. Konopka, Religia w szkołach Polski Ludowej, 218. Dudek and Gryz, Komuniści i Kościół; Tomasz Pączek, “Akcja usunięcia krzyży w szkołach w województwie koszalińskim w 1958 r.: Geneza, przebieg, represje,” in Kościół katolicki w realiach władzy komunistycznej na Pomorzu Środkowym w latach 1945–1989, edited by Tadeusz Ceynowa and Paweł Knap (Szczecin: IPN, 2011), 103–115; Szczepaniak, “Akcja dekrucyfikacyjna.” Padraic Kenney, “The Gender of Resistance in Communist Poland,” The American Historical Review 104, 2 (1999), 405. Krzysztof Sychowicz, “Okólnik nr 26 Ministerstwa Oświaty z 4 sierpnia 1958 roku i jego realizacja w powiecie augustowskim, sejneńskim i suwalskim,” Rocznik AugustowskoSuwalski 10 (2010): np. Available at www.astn.pl/r2010.htm (accessed March 5, 2018).

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the heretics,”105 while pupils participating in a school strike in Wojnicz, near Tarnów, declared that they would not take classes in a place that resembled “a synagogue, not a school.”106 The reference to Judaism is notable in this context as it points to the antisemitic cliché, circulated widely in postwar Poland, that it was Jews who were responsible for installing Communism in the country and, by the same token, were to blame for the secularization reforms.107 It would be inaccurate to say that resistance to the “decrucification” directive took place on a mass scale – out of circa 26,000 schools nationwide, crosses were replaced in just 600 and larger demonstrations took place in just 33 cases.108 As a consequence of the clashes, over a thousand people were fined, 32 protesters were arrested and anti-riot militia units (ZOMO) intervened 41 times.109 Yet the events of 1958 were significant for a number of reasons. Firstly, they paved the way for a genre of protest that would gain great popularity over the following decades and bear an unmistakably Polish signature – the “defense of the cross.” Secondly, they mobilized parts of Polish society that had previously been less likely to participate in acts of open dissent against the Communist state – a predominantly nonurban and female demographic. Thirdly, they drew on a whole array of new and creative strategies for expressing nonconformism that have until now received little attention in the study of anti-Communist opposition. Although both decrucification and the Nowa Huta riot have certainly attracted a lot of attention in post-1989 historiography, one aspect has largely escaped historians.110 Unlike the iconic workers’ protests – the riots in Poznań 105 106 107

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Sychowicz, “Okólnik nr 26 Ministerstwa Oświaty,” np. Szczepaniak, “Akcja dekrucyfikacyjna,” 791. On the myth of Judeo-Communism in Poland, see Paweł Śpiewak, Żydokomuna: Interpretacje historyczne (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Czerwone i Czarne, 2012), 187–214; Bożena Keff, Antysemityzm: Niezamknięta historia (Warsaw: Czarna Owca, 2013), 203– 205; Anna Zawadzka (dir.), Żydokomuna (DVD, 2010); Anna Zawadzka, “Żydokomuna: The Construction of the Insult,” in World War II and Two Occupations: Dilemmas of Polish Memory, edited by Anna Wolff-Powęska and Piotr Forecki (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2016), 249–280. A fascinating case study of the impact this myth had on post-1945 anti-Jewish violence and a critical deconstruction of the myth itself is provided by Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Pod klątwą: Społeczny portret pogromu kieleckiego (Warsaw: Czarna Owca, 2018). Data taken from a report by the Office of Denominational Affairs (Urząd do Spraw Wyznań) dated September 9, 1958. Konopka, Religia w szkołach Polski Ludowej, 218. Jan Żaryn lists 354 protests against the decree, which “took different forms.” See Żaryn, Dzieje Kościoła Katolickiego, 189. Konopka, Religia w szkołach Polski Ludowej, 219–223. On the protests against decrucification, see Konopka, Religia w szkołach Polski Ludowej; Ważniewski, Państwo laickie; Żaryn, Dzieje Kościoła Katolickiego; Dudek and Gryz, Komuniści i Kościół; Pączek “Akcja usunięcia krzyży w szkołach w województwie koszalińskim”; Jasiak, “Akcja dekrucyfikacyjna w 1958 roku”; Szczepaniak, “Akcja dekrucyfikacyjna”; Małgorzata Lubecka, Kościół katolicki w powiecie ostrołęckim wobec polityki państwa w latach 1944–1966 (Ostrołęka: Ostrołęckie Towarzystwo Naukowe, 2016); Łucja Marek, “Kler to nasz wróg”: Polityka władz państwowych wobec Kościoła katolickiego na terenie województwa katowickiego w latach 1956–1970 (Katowice: Studio

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in 1956, the student protests in 1968, or the Gdańsk shipyard strike of 1980 – seen as paradigmatic milestones of the Polish anti-Communist opposition movement, the campaigns waged in defense of crosses in 1958 and 1960 were largely a women’s affair.111 Though their presence is noted both in official reports and in historical accounts, the leading role played by women in these protests, their strategic choices, and gendered strategies of resistance are usually overlooked.112 A gender-based analysis of the defense of the cross as an emerging genre of protest can help us shed light not only on women’s agency in popular forms of daily nonconformism under Communism, but also on how sexism within the oppressive system moved some women to action.

Gendering the Cross Defense Female participation in anti-Communist protest was not new back in 1958, as women had already engaged in acts of resistance against Communist reform, for example, during the collectivization campaign of 1948, or strikes in factories and coal mines in the late 1940s and early 1950s.113 Women were also active

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Noa, 2009). To date, only one publication has addressed the gendered character of these protests: Ryszard Gryz, “‘Elementy usiłujące zakłócić bezpieczeństwo i porządek’: Kobiety w walce o nowe kościoły w PRL,” in Płeć buntu: Kobiety w oporze społecznym i opozycji w Polsce w latach 1944–1989 na tle porównawczym, edited by Natalia Jarska and Jan Olaszek (Warsaw: IPN, 2014), 151–177. Women did participate in the protests of 1956, 1968, and 1980, too. But their contribution has only recently attracted more scholarly attention. See Kristi S. Long, We All Fought for Freedom: Women in Poland’s Solidarity Movement (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996); Kenney, “The Gender of Resistance,” 399–425; Shana Penn, Solidarity’s Secret: The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2006); Kinga Konieczny and Andrzej Łazowski, Matki Solidarności (Szczecin: Stowarzyszenie Czas Przestrzeń Tożsamość, 2010); Natalia Jarska and Jan Olaszek (eds.), Płeć buntu: Kobiety w oporze społecznym i opozycji w Polsce w latach 1944–1989 na tle porównawczym (Warsaw: IPN, 2014); Marta Dzido, Kobiety Solidarności (Warsaw: Świat Książki, 2016); Jan De Graaf, “Frauen und wilde Streiks im Europa der Nachkriegszeit,” Arbeit, Bewegung, Geschichte: Zeitschrift für historische Studien 3 (2019): 13–33. Padraic Kenney makes the same argument about the women-led protests in the textile industry and, more generally, about the neglect of gender identities in the history of European communist states. See Kenney, “The Gender of Resistance,” 401. Turkowski, “Władza komunistyczna wobec przejawów religijności,” 88; Grzegorz Miernik, “Opór kobiet przeciw kolektywizacji – najważniejsze konteksty,” in Płeć buntu: Kobiety w oporze społecznym i opozycji w Polsce w latach 1944–1989 na tle porównawczym, edited by Natalia Jarska and Jan Olaszek (Warsaw: IPN, 2014), 91–119; Małgorzata Fidelis, “Przodownice pracy i buntowniczki: Strajki kobiet w Żyrardowie (1945–1951),” in Płeć buntu: Kobiety w oporze społecznym i opozycji w Polsce w latach 1944–1989 na tle porównawczym, edited by Natalia Jarska and Jan Olaszek (Warsaw: IPN, 2014), 121–138; Malgorzata Fidelis, Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland (New York: Cambridge University Press), 2010, 61–98; Padraic Kenney, “Working-Class Community and Resistance in Pre-Stalinist Poland: The Poznański Textile Strike, Łódź, September 1947,” Social History 18 (1993): 31–51; De Graaf “Frauen und wilde Streiks.”

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during the 1956 riots in Poznań – a fact which later gained some recognition in unofficial acts of memorialization.114 Despite the presence of women during the Poznań events and elsewhere, however, their contribution and the gendered nature of their protest remained widely unnoticed. The few authors who investigated women-led protests in Communist Poland note that both the female experience of Communism and the strategies of dissent that women adopted differed from those of men.115 To Padraic Kenney, female strategies of protest were more efficient, because women devised a novel and unexpected language of dissent, and had particularly powerful symbols at their disposal.116 While the identity of a “motherworker” was particularly challenging to the regime, because it helped womenled protests against wage inequality or food shortages to communicate a “devastating sense of pure injustice,”117 the gendered rules of conduct protected female strike participants from repressions.118 Using nonhierarchical forms of activism, applying self-policing to avoid an escalation of violence, and exploiting gender stereotypes to their advantage, female protesters were more resourceful, could baffle their adversaries with creative means of protest, and were, in the long run, more likely to succeed with their demands.119 But, if the figure of motherhood and some specific forms of collective response, like crying or fainting, have been noted by scholars as gendered strategies of protest, performative religiosity has yet to be considered as another gendered resource that stood at the disposal of female protesters. Women took action in a number of ways during the 1958 decrucification campaign – from signing petitions to breaking into schools. In Wola Rzędzińska, mothers threatened to organize a pupils’ strike if crosses were removed from their children’s school.120 In Tarnów, police confiscated leaflets calling on mothers not to send their children to school “before the cross, prayers, 114

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Visual materials distributed by the Solidarity movement, such as stamps, often featured reproductions of a photograph from the 1956 demonstrations showing a woman marching at the front of the demonstration. See Silke Plate, Widerstand mit Briefmarken: Die polnische Oppositionsbewegung und ihre unabhängige Post in den 1980er Jahren (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 130. See also “Uczestnicy,” Tygodnik Mazowsze: Numer Specjalny, June 28, 1986, 3. FSO, Gp 0563. On female protesters in Poznań, see also Eugenia R. Dabertowa and Agnieszka Łuczak, Walka o pamięć Czerwca ’56 (Poznań: Archiwum Wielkopolskiej Solidarności, 2001), 20. Kenney, “The Gender of Resistance,” 400; Fidelis, “Przodownice pracy i buntowniczki,” 121; Fidelis, Women, Communism, and Industrialization, 89–90; De Graaf, “Frauen und wilde Streiks,” 32. Kenney, “The Gender of Resistance,” 425. Ibid., 403, 411. Ibid., 414; Fidelis, Women, Communism, and Industrialization, 74; Fidelis, “Przodownice pracy i buntowniczki,” 131–132. Kenney, “The Gender of Resistance,” 425; De Graaf, “Frauen und wilde Streiks,” 14; Fidelis, “Przodownice pracy i buntowniczki,” 120–121; Fidelis, Women, Communism, and Industrialization, 91. Jasiak, “Akcja dekrucyfikacyjna w 1958 roku,” 153.

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and religious education classes are reinstated.” The message ended with the following plea: “We ask all mothers for solidarity.”121 Protests against the removal of crosses from public hospitals were likewise orchestrated by women: nurses, receptionists, and cleaners.122 In Białystok, collective prayers defying the ban took place in the gynecology and maternity wards.123 Not all forms of female protest were entirely peaceful. In Dąbrowa Tarnowska, fifty women, having marched through the town singing religious songs, forced their way into two local schools to rehang the removed crosses.124 In Więciórka, in Kraków Voivodeship, a group of women broke into the storage location where removed crosses had been locked up and redistributed them to classrooms.125 In Dąbrówka Szczepanowska, a group of schoolgirls, having entered a building through a cellar window, opened the locked doors for a group of protesters carrying a cross.126 The authorities were quick to realize that it was women who posed the most vigorous resistance to the new secularization measures. This led them to make some adjustments in the next stages of the campaign and allot extra time for the implementation of the directive in shops, pharmacies, and restaurants, where most employees were women, expecting “obstacles in the execution of the task.”127 The PZPR in turn sought to persuade women to cease their activities by calling on male party members “to bring to their wives’ attention that [protests] w[ould] bring them nothing good.”128 This indirect appeal betrayed the Communist authorities’ lack of recognition of the agency of the protesting women, whom they saw as mere pawns in the hands of the clergy.129 The authorities also believed that women engaged in protest only to protect their husbands, who might have faced harsher reprisals for similar behavior.130 While there might indeed have been some strategic consideration behind, for example, delegating the delivery of petitions to women or children, reducing the women who participated in the protests to proxies for more vulnerable male activists would be wrong.131 Women chose specific genres, strategies, and agendas of protest not only to protect their sons and husbands from the consequences of potentially risky political action, but also to articulate their own needs, as means of collective empowerment, and as a form of experimentation with different means of protest, often alternative to those used by men. 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131

Szczepaniak, “Akcja dekrucyfikacyjna,” 800. Ważniewski, Państwo laickie, 149. Ibid., 161. Jasiak, “Akcja dekrucyfikacyjna w 1958 roku,” 156. Ważniewski, Państwo laickie, 106. Jasiak, “Akcja dekrucyfikacyjna w 1958 roku,” 161. Ważniewski, Państwo laickie, 132. Ibid., 125. Ibid., 106. Jasiak, “Akcja dekrucyfikacyjna w 1958 roku,” 157. See also De Graaf, “Frauen und wilde Streiks,” 21.

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Women had their own motivations for speaking out against the secularization of schools: they were not only intervening in what was traditionally considered a female domain (supervision of their children’s education), but also asserting themselves in the face of authorities that ignored their particular concerns. Kazimiera Owczarek from the county of Ostrołęka, in a letter of protest she addressed to the authorities in September 1958, openly writes about discrimination she and her fellow female protesters faced from officials, describing a sense of helplessness that moved them to action: When one of us women asked what decree this decision [the removal of the crosses] was based on and why it had not been communicated to us beforehand, the citizens responded that we were just dumb mothers, that they could walk over us as over a doormat, and that we had no say in the matter. Don’t we count, don’t we have the right to a voice? We allow them to shut us down, and there are millions of us.132

The discovery of an empowering sense of community with other women and the possibility of using debates on secularization to voice more general grievances might have been significant – if overlooked – factors attracting some women to join the protests. The protesters’ identity as mothers also has a strategic relevance here. The conviction that they were acting for the good of their children may have driven their decision to confront the authorities, while the cultural status of mothers, which they invoked in their leaflets, was both a tool for mobilizing other women and a source of increased collective authority. A related issue deserving attention is the assortment of remarkably resourceful gender-specific protest strategies adopted in defense of the cross. In Stróże, in southern Poland, for example, women replaced removed crucifixes with pictures of the Virgin Mary.133 In Janowice, the group that occupied a local school arrived on site armed with hoes.134 The creative use of holy icons, especially those representing Mary, and objects of daily use such as gardening tools suggests a new quality of protest that was distinctly female in its aesthetics.135 Another new trait was a strategy of passive resistance via prayer. In Paradys, when a group of women picketing the school was confronted by local officials, they sank to their knees and started praying in response.136 The switch of tactics from picketing to praying was clearly a strategy for avoiding reprisal, but also an 132 133 134 135

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Lubecka, Kościół katolicki w powiecie ostrołęckim, 206. Ważniewski, Państwo laickie, 106. Szczepaniak, “Akcja dekrucyfikacyjna,” 790. It must also be noted that the popular cult of the Holy Mother in Poland, which endows Mary with goddess-like qualities and powers, carries a certain subversive potential, empowering many women within the patriarchal structures of the Catholic Church. See Marta Bierca, “Mistyka typu ludowego: Kobieca pobożność maryjna w świetle teologii feministycznej,” in Kobiety i religie, edited by Katarzyna Leszczyńska and Agnieszka Kościańska (Kraków: Nomos, 2006), 117–138. Ważniewski, Państwo laickie, 112.

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attempt to disarm the opponent psychologically. This kind of resourcefulness on the part of female protesters and the mediation skills they possessed are examples of the fundamental difference between early defenses of the cross and other, male-dominated forms of anti-systemic resistance in Poland. There are a number of reasons why women might have been particularly attracted to the defense of the cross as a cultural genre. One was their competence in performative devotion, as manifested in the singing of religious songs or the decoration of public shrines. These skills were instrumental in bringing focus to their protest and maintaining it over time. They also had a psychological impact, derived from the traditional gender dynamics of patriarchal peasant culture. As Andrzej Leder compellingly argues, Polish peasant women, subordinated to their often violent husbands, instrumentalized performative religiosity in order to reverse these power relations. Through her identification with the symbols of faith and ritual, through her fervent love for the priest, God, Christ, the woman can gain a position of moral superiority, coming to represent the norm and the law to the extent that she eventually, symbolically annihilates the man in her and her children’s eyes – indeed, even in his own. Leaning on the authority of the sermon and of the cross, she undermines the validity of his fatherly position, rendering him a stupid and primitive animal that one can fear, but not respect.137

Using religious symbols and practices to generate an aura of moral superiority around their protests against secularization measures by extension enabled women to psychologically disarm powerful men; framing their protest as a form of religious practice made it “safer.” In blurring the boundary between civic insubordination and religious worship, women created a liminal space where they could achieve more than in a purely secular setting. This does not mean, however, that gendered strategies of protest did not meet with a backlash. Men resented, ridiculed, and downplayed such female forms of dissent, and the disparaging, and often sexist, reaction was not limited to the Communist authorities alone. In the wake of the Nowa Huta events, the Commander in Chief of the People’s Police, Ryszard Dobieszak, in a briefing given to secret police officers in June 1960, did not mince his words as he called on the force to rethink its strategies for dealing with female protesters. You stood by, watching those old bats [demonstrating], instead of dispersing them immediately. How do women (baby) end up organizing street riots? And if they want to occupy our offices, will you stand idly by? We had similar experiences in Poznań, where a mob attacked a prison building and soldiers didn’t want to shoot because they saw women and 137

Andrzej Leder, Prześniona rewolucja: Ćwiczenie z logiki historycznej (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2014), 102.

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female and furious children. The result was that the mob not only took over the prison building, but also got hold of firearms, which they then used.138

One striking feature found universally in police reports from Nowa Huta, but also in the press and even in witness accounts, is the condescending, disparaging language used to describe female protesters. While official sources also disparage male participants as “hooligans” or a “mob,” women are almost always referenced in particularly sexist and offensive terms that call into question their capacity for rational thought or even their mental health. The women who picketed the cross appear in police reports almost invariably as dewotki (singular dewotka)139 This Polish noun, which denotes a person of “superficial and demonstrative religious devoutness,”140 is virtually never used in its masculine grammatical form, dewot. A gendered term that blends bigoted religious fanaticism with femininity, it is usually accompanied by equally offensive qualifiers, such as “hysterical,” “primitive,”141 or “feverishly excited.”142 While the official discourse of the Communist authorities clearly aimed to discredit religious believers, the fact that the stigmatization was gender-specific on a lexical level was part of a wider cultural pattern. Similar language features in denunciations of individual female protesters filed by their fellow civilians, with female demonstrators being characterized as “religious fanatic[s] who [sit] in church all day”143 or women of a “fanatical and backward”144 type. Some women are even described as “psychologically disturbed.”145 Male eyewitnesses and fellow protesters describe female riot participants in the same patronizing and disparaging terms. The Polish words “kobity” and “baby,” which appear in many male witness accounts and can be translated as “chicks” and “broads,” respectively, communicate a spectrum of attitudes ranging from the benevolently patronizing to the denigratingly offensive.146 The sexist bias evident in contemporary descriptions of the female Nowa Huta protesters is indicative of how men, whether police, fellow protesters, or 138

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141 142 143 144 145

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“Notatka dotycząca sprawozdań zastepców komendantów MO do spraw bezpieczeństwa za I kwartał 1960 r.” AMSW sygnature 17/IX/77, cited in Henryk Dominiczak, Organy bezpieczeństwa PRL 1944–1990 (Warsaw: Bellona, 1997), 222–223. For example, “Plan operacyjnych przedsięwzięć do sprawy agenturalnego sprawdzenia krypt. ‘Karły,’ 6.05.1960, Nowa Huta,” 10; E. Muszyński, “Notatka służbowa, Kraków Nowa Huta 2.05.1960.” Karły. IPN, Kr 010/9467 vol. 4 (9633/II), 18; Ciupiński, “Notatka służbowa, Kraków–Nowa Huta 5.05.1960 r.,” 375. Słownik Języka Polskiego (PWN), https://sjp.pwn.pl/szukaj/dewotka.html (accessed December 14, 2018). “Po wypadkach w Nowej Hucie,” 2. Ciupiński, “Notatka służbowa, Kraków–Nowa Huta 5.05.1960 r.,” 374. “Raport z przeprowadzonej rozmowy z ob. ‘BE.’” Karły. IPN, Kr 010/9467 vol. 1 (9633/II), 94. Ibid. “Meldunek informacyjny nr. 23/60, Nowy Sącz, 2.05.1960: Do Zastępcy Komendanta Wojewodzkiego MO.” Karły. IPN, Kr 010/9467 vol. 8 (9633/II), 160. See, for instance, the oral history interviews with Macedoński and Szadkowski. Collection “W imię wolności Nowej Huty ’60.” AMHP.

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bystanders, perceived female participation in the protest. On the one hand, they regarded the nonviolent forms of protest that women were involved in, such as decorating the cross site with flowers, singing, and praying, as less harmful than but also inferior to more “masculine” and confrontational forms of collective protest, like marching, rioting, or fighting with the police.147 On the other hand, women participating in open protest against the authorities and even using violence were perceived as transgressive. In her study of collective violence co-perpetrated by women during the Kielce Pogrom of 1946, anthropologist Joanna Tokarska-Bakir notes that, although the communitas that would develop during a pogrom temporarily sanctioned violence committed by women, females were still seen as “transgressing the social norm of withdrawal” traditionally prescribed to them.148 Male observers of the cross defense in Nowa Huta – civilians and policemen alike – were uniformly aware that women protesting did so in defiance of a cultural prohibition. Riot police, in sending female protesters back home “to cook for their children,” reacted to this transgression by pointing to the socially accepted norm. The gendered ridicule and offensive language used in the police reports fulfills the same role – of “neutralizing” transgression by labeling female behavior as irrational, abnormal, and psychologically labile. Piotr Szadkowski, who witnessed the protest in Nowa Huta as a pedestrian and found the singing women laughable, also recollects that men returning from work after the morning shift were irritated by their wives’ absence from home: The husbands came back home and saw the wives were not there, [because] they were all standing around the cross. “Where’s my Helka?” [he would ask]. “Helka’s under the cross.” Then the guy was angry that there was no dinner, because the dame, instead of cooking, was protesting under the cross. So he would go out to check on her and that’s when those husbands started stirring up trouble.149

Szadkowski’s account suggests that men on both sides of the barricade were opposed to the public engagement of the Nowa Huta women. Even if Nowa Huta husbands had some sympathy for their wives’ cause, they also believed a woman’s place was at home. Given that male contemporaries so unanimously characterized women’s participation in the street protests as far outside the norm of female behavior, it is perhaps surprising that the “transgression” has 147

148 149

While violent forms of resistance are glorified in Polish society and memorial culture, nonviolent forms tend to be given less credit, even if they are equally risky. See Kenney, “The Gender of Resistance,” 400, 406; Maciej J. Bartkowski, “Poland: Forging the Polish Nation Nonviolently, 1860s–1900s,” in Recovering Nonviolent History: Civil Resistance in Liberation Struggles, edited by Maciej J. Bartkowski (London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2013), 259–277. Tokarska-Bakir, Pod klątwą, 257. Piotr Szadkowski, oral history interview, April 13, 2010, Collection “W imię wolności Nowej Huty ’60.” AMHP.

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not met with greater reflection in the literature on anti-Communist dissent. Especially since, as Padraic Kenney notes, gender was de facto the greatest division in Poland’s ethnically homogeneous postwar society.150 Instead, in the popular memory of the riots men have retroactively taken center stage. When in the 1980s underground Solidarity issued stamps commemorating the Nowa Huta cross defense, it was male bodies that dominated the images. In a series issued by Solidarność Małopolska in 1986 a static panel entitled “We want God” pictures praying women around a cross, while the panel depicting the clashes with the riot police features only male steelworkers as active defenders of the cross.151 One reason for such male-centered representations and a general lack of reflection on women’s active role in the events is the fact that male protesters, who were also responsible for the evening riots in Nowa Huta, suffered more severe legal consequences, while women faced criminal charges only in exceptional cases.152 The lack of recognition of female agency is, however, also related to a wider lacuna in existing research on the role of women in antiCommunist dissent more generally. This historiographical blind spot may in part be due to the fact that the kind of protest behavior women engaged in is still perceived as less heroic today. Recent historical analyses of anti-Communist street protests in Poland focus not only on violent forms of protest, but also on the male experience.153 Another concern is the inadequate sensibility of many historians of antisystemic protest to gender issues – a deficiency that is evident in the very language of their descriptions. Sexist bias and disparaging terminology used by the People’s Police to discredit female protesters seeps into the language of Polish historians, who unreflectingly use words like dewotki (religious fanatics) and rozhisteryzowane kobiety (hysterical women) in their accounts of female protest against collectivization and secularization.154 150 151

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Kenney, “The Gender of Resistance,” 400. “26 rocznica krzyża w Nowej Hucie” KOWiPzPP Solidarność Małopolska, FSO, 02–005 xp 1016. Records of the police investigation show that female suspects were treated rather leniently. In most cases investigators recommended that charges against them be dropped on the grounds of good reputation, even in the case of one former convict: “Wykaz prowadzonych spraw przez Sekcję Operacyjno-Dochodzeniową KDMO Nowa Huta w sprawie zajść w dniu 27 IV 1960 r.” Komenda Rejonowa Policji Kraków Wschód, Materiały operacyjne dot. wypadków w dniu 27.04.1960 przy usuwaniu krzyża na terenie Nowej Huty. IPN, Kr 619/7, 422, 424, 430. Dudek and Marszałkowski, Walki uliczne w PRL; Grzegorz Baciński, Kamieniem w komunę (Warsaw: Fronda, 2014). Both books also feature men engaged in street fights against the police on their covers. See Kozłowska, “Dwa dni z dziejów PRL,” 153; Miernik, “Opór kobiet przeciw kolektywizacji,” 96; Ryszard Gryz, Pozwolić czy nie? Władze PRL wobec budownictwa katolickich obiektów sakralnych w latach 1971–1980 (Kielce: Wydawnictwo Akademii Świętokrzyskiej, 2007), 281.

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Fig. 15. Underground stamp series by Solidarność Małopolska celebrating the twentysixth anniversary of the cross defense in Nowa Huta. Archive of the European Solidarity Center in Gdańsk.

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The Nowa Huta clashes were a watershed not only because women played such a prominent role in sparking off the first phase of the protest, but also because they delivered the script for a new genre of protest: the defense of the cross. The Nowa Huta cross defense was a predominantly female-driven performance, combining elements of religious practice with strategies of symbolic occupation. Its most characteristic feature was its ambivalent nature, which oscillated between religious and political modes, between a peaceful picket and lynch-mob-like violence. The symbolic weight of the cross and the ritual practices involved in sacralizing the area around it both provided a “safe” space in which political demands could be voiced and legitimized the use of violence against opponents who could now be labeled as morally despicable “enemies of the cross.” This emerging cultural genre exemplified how new forms of anti-systemic protest were both shaped by and challenged traditional gender roles in postStalinist Poland. While female protesters in Nowa Huta and elsewhere upheld those traditional roles as mothers and custodians of the altar, they also subversively instrumentalized these identities, transgressing the norm of female withdrawal and meekness. Female cross defenders gained agency by turning their traditionally subservient roles (e.g. that of maintaining sacral spaces) into tools of political defiance. With their gendered routines (singing, decorating), they defined the geography of the protest, while by invoking their motherhood they mobilized support, maintained order during the demonstration, and shielded themselves from police harassment. Whether in appealing to the solidarity of other mothers in their leaflets or theatricalizing the accessories of motherhood, such as prams, female protesters adopted a form of “strategic essentialism” labeled in gender theory as “maternalism.”155 According to this paradigm, in cultural settings where gender roles are strictly divided and a divine status is ascribed to motherhood, women may use their maternal identity as a powerful tool for legitimizing female political activism.156 The evidence from Nowa Huta and the anti-decrucification protests across Poland suggests that women opposing the state-driven secularization campaign knew how to tap into the symbolic capital associated with motherhood. As research on gendered protest in the 1970s and 1980s has shown, this strategy was extraordinarily successful in undermining the Polish Communist authorities in the decades following Nowa Huta. Because the 155

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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “In a Word: Interview,” in The Essential Difference, edited by Noami Schor and Elizabeth Weed (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 151–184; Lynn Y. Weiner, “Maternalism as a Paradigm: Defining the Issues,” Journal of Women’s History 5, 2 (1993): 96–98. Renata E. Hryciuk, “O znikającej matce: Upolitycznione macierzyństwo w Ameryce Łacińskiej i w Polsce,” in Pożegnanie z Matką Polką? Dyskursy, praktyki i reprezentacje macierzyństwa we współczesnej Polsce, edited by Renata E. Hryciuk and Elżbieta Korolczuk (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2012), 269.

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figure of the mother–worker epitomized values the regime could not question, while the cultural taboo against opposing women with brute force prevented the authorities from repressing female protests, such incidents were actually more threatening to the regime than iconic strikes in masculine factories.157 Cross defenders from Nowa Huta consciously staged their protest as a rebellion of women and mothers, despite the fact that the Polish cultural repertory contained alternative models of resistance, including that of (genderneutral) Christians opposing heretics, or the masculinized insurgent heroines of the Romantic Period, such as Emilia Plater or Anna Pustowójtówna.158 Nowa Huta protesters placed their femininity center stage and managed to gain some leverage with their gendered protest strategies.159 But, even if the instrumentalizion of traditional gender roles was part of this script, the genre of the cross defense also challenged many contemporary social expectations about female behavior. Women publicly demonstrating against the authorities and using physical violence decidedly transgressed the normative canon of conduct for socialist working women. Quite paradoxically, therefore, a protest template based on conservative values carried strong gender-emancipatory potential. An exploration of male perspectives on this predominantly female genre of protest yields a similarly complex picture. Men observing the cross defense considered the characteristically female forms of performative religiosity to be, if not outright grotesque, then inferior to conventionally sanctioned “male” genres of protest, such as physical clashes with police. While representatives of the authorities and the media openly ridiculed female participants, using disparaging and sexist language, witness accounts suggest that the majority of (male) co-protesters also sought to distance themselves from the displays of ostentatious religiosity taking place in the immediate vicinity of the cross. The most intensive skirmishes with police in Nowa Huta (staged predominantly by 157 158

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Kenney, “The Gender of Resistance,” 425. Emilia Plater (1806–1831) was a noblewoman from the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania who fought in the November Uprising of 1830, reaching the rank of captain in the insurgent forces. Anna Henryka Pustowójtówna (1838–1881), who was likewise of noble descent, fought in the January Uprising of 1863–1864 disguised as a male soldier. See Maria Złotorzycka, O kobietach-żołnierzach w Powstaniu Styczniowym (Warsaw: Państwowe Zakłady Wydawnictw Szkolnych, 1972). Padraic Kenney demonstrates that similar gendered strategies of protest, characterized by nonviolence and nonhierarchical structures, were already in use during the 1947 strike of female textile workers in Łódź and were again employed in the 1970s and 1980s. See Kenney, “The Gender of Resistance.” Female-powered anti-systemic demonstrations that took place in Łódź in 1981, where women and children protested high prices and shortages in so-called hunger marches, are a particularly prominent instance of maternalist activism in Poland. See Małgorzata Mazurek, “From Welfare-State to Self-Welfare: Everyday Opposition among Textile Female Workers, Lodz 1971–1981,” in Gender Politics and Mass Dictatorship: Global Perspectives, edited by Jie-Hyun Lim and Karen Petrone (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 278–300.

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men) happened in other locations. At the same time, despite the reservations that male contemporaries may have had about the public involvement of women and the performative strategies they adopted, the reactions of male participants in the Nowa Huta events indicate that they were not immune to the authority of women as morally superior custodians of holy symbols. Field operatives who reported on female cross defenders “threatening them with god [sic]” may have questioned the validity of the sacred, but nonetheless complied with the spatial order imposed by the praying women. While the authorities did not hesitate to disperse the (male-driven) Nowa Huta riots with considerable brutality, they never relaunched their attempts to remove the contested cross. Over the subsequent two decades, protests in defense of illegally erected sacral buildings followed a similar template. After 1961, when the state introduced a law obliging religious communities to obtain building permits for the erection of small structures, including chapels, and wayside crosses, the authorities undertook numerous attempts to remove “illegal” crucifixes. This led to further local clashes between the police and “cross defenders,”160 who were again mostly women.161 By the end of the 1970s, the Communist authorities had suspended these demolition efforts, recognizing that cross removals played into the hands of the Church, which condemned and publicized each such incident.162 Indeed, the relaxation in the attitude of the Communist authorities towards the construction of new churches was remarkable in its extent. As Brian Porter-Szücs points out, the total number of churches in Poland nearly doubled between 1964 and 1985, and the number of parishes rose from 5,889 to 8,101.163 The number of ordained Catholic priests likewise increased from 8,806 clergymen in 1945 to 22,040 by 1985. In fact, by the end of the Communist era the ratio of priests to parishioners in Poland was actually higher than the global average.164 One symbol of this general change of direction was the 1977 consecration of the church that the cross defenders of Nowa Huta had campaigned for. The so-called Lord’s Arch, built 500 meters from the original protest site, became one of the most iconic places in Nowa Huta and a hub of anti-Communist civic activity in the 1980s.

Conclusions With time the cross defense in Nowa Huta came to be seen as one of the most iconic and symbolically significant early anti-Communist protests in Poland. The story of the dramatic campaign for a church in the model socialist city had 160 161

162 163 164

Marek, “Kler to nasz wróg,” 342–346. Gryz, Pozwolić czy nie?, 281, 277; Gryz, “‘Elementy usiłujące zakłócić bezpieczeństwo i porządek,’” 151–177. Gryz, Pozwolić czy nie?, 292. Porter-Szücs, Faith and Fatherland, 257–258. Ibid., 258.

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its particular appeal. But the cross defense might not have gone down in history if it had not been “discovered” by dissidents a generation later. In 1980, local opposition activists launched an underground periodical entitled Krzyż Nowohucki (Nowa Huta’s Cross), which also featured a column on historical events.165 Its first two issues ran special sections on the Nowa Huta cross defense, deeming it an episode “of tremendous importance for the entire Nation”166 and “the first time in Polish history that the working class rose to defend what [wa]s holiest to it, the faith.”167 On the twentieth anniversary of the Nowa Huta events the editors of Krzyż Nowohucki circulated flyers to commemorate “the wounded and the dead in the massacre”168 of 1960 and organized a memorial march from the Lord’s Arch church to the original cross.169 Thus, two decades after the unrest, Nowa Huta’s cross defense was to secure a place in the collective memory of the coalescing anti-systemic opposition movement.170 However, the legacy of the cross defense in Nowa Huta extends beyond the narrative of religion’s suppression under state socialism. The genre of protest that emerged there illustrates well how, in post-Stalinist Poland, the symbol of the cross regained its status as a national emblem of righteous dissent against illegitimate power. Given that the Communist state authorities had appropriated the main Polish national symbols, such as the white eagle and the national flag, the cross emerged as a countersymbol to the Communist brand of patriotism. This shift became evident for the first time during the 1956 “October” events, when protesters would replace portraits of state officials in public institutions with crucifixes. Reinstalling crosses was more than a gesture in favor of keeping religious education in state schools; it also served to delegitimize the Communist state as anti-religious and therefore anti-Polish. In the second postwar decade, the cross thus regained its antistructural capacity, both serving as a code of communication for the emerging communitas of dissent and marking the boundary between “us” and “them.” This time the fault lines did not only run between practicing Catholics, who for the first time constituted a vast majority of Polish society, and the socialist state apparatus on its secularizing course; the communitas forged in demonstrations 165

166 167 168 169

170

The column included, for example, texts on the Katyn massacre, the Battle of Warsaw against the Bolsheviks in 1920, and the January Uprising of 1863. Franczyk “20 rocznica obrony krzyża w Nowej Hucie,” 20. Ibid., 21. “Telegram,” Krzyż Nowohucki 2 (1980): 20. FSO, Gp 0262. Franczyk, “20 rocznica obrony krzyża w Nowej Hucie,” 20–21; “Jeszcze o 20-tej rocznicy obrony krzyża w Nowej Hucie,” Krzyż Nowohucki 3 (1980): 19–20. Today the local chapter of the Solidarność trade union still celebrates the defense of the Nowa Huta cross as one of its founding myths. See Tadeusz A. Janusz, Krzyż Nowohucki początkiem i znakiem nowej ewangelizacji (Kraków: Region Małopolski NSZZ “Solidarność,” 2017), 49–52.

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like those in Nowa Huta understood itself to be the morally superior core of the Polish nation, dissenting against a government regarded as externally imposed and illegitimate. What is more, as Maryjane Osa observes, the boundary between “us” and “them” was also one between an “internationalist” state and the Church, which understood itself as representing Polish national culture.171 This conflation of the nation with the Church was directly inspired by “theological nationalism,” as represented by Primate Stefan Wyszyński, who saw the “continuity of the Polish nation [as] inviolably linked to the persistence of the Church in the Polish lands.”172 This master frame, which was consolidated in the years leading up to the millennial celebrations of 1966, continued to resonate over the subsequent decades, helping to sustain the oppositional boundary between “the nation” and “externally imposed” state structures. But this fundamentally antagonistic frontier between the national community, defined in religious terms, and the Communist power-holders, cast out of the national collective, was not the only one implied by the symbol of the cross. The figure of Polak-katolik invoked in the anti-secularization protests of the 1950s and 1960s was based from its inception on the divide between Catholic Poles and Jews. As Joanna Tokarska-Bakir notes, Jews have been cast in the role of the “essential Other” in the Polish lands since the Middle Ages.173 And this historic alterity fed into the emerging ethno-nationalism of the early twentieth century, which solidified the dyad of national identity and Catholicism.174 In the ideology of National Democracy (Endecja), which championed the ideal of Polak-katolik in interwar Poland, it was the Jew who embodied the antithesis of Polishness.175 After 1945 the new state ideology nominally condemned antisemitism, but Holocaust survivors, who gained a degree of upward social mobility and were able to accede to positions of power in the socialist state apparatus, also bore the brunt of anti-Communist sentiment among Poles, who collectively accused Jews of supporting Soviet supremacy.176 171 172 173

174 175

176

Osa, “Creating Solidarity,” 353. Ibid., 353. Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Legendy o krwi: Antropologia przesądu (Warsaw: WAB, 2008), 632. Porter-Szücs, Faith and Fatherland, 182. Paul Brykczynski, Primed for Violence: Murder, Antisemitism, and Democratic Politics in Interwar Poland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016); Andrzej Garlicki, Piękne lata trzydzieste (Warsaw: Prószyńki i Spółka, 2008), 199–233; Grzegorz Krzywiec, “Komitet Narodowy Polski wobec kolektywnej przemocy antysemickiej: Przyczynek do dziejów antysemityzmu na ziemiach polskich (1917–1918),” in Przemoc antyżydowska i konteksty akcji pogromowych na ziemiach polskich w XX wieku, edited by Konrad Zieliński and Kamil Kijek (Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS, 2016), 89–121. Tokarska-Bakir, Pod klątwą, 134–184; Zawadzka, “Żydokomuna: The Construction of the Insult”; Zawadzka (dir.), Żydokomuna.

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As is evident from the source material discussed throughout this chapter, the anti-decrucification protests in post-Stalinist Poland had antisemitic undertones. Although what are seemingly random and inapposite comments about Jews surface only on the margins of the main narrative, which instead targets the Communist authorities as the ultimate foe of the Polish nation, they are not coincidental. Jews here appear to share an agenda with the Communists, who convert Polish classrooms into “synagogue-like” spaces by stripping them of crucifixes and support the renovation of Jewish temples while banning the construction of new churches. The Jew, as an imaginary antagonistic figure, lingers on the fringes of this developing anti-Communist narrative, even though actual Jews constitute a miniscule minority in the nearly homogeneous postwar Polish society and have barely any relevance as a pressure group exerting influence on the shape of the nation. Ernesto Laclau, in his discussion of the populist use of symbols, argues that, in articulating its difference from power-holders, any oppressed group needs another, “internal” Other. “The ‘people,’” he notes, “will always be something more than the pure opposite of power,” and in order to become a truly “antagonistic subject” they need some group to play a role akin to that played by the Lumpenproletariat for the rebelling working class.177 This internal Other must be expelled from the community in order for “the people” to reach “a sense of its own cohesion.”178 For Polish protesters who invented themselves as an oppressed populus in opposition to the un-Polish socialist authorities, the specter of the antagonistic Jew may have fulfilled this very function. In referencing the internal outcast, opponents of secularization reactivated the old template of Polak-katolik and bolstered in-group consolidation. In a recent essay on the figure of the Polak-katolik, Polish literary scholar Elżbieta Janicka goes a step further, claiming that anti-Communist sentiment in Poland had an “antisemitic flip side”179 and that “anti-Communist radicalization in Eastern Europe could not have taken place if anti-Communism had not been undergirded with the powerful motivation, or even passion, [. . .] provided by antisemitism.”180 While this sweeping claim remains unsubstantiated, the presence of antisemitic tropes in post-Stalinist anti-systemic protests suggests that the revival of the early-twentieth-century vision of the Polish nation as defined by Catholicism reanimated an old and deep-seated antiJewish prejudice, harnessing it into a new master frame of anti-Communist dissent. Nowa Huta protesters who instrumentalized religious symbols to voice discontent with the authorities drew on the legacy of Endecja, but also on 177 178 179 180

Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), 152. Ibid., 70. Elżbieta Janicka, “Niewinność odzyskana,” Krytyka Polityczna 46 (2018): 62. Ibid., 63.

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Romantic templates. In Nowa Huta, as in Warsaw a century earlier, demonstrators created a liminal space between the religious and the political which allowed them to articulate their national identity and, by using the frame of religious practice, reduce the risk of speaking out against the authorities. One profound difference, however, lay in the new script of protest: the defense of the cross, and its gendered nature. While nineteenth-century protesters marching with crucifixes to demand national and social emancipation were predominantly men – or, at least, only male cross bearers like Landy went down in history – a century later the juncture of nationalist rhetoric and religious idiom became the exclusive domain of women. Industrial revolution, female emancipation, and the secularization processes at work after 1945 both empowered women to participate in public life and rendered ostentatious public displays of religiosity less normative than they had previously been. No more than a handful of male protesters in Nowa Huta are reported to have prayed under the cross, let alone to have joined in decorating it with holy icons and flowers. Instead, the derision expressed for these activities among male observers indicates that performative religiosity, outside the framework of church festivities, had become socially conspicuous. Women nevertheless seem to have been more comfortable with this kind of performativity. What is more, they instrumentalized it as a useful tool of protest. Decorating the cross helped protesters to mark it as the signpost of the demonstration and its battle line. Chanting and collective prayer galvanized the first spontaneous gathering into a regular protest, providing it with a focus and helping to maintain it over time. And while these kinds of strategies may have borne a distinctly female signature during the anti-secularization protests of the 1960s and 1970s, that would change again two decades later. Floral decoration and public prayer entered into the aesthetics of the Solidarity movement during the strike at the Gdańsk shipyard in August 1980 and remained popular protest practices in the era of late socialism, embraced by male protesters too.181 The genre of the defense of the cross has itself outlived socialism. After 1989, detached from any genuine struggle for religious freedom, it would continue to be employed as a format for the symbolic occupation of public places and as a tool for othering political opponents. In 1998, when hundreds of crosses were planted on the perimeter of the Auschwitz concentration camp, it was the international Jewish community and “crypto-Jews” (i.e. disloyal Poles) that became the principal Other, this time in a threat to the 181

On the use of flowers during the Gdańsk strikes, see Jan Kubik, The Power of Symbols against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of State Socialism in Poland (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 195. On the use of collective prayer, see Osa, “Creating Solidarity,” 356–359.

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Polish national memory of the country’s own victims.182 Similarly, during the controversy over the so-called Smolensk cross, spontaneously planted in front of the Presidential Palace in Warsaw in the aftermath of the 2010 plane crash, the “defenders of the cross” defined themselves as a community of “real Poles.”183 Thus, since 1945, the cross has morphed into a symbol that is predominantly inwardly directed, but one that retains its crucial boundary-drawing function. The Others that are cast out of the national community may no longer be citizens of foreign, competing states, or actually present ethnic minorities. More often than not they are compatriots. But their exclusion plays the same crucial role of consolidating the core and mobilizing against (imagined) threats.

182

183

Geneviève Zubrzycki, The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in PostCommunist Poland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 164. Czesław Bartnik, “Jak to Kościół prześladuje Polaków . . .,” Nasz Dziennik, July 17–18, 2010, 20.

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4 Solidarity’s Sacred Politics

On July 31, 1981, a four-ton granite cross bearing the date 1940 and the word “Katyń” was smuggled into the Powązki Cemetery in Warsaw inside a garbage truck and surreptitiously assembled inside. However, when on the following day over 10,000 Varsovians turned up to inaugurate the monument, the cross was gone. The Communist authorities had removed it overnight. But the empty spot was quickly filled. A simple wooden crucifix, decorated with flowers and national banners, was planted at the site on the very same day.1 The 1981 incident was just one in a long succession of grassroots attempts to create spaces of mourning for victims of the mass executions of Polish officers carried out at Katyn and other locations by the NKVD in 1940, for which the Soviets officially denied any responsibility until 1990.2 During the renaissance of national memory which followed on the heels of a series of mass strikes in 1980 and the historic “August Agreements” concluded between the Communist authorities and striking shipyard workers in Gdańsk, the commemoration of Katyn gained central importance within a trend of antisystemic memorialization. After the free trade union Solidarity came into being in the course of the iconic strikes and saw its existence legalized as a result of the August Agreements, an investigation of blank spots in Polish historiography became one of the central endeavors of the “revolution” that swept across Poland in the following months. The symbol of the cross, not surprisingly, emerged as a kind of visual shorthand for these efforts.3 1

2

3

Marcin Napiórkowski, Powstanie umarłych: Historia pamięci 1944–2014 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2016), 322–323. The first wooden cross marking a symbolic grave for Katyn victims appeared in Powązki in 1959 and was likewise immediately removed by the secret police. Renewed attempts to honor the victims in the same section of the cemetery led to the establishment of the so-called “Katyn Hollow,” where visitors would deposit crosses, flowers, wreaths, and messages. See Aleksandr Etkind et al., Remembering Katyn (Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2012), 19; Andrzej Przewoźnik and Jolanta Adamska, Katyń: Zbrodnia, prawda, pamięć (Warsaw: Świat Książki, 2010), 388–448. For some visual examples, see the underground stamp series “Krzyże Polskie,” 1986 (FCDCN, Szp 27 III); “Katyń” by KPN Poczta Polska (FSO Xp0264/2); “Katyń 1940 rok” by Wydawnictwo Czas (FSO Xp0254/2); “Seria Pamięci Narodowej” by Poczta KW NSZZ Solidarność Warszawa (ECS/AS/12/I/4/464–468) as well as countless other samizdat

146

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In the decade of Solidarity, the symbol of the cross experienced an unprecedented resurgence in the public space. It was not only one of the most dominant symbols of the iconic strike at the Gdańsk Shipyard in 1980, but also has been “a permanent element of Solidarity’s décor” ever since.4 Its role as a rallying sign of anti-Communist mobilization, sealed during the sixteen months of Solidarity’s legal existence, only increased after the introduction of Martial Law in December 1981, when the Communist authorities disbanded the free union and interned thousands of its members.5 In this last turbulent decade of Communism, as the country transitioned from the effervescence of revolution to a sense of resignation brought about by new political pressures and economic stagnation, the cross became virtually omnipresent in the Polish oppositional landscape. Used in a wide range of settings from strikes to spontaneous street demonstrations, and replicated in countless different forms, from monuments to covertly produced postage stamps, the cross emerged in this period as perhaps the most efficacious and contested political symbol demarcating radical cleavages in a society which now faced systemic transformation.

Branding the Spaces of Dissent In the period between 1980 and 1989 the cross served as the most unequivocal marker of spaces of dissent. Absent from public institutions, it featured prominently in the regional headquarters that Solidarity opened across Poland in 1980 as well as at mass events organized by the movement.6 During Solidarity’s first congress, staged in a sports hall in Gdańsk, one of the most dominant visual elements was a massive electronic scoreboard placed at the center of the assembly which lit up with the sign of the cross and the words Polonia semper fidelis. The installation expressed a powerful desire to brand emerging political spaces in a way that combined progressive spirit with the emotional appeal of tradition.7 The symbol of the cross was not reserved solely for the union’s private gatherings, however. Programmatic memory

4

5

6

7

publications on the subject, e.g. Jan Abramski and Ryszard Żywiecki, Katyń (Wrocław: Niezależne Wydawnictwo, 1981) (FCDCN, AR 4056 III RARA); Katyń: 41 rocznica mordu oficerów W.P. (Kielce: NZS, 1981) (FCDCN, AR 2126 II RARA). Jan Kubik, The Power of Symbols against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of State Socialism in Poland (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 189. Martial Law was introduced on December 13, 1981, suspended on December 31, 1982, and officially ended on July 22, 1983. Wojciech Modzelewski, “Symbolika Solidarności,” in Studia nad ruchami społecznymi, edited by Piotr Marciniak and Wojciech Modzelewski (Warsaw: Uniwersytet Warszawski, 1989), 229–279, here 275. Timothy Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity 1980–82 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983), 208.

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projects implemented under the aegis of Solidarity in the brief period of its legal existence brought the symbol into the public eye too. All the major memorials dedicated to workers killed in upheavals against the Communist regime and constructed in the aftermath of the August Agreements prominently featured the motif of the cross.8 A New York Times journalist who visited Gdańsk in 1983 and saw the newly built Gdańsk memorial, consisting of three forty-two-meter-high crosses, compared it to “a fist [. . .] in concrete” that the party “can do nothing about except dynamite it, which would probably dynamite Poland.”9 Cross monuments such as these, built in Gdańsk (1980) and Poznań (1981), not only marked the cityscapes, becoming central venues for subsequent demonstrations but also came to function as symbols in their own right, featuring on posters and stamps and reproduced as miniatures and pins.10 The 1980s also saw renewed attempts to reintroduce crucifixes into public institutions. On the heels of Solidarity’s revolution of August 1980, the ceremonial hanging of crucifixes in public schools and factories became a way of voicing support for the burgeoning opposition movement.11 Once the window for this systematic rebranding of spaces had closed with the introduction of Martial Law, displaying crucifixes, particularly in schools, again became an act of nonconformism. Conflicts over the presence of crosses in public institutions thus continued throughout the decade.12 The Communist secret police monitored this outbreak of symbolic activism across the country in minute detail, documenting small local acts of defiance in weekly newsletters addressed to the Central Committee. Among the events 8

9 10

11

12

While the monuments to the uprisings of June 1956 in Poznań and December 1970 in Gdańsk had the shape of crosses, the smaller memorial in Gdynia was built on the footprint of a cross. Abraham M. Rosenthal, “The Trees of Warsaw,” The New York Times, 7 August, 1983, 22. The motif of the Poznań crosses also, for example, adorned the outdoor altar during the annual pilgrimage of workers to Jasna Góra in 1986. See Piotr Grzelczak, Poznański Czerwiec 1956: Walka o Pamięć w latach 1956–1989 (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Nauka i Innowacje, 2016), 513. The blessings of crosses that were to be hung in public institutions were mass events in their own right. See Teresa Sowińska (ed.), NSZZ Solidarność XXV lat (Gdańsk: Studio ATS, 2005), 104. In Włoszczowa, in a protest against the removal of crosses from their school, about 200 pupils, accompanied by two priests, occupied the school building for two weeks in December 1984. In Miętne, pupils began to strike in December 1984 after realizing that the crucifixes which had been hung in classrooms in 1980 had been removed. Both episodes drew the attention of the official press. See Anna Krawiecka, “Modlitwa czy polityka?,” Magazyn Słowo Ludu, Kielce, December 8–9, 1984, 1, 4. For contemporary analysis of the events, see Anna Wasak (ed.), Obrona krzyża w Miętnem: Wspomnienia, dokumenty, relacje (Radom: Polwen, 2004); Tadeusz Krawczak and Cyprian Wilanowski, Kościół w stanie wojennym: Wybór dokumentów z Archiwum Akt Nowych (Warsaw: Pax, 2008), 293–301.

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deemed worthy of reporting, for example, was a Sunday sermon delivered in the parish of Broniszewice, where, two months into Martial Law, a local priest displayed a Solidarity banner on the pulpit and announced that, as soon as the state of emergency was lifted, he would bless new crosses to be hung in local schools.13 The Central Committee was also informed about a primary school in the town of Miastko, where a wooden cross of dimensions 30 × 40 centimeters was found hanging in the corridor with a placard attached underneath saying: “Think twice before you carry out the shameful act of removing a cross. The person who dares to take down this innocent cross shall suffer the harshest of punishments: a paralysis of the entire body [. . .]. We declare that if this innocent cross is taken down, we will hang it anew as many times as necessary. We want God at school. So help us God.”14

The seemingly disproportionate attention given by the central authorities to such local incidents suggests that symbolic manifestations of this kind were treated seriously and recognized as clearly anti-systemic. Although some of these incidents followed the pattern of the anti-decrucification protests of 1958, their political significance was much more pronounced now. Conflicts over the presence of the cross in public spaces, such as two major school protests in 1984, resonated widely in opposition circles and gained iconic status.15 The theme of the cross defense also entered the repertoire of anti-systemic chants and protest songs, thus being sanctioned as a canonical form of anti-systemic behavior.16 After 1980, marking public spaces with crosses was a clear way of manifesting political allegiance with Solidarity. That this “sacralization” of public spaces had less to do with executing the right to religious freedom than with making a political statement, underpinned by sentiments of exclusionary ethnic nationalism, was particularly clear in places where such initiatives were carried out by nonCatholic communities. When, in Białystok, home to a considerable Belarusian 13

14

15

16

“Informacja nr III/69/82: Niektóre przejawy działalności kleru, 27.02.1982.” Cited in Krawczak and Wilanowski, Kościół w stanie wojennym, 18. “Niektóre przejawy działalności kleru, 31.05.1982.” Cited in Krawczak and Wilanowski, Kościół w stanie wojennym, 87. After crucifixes had been removed from a school in Włoszczowa, 200 pupils, accompanied by two priests, went on a two-week-long occupation strike, while in the town of Miętne students kept on demonstrating and retrieving removed crucifixes well into 1985, until a compromise with the authorities had been reached. See Wasak, Obrona krzyża w Miętnem; Krawczak and Wilanowski, Kościół w stanie wojennym, 293–301. For example, Krzyż Chrystusa, performed at the site of the floral cross in Warsaw, which opens with the following stanza: “Nie damy Chryste krzyża zdjąć / Ze szkół, szpitali – domów / Twój znak będziemy jawnie czczić / Nie w kącie po kryjomu” (“We will not allow the cross to be taken down / In schools, hospitals, and our homes / We shall honor Your sign in public / Not surreptitiously in a corner”). See “Wybór pieśni śpiewanych pod krzyżem z kwiatów w Warszawie,” FCDCN, AR2721 II, 29.

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minority, Solidarity members moved to hang an Orthodox cross next to the Catholic one inside the union’s office, the regional Solidarity chapter refused on the grounds that an Orthodox crucifix would “irritate” members due to its “Russian associations.”17 Although this single episode may not fully capture the complexity of interethnic relations within the Solidarity movement, it illustrates well the fact that crosses were more than symbols of religious expression to the organization. Similarly, the cross removals that swiftly followed the implementation of Martial Law were motivated less by the secularization agenda than by the objective of quenching political opposition.

Mourning the Martyrs Because the cross plays such a central role in Christian mourning rituals, it naturally dominated Solidarity’s efforts to commemorate victims of state violence. Mourning the striking workers shot dead, in particular, during the demonstrations of 1956 in Poznań and 1970 in Gdańsk had a crucial symbolic function for the movement. Since Solidarity framed its struggle as a continuation of these earlier workers’ upheavals, imagery of mourning and victimhood occupied a very prominent position in the movement’s visual culture. With new casualties of state repression losing their lives during the period of Martial Law and its aftermath, commemoration of the dead became increasingly central to Solidarity’s symbolic practices. The symbol of the cross was nearly omnipresent on oppositional posters, flyers, and stamps honoring the movement’s martyrs. Some of these commemorated particular instances of violence, such as Krystyna Janiszewska’s iconic poster Grudzień 1970 (December 1970), on which the digit 7 was stylized as a cross. Others featured whole lists of places where deadly clashes had occurred between striking workers and riot police, such as Poznań 1956, Gdańsk/ Gdynia 1970, Radom/Ursus 1976, Wujek 1981, and Lubin 1982.18 These dates alone, in conjunction with the symbol of the cross, sufficed to direct an accusatory message towards the oppressive regime. One special commemorative genre was death notices hung in public places featuring the names of 17

18

Sergiusz Kowalski, Krytyka solidarnościowego rozumu: Studium z socjologii myślenia potocznego (Warsaw: PEN, 1990), 94. Tomasz Szczepański, who analyzes Solidarity’s relations with different ethnic minorities in Poland, notes that, in the case of the Belarusian minority in Białystok, there was a degree of mutual mistrust as many ethnically Polish oppositionists considered Belarusians en masse as loyal to the Communist regime, while some Belarusians feared opposition groups were essentially anti-Belarusian. At the same time, however, he also confirms that some Belarusians in the region were active members of Solidarity structures. See Tomasz Szczepański, Mniejszości narodowe w myśli politycznej opozycji polskiej w latach 1980–1989 (Toruń: Adam Marszałek, 2008), 240–250. For example, “1956, 1968, 1970, 1976, 1980–83 . . . Wieczne odpoczywanie racz im dać Panie,” leaflet, FSO, Afisze Chojn. ˂W-wa˃ 2000.

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Fig. 16. Krystyna Janiszewska, December 1970. Archive of the European Solidarity Center in Gdańsk.

individual victims of police brutality or dedicated to “all victims of the Communist regime.”19 Using the familiar form of these outdoor death announcements, which are traditional in Poland, and subtly altering their neutral character by adding a Solidarity logo or barbed wire to their design, their makers turned them into subversive objects. Some victims of the regime, such as the outspoken Solidarity supporter Father Jerzy Popiełuszko, murdered by the secret police in 1984, and Grzegorz Przemyk, who died as a result of police brutality in 1983, inspired more personalized acts of commemoration.20 Underground iconography of the 19

20

For example, “Wszystkim ofiarom Władzy ludowej 1944–1983,” leaflet, FSO, Afisze Chojn. ˂W-wa˃ 2000. Two other victims of police brutality, Stanisław Pyjas and Bogdan Włosik, are likewise represented alongside the symbol of the cross in Solidarity’s iconography. See Niezależna Poczta Pomorza, “Bądź patronem zaginionych, torturowanych, zamordowanych.” FSO, 02-005-Xp 1117/5.

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1980s not only pictured them accompanied by the symbol of the cross but also, as in the case of Popiełuszko, set against the background of the cross, or carrying a cross, suggesting a symbolic crucifixion.21 Hugely popular in his lifetime due to his political activism, after his tragic death Popiełuszko immediately gained the status of a martyr – a status underscored by the Catholic Church’s initiation of a process of beatification that concluded in 2010. This posthumous cult, expressed for example in the form of symbolic graves that appeared at many cemeteries across Poland,22 had a clear political dimension too. Popiełuszko’s funeral evolved into a mass demonstration of support for Solidarity, while his sermons openly criticizing the Communist authorities circulated in multiple underground print and audio editions.23

Performing Protest While religious rites of mourning offered protesters a safe “exit option,” allowing them to veil their often deeply subversive actions as religious practice, another reason for the immense popularity of the symbol of the cross in Solidarity’s protest culture was its high adaptability for performative use. Throughout Solidarity’s decade, crosses were planted, worn, carried in marches, and used as highly symbolic protest props. Much like during the January Uprising of 1863, crosses were used as “patriotic jewelry” distributed among opposition activists in the form of pins, pendants, or miniatures.24 During Pope John Paul II’s visit to Poznań in 1983, after the authorities banned him from stopping at the memorial to the victims of 1956, Solidarity activists prepared thousands of miniature wooden copies of the memorial to be held by those attending the papal holy mass.25 The cross was also publicly displayed during strikes and official meetings of the free unions. 21

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See, for example, the front cover of Jerzy Popiełuszko, Homilie, FCDCN, AR8182 II, or the stamp issued by Solidarność Białystok to mark the third anniversary of his death: “Rocznica zabójstwa ks. Jerzego Popiełuszki,” FotoKarta, AOZ_0824. Popiełuszko was also portrayed as carrying a cross in Polish folk art of the period, e.g. Anonymous, “Ks. J. Popiełuszko,” 1994, in the collection of Jürgen Telschow. “Informacja II/75/84: Niektóre przejawy działalności kleru katolickiego w okresie od 1 października do 11 listopada 1984 r.,” November 13, 1984, cited in Krawczak and Wilanowski, Kościół w stanie wojennym, 290. For example, Jerzy Popiełuszko, Homilie, FCDCN, AR8182 II; Jerzy Popiełuszko, Cena miłości ojczyzny, 1985; “Msza święta w intencji Ojczyzny,” FSO, HA PL Ep 2538; Jerzy Popiełuszko, Jestem gotowy na wszystko (Kraków: Biblioteka Miesięcznika Małopolskiego, 1985), FSO, HAPL Ep 1534; Ziarno rzucone w polską ziemię: Kazania ks. Popiełuszki, audio cassette vols. 1–2, Kraków, 1984; Ostatnie homilie, audio cassette, 1984. BN, Fon.52.544 A. Marcin Kula, Narodowe i rewolucyjne (London: Aneks, 1991), 297. Grzelczak, Poznański Czerwiec 1956, 503; “Niektóre sygnały z informacji KW w sprawie wizyty papieża Nr 2 z dn. 17 VI 1982,” cited in Krawczak and Wilanowski, Kościół w stanie wojennym, 189.

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During the Poznań congress of Rural Solidarity in 1981 a member of the public, clad in a traditional outfit of the Tatra mountaineers, held up an approximately two-meter-high crucifix directly behind the speakers’ pulpit for the entire duration of the deliberations.26 Some Solidarity leaders were also known to wear oversized crucifixes on their chest during their public appearances.27 Large wooden crosses were used as props during marches, demonstrations, and occupation strikes.28 They were also planted outdoors to commemorate important anniversaries of the Solidarity movement, such as the signing of the August Agreements of 1980.29 While many practices involving the symbol of the cross – such as using it to decorate strike venues – became almost canonical, the symbol also afforded a large degree of performative creativity. Prominent Solidarity activist Anna Walentynowicz recalls that during the 1970 clashes with police in Gdańsk wounded workers were treated in a small shipyard hospital, which “hung out white sheets with crosses smeared with the victims’ blood”30 for each of the casualties. Solemn oaths of loyalty to the Solidarity movement were another ritual-like use of the symbol. Józef Przybylski, a participant in the strike at the Gdańsk Shipyard in 1980, recalls a member of the Interfactory Strike Committee, who had previously been an active member of the Communist Party, standing up during the proceedings and swearing an oath of loyalty to the Solidarity movement “by kissing the crucifix that hung on the wall of the assembly hall.”31 Perhaps the most ingenious form of protest developed in the Solidarity decade was the use of so-called floral crosses (krzyże kwietne). Cross-shaped arrangements of fresh flowers spontaneously placed on the ground in public locations across Poland combined the form of a street performance with religious devotion. Passersby who brought flowers to these installations or were just visiting them would not only participate in collective prayer but also chant oppositional songs or commemorate victims of state violence. 26

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See photo by Lech Ścibor Rylski, “Zjazd zjednoczeniowy NSZZ Rolników Indywidualnych Solidarność . . .,” FotoKarta, IPA_001-21A-022. Jan Kubik, for instance, notes that Seweryn Jaworski, one of the leaders of Solidarity in the Mazowsze region, would appear in public with a huge cross on his chest. See Kubik, The Power of Symbols, 189. For example, during the Rural Solidarity demonstration in Warsaw on February 10, 1981; an occupational strike in Ustrzyki Dolne in January 1981; a protest at the School for Firefighters in Warsaw; or the triumphant march ending the 1988 strike at the Gdańsk Shipyard. For visual documentation see, for instance, Lech Ścibor-Rylski, “Manifestacja NSZZ Solidarność Wiejska . . .,” FotoKarta, IPA_001-22a-052; “Rozmowy komisji rządowej . . .,” FotoKarta, IPA_001-22b-050; “Strajk w Wyższej Oficerskiej Szkole Pożarnictwa . . .,” FotoKarta, OK_1826_0001_0003_020. Adam Szymański, “Wkopanie krzyża na terenie Huty Warszawa . . .,” FotoKarta, OK_026883. Anna Walentynowicz, “Fragmenty wspomnień: Grudzień 1970,” cited in Franciszek Langner, Bruk był naszym przyjacielem: 1956, 1968, 1970, 1976 (Piła: Wydawnictwo Lech, 1986), 23. FCDCN, AR 5460. Józef Przybylski, “Wspomnienia,” Kontakt 1, 21 (1984): 29–37, here 32. FSO, Fa 35.

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Fig. 17. A memorial pin with the photograph of a floral cross made for the occasion of John Paul II’s visit to Poland in 1983. Archive of the European Solidarity Center in Gdańsk.

The first such floral cross appeared in one of Warsaw’s main squares, Plac Zwycięstwa (today Plac Piłsudskiego), in May 1981. The immediate trigger for the installation was the death of Primate Wyszyński, which inspired an outpouring of collective mourning across Poland. Initiated as a tribute to the late hierarch, the floral cross – maintained daily by a group of local women – soon turned into a popular site of protest. After initial attempts on the part of the authorities to remove it, and especially after the introduction of Martial Law, the cross became a symbol of nonviolent defiance against the regime and a site of commemoration for victims of state repression.32 Alongside flowers, the installation incorporated other symbolic elements, such as bulletins containing information about the fate 32

Magdalena Michalska-Ciarka, “Warszawski Krzyż z kwiatów,” Polska Sztuka Ludowa: Konteksty 48, 1/2 (1994): 86–97, here 88–91.

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of interned Solidarity activists, Polish national flags, the emblem of the crowned white eagle, photographs of Lech Wałęsa and John Paul II, and lumps of coal in memory of the miners shot dead at the Wujek mine in December 1981.33 In 1982 activists replaced one of the concrete pavement slabs next to the cross with a plaque commemorating the victims of Martial Law. When this was removed overnight by the police, the empty hole where it had been located gained symbolic status too, with visitors filling it with fresh flowers.34 The cross in Plac Zwycięstwa also became a platform of communication, where open calls for action, leaflets, or even letters to state leaders were deposited. In September 1982, for instance, secret police intercepted a note addressed to President Ronald Reagan thanking him “for his personal contribution to defending Poland against Communism.”35 The floral cross became a meeting point on important anniversaries, such as those of the signing of the August Agreements or the introduction of Martial Law. Varsovians also gathered there to commemorate the student protests of March 1968 and the workers’ revolts of 1956 and 1970 as well as to celebrate May Day and May 3 (the anniversary of the May Constitution of 1791).36 Demonstrations at the floral cross soon developed their own repertoire of songs, chants, and poems, but also a specific protest dynamic that oscillated between open political dissent and religious devotion.37 When riot police surrounded the gathering during a demonstration in 1982, with commanders issuing an order not to disturb “people in prayer,” one eyewitness reports that “everybody threw themselves down on their knees and said a collective ‘Our Father.’”38 In time, the floral installation became a symbol in its own right. It inspired a popular song that circulated in multiple versions and featured on pins distributed during the 1983 pilgrimage of John Paul II to Poland.39 The site also

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Michalska-Ciarka, “Warszawski Krzyż z kwiatów,” 90, 94; “Niektóre przejawy działalności kleru 29.09.1982,” cited in Krawczak and Wilanowski, Kościół w stanie wojennym, 152. Bronisław Baczko, Wyobrażenia społeczne: Szkice o nadziei i pamięci zbiorowej (Warsaw: PWN, 1994), 222. “Niektóre przejawy działalności kleru 20.09.1982,” cited in Krawczak and Wilanowski, Kościół w stanie wojennym, 149. Michalska-Ciarka, “Warszawski Krzyż z kwiatów,” 91–92. Wybór pieśni śpiewanych pod krzyżem z kwiatów w Warszawie (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo CDN, n.d.), FCDCN, AR2721II. Michalska-Ciarka, “Warszawski Krzyż z kwiatów,” 92. In the original: “Takie kwiaty jakie kwitną tu / Na warszawskim placu to prawdziwy cud / Szpicle i armaty stoją przeciw nim / Pałki, automaty, milicyjne psy. / Nielegalne kwiaty, zakazany krzyż / Co dnia wyrastają z betonowych płyt / Ludzie je składają wierni sercom swym / Co w nadziei trwają przeciw mocom złym.” (“The flowers that blossom here / in the Varsovian square are a true miracle / Spies and cannons stand against them / Batons, machine guns, and police dogs. / Illegal flowers, the forbidden cross / which grow out of concrete tiles / People true to their hearts lay them down / to hold on to hope in the face of evil powers.”)

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attracted the attention of Western journalists and tourists.40 In 1983 a New York Times reporter went so far as to call the Warsaw floral cross a “political tourist center for foreigners.”41 Agents of the secret police reported in 1982 that school trips to Warsaw made an obligatory stop at the floral cross and freshly married couples were bringing their wedding bouquets there.42 When, in August 1982, the authorities fenced off the square for renovation, in an attempt to curtail such practices, new floral crosses appeared in four other locations throughout Warsaw.43 By September of the same year, the practice had spread to Kraków and Tarnów.44 Spontaneously arranged floral crosses would also appear to commemorate specific deaths, such as that of Grzegorz Przemyk,45 or sites of bloody clashes with the police, such as in Lubin in August 1982.46 While religious symbols made their way into political demonstrations, political messages also penetrated some religious practices. Two specific genres of religious cult that lent themselves well to political appropriation were the tradition of the “Lord’s Tomb” – three-dimensional installations of Jesus’s sepulcher traditionally set up in Polish Catholic churches on Good Friday – and the procession of the via crucis. Both experienced a revival of sorts during the 1980s as they became vehicles of more or less subtle political subtexts. Lord’s Tombs have a long tradition of political significance and, at least since the partitions, of incorporating national symbols and referencing Poland’s lack of sovereignty.47 After the introduction of Martial Law, such references became

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O krzyżu kwietnym w Warszawie, in Wybór pieśni śpiewanych pod krzyżem z kwiatów w Warszawie, 12. When the police cleared the flowers in May 1982, a Los Angeles Times reporter addressed the press office of the President of Warsaw to enquire about the decision, causing some concern among the secret police. “Niektóre przejawy działalności kleru 31.05.1982,” cited in Krawczak and Wilanowski, Kościół w stanie wojennym, 84. Rosenthal, “The Trees of Warsaw,” 22. “Niektóre przejawy działalności kleru, 21 czerwiec 1982,” cited in Krawczak and Wilanowski, Kościół w stanie wojennym, 91. A secret police report from August 27 enumerates four churches in front of which Varsovians placed floral crosses: St. Ann’s in Krakowskie Przedmieście, St. Paul’s in Grochowska Street, the Church of the Virgin Mary’s Heart in Chłopicki Street, and the Church of the Order of the Visitation of the Virgin Mary. See “Niektóre przejawy działalności kleru 27 sierpień 1982,” cited in Krawczak and Wilanowski, Kościół w stanie wojennym, 134. “Niektóre przejawy działalności kleru 29.09.1982,” cited in Krawczak and Wilanowski, Kościół w stanie wojennym, 152. One such cross was created in Warsaw in May 1984 to commemorate the first anniversary of Przemyk’s death. See Janusz Bałanda Rydzewski, “Krzyż ułożony z kwiatów . . .,” ESC, ECS/T/F/0073. See photo documentation of the commemorative actions in Lubin in the aftermath of the clashes on August 31, 1982, by Krzysztof Raczkowiak at “Lubin 31.08.1982,” www .lubin82.pl/index.html (accessed June 7, 2019). Jędrzej Kitowicz, Opis obyczajów za panowania Augusta III (Gdańsk: Wirtualna Biblioteka Literatury Polskiej, [1840]), 39–40, https://literat.ug.edu.pl/kitowic/index

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more numerous again, and the installations often offered a visual commentary on the current political situation.48 One frequently used motif was the Gdańsk monument to the fallen shipyard workers, which was reproduced in miniature in many such installations across Poland.49 Broken crucifixes, barbed wire, and anchors likewise belonged to the popular Easter décor of Polish churches of the period, alluding to the regime’s violent clampdown on the opposition.50 Another performative genre developed in the 1980s was the patriotic via crucis service, which would offer participants a list of painful events from Poland’s history as themes to meditate on, while commemorating the stations of Christ’s crucifixion. Such “Ways of the Cross of the Polish Nation” existed both in the form of spatial installations and in the form of brochures distributed by the underground press. In 1986, an installation of crosses bearing the dates of Polish uprisings (1830, 1863) and other significant events in Polish history (such as the Battle of Warsaw in 1920 and the Gdańsk Shipyard strike of 1980) appeared outside of the St. Stanisław Kostka Church in Warsaw. Known as “The Way of the Cross of the Fatherland,” this highly popular display featured the motto “Whatever may come, Poland shall be resurrected,” clearly framing the country’s political predicament in a teleology of death and rebirth.51 Another such site of cult practice appeared in Głogowiec in central Poland, where local Solidarity members constructed an outdoor via crucis, with each of the fifteen chapels displaying a double theme: a scene from the story of Christ’s crucifixion and a corresponding event from modern Polish history. For example, station three, “Jesus falls for the first time,” carried the subtitle “The first partition of Poland 1772,” while “Jesus is placed in the tomb” was coupled with “Poland in the power of atheism 1945.” The most explicit and final station, “Resurrection,”

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.htm (accessed July 10, 2022); Stanisław Soszyński, Groby wielkanocne w latach okupacji 1940–1944 w kościele św. Anny w Warszawie (Warsaw: Fundacja “Moje Wojenne Dzieciństwo,” 2006); Andrzej Falkiewicz, “Kultura Stanu Wojennego: Notatki do opisu,” Wezwanie no. 4 (1982): 51–54, FCDCN, A 415723 II RARA; Dariusz Kosiński, Teatra polskie: Historie (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 2010). Similar accents would also occasionally appear in the nativity scenes displayed in churches over Christmas, where crosses would also be used as symbols of regime violence against the oppositionists. Kula, for instance, describes a nativity scene referencing internment camps (Kula, Narodowe i rewolucyjne, 297). After the murder of Jerzy Popiełuszko, a remarkable nativity scene was also displayed at the Church of St. Stanisław Kostka in Warsaw, in which the baby Jesus was placed inside the trunk of a Fiat 126p. The same type of car was used by the secret police officers who murdered the priest in 1984: Jerzy Kalina, “Symboliczny Pojazd Betlejemski,” FotoKarta, OK_026243. See also Renata Rogozińska, W stronę Golgoty: Inspiracje pasyjne w sztuce polskiej w latach 1970–1999 (Poznań: Księgarnia Świętego Wojciecha, 2002), 28. “Niektóre przejawy aktualnej działalności kleru 17.04.1982,” cited in Krawczak and Wilanowski, Kościół w stanie wojennym, 49–50. “Niektóre przejawy działalności kleru w okresie 6 kwietnia–30 kwietnia br. 30.04.1984,” cited in Krawczak and Wilanowski, Kościół w stanie wojennym, 263. Kula, Narodowe i rewolucyjne, 306, 343.

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simply bore the logo of Solidarity. The accompanying brochure, The Way of the Cross of the Polish Nation in Głogowiec, which appeared as a samizdat publication, provided texts for meditation concentrating on the historic suffering of the Polish nation.52 It was only one of a number of patriotically themed prayer books. Another example, The Polish Way of the Cross, published in Kraków in 1986, referenced the massacre at the Wujek coal mine in 1981 and the casualties of 1970 in Gdańsk, where police opened fire on demonstrating workers.53 The crucifixion of the Polish nation, a topos already heavily exploited by the nineteenth-century Romantics, returned in the 1980s with renewed force. The familiar motifs of crucifixes, chains, and tombs came to serve as shorthand for the Communist “enslavement” of the country. They also helped to depict Poland as a “messiah of nations” leading the anti-Communist revolution in the region.54 This apotheosis of Poland not only equated the Passion of Christ with the suffering of the Polish nation, but also narrated the biblical story of salvation as set in 1980s Poland.

The Apotheosis of Poland The motif of the cross drawn into the outline of Poland’s borders, the white eagle nailed to the crucifix, and the national flag waving atop it – all to be found in Solidarity’s underground publications – carried this message in a most succinct way.55 In this kind of iconography, not only is the Polish nation defined by Christianity, but Poland has its place in the history of salvation. This rhetorical device is even more evident in the textual medium. Vernacular poetry, protest songs, and prayers written during the decade of Solidarity often conflate Biblical time with the present. For example, a song from the underground volume Polish Patriotic Christmas Carols sets the nativity in a Polish factory under Martial Law. Left in the toolroom, Swaddled with oakum and rags, In a wooden crate, Baby Jesus lies.

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Antoni Lenkiewicz, Droga Krzyżowa Polskiego Narodu w Głogowcu k/Kutna, FCDCN, AR1573II. Andrzej Radwański, Polska Droga Krzyżowa (Kraków, 1986), FCDCN, AR8241II. Kubik, The Power of Symbols, 189. See also Geneviève Zubrzycki, The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 72–73. “Zmartwychwstaniemy: Jeruzalem polskie,” leaflet, FSO, Afisze Chojn. ˂W-wa˃ 2000; “Jest,” Poczta Solidarność, FSO, 02–005-Xp 1324; “Ruch Odwaga i Prawda im. Ks. Jerzego Popiełuszki,” 1986, FSO, Xp1127/1; “Bliski jest czas zmartwychwstania,” FSO, Karty Pocztowe 1988–1992 FSO 2005.

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Fig. 18. A Solidarity poster titled “We shall resurrect. The Polish Jerusalem.” Archive of the Research Center for East European Studies at the University of Bremen.

In the depot, We’ll keep you safe, No one will rat on you, While you’re sleeping there. We’ll feed you margarine, From our ration cards. Grow to save us, Baby Jesus ours.56 56

J.J., “Kolęda ’81,” in Polskie kolędy patriotyczne 1831–1983 (Biblioteka Literacka, 1983), 93, FCDCN, AR7549II. In the original: “Położyli w narzędziowni / W skrzynce / Pakuł, szmat podścielili / Dziecince, / Przechowamy Ciebie / Na zajezdni, / By Cię znów nie zakapował / Jeden z nich. / Podzielimy się kartkową / Margaryną. / Rośnij nam na zbawienie / Dziecino.”

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Not only are the events of the New Testament set against a Polish background, but also the suppression of the Solidarity movement is portrayed as being of concern to Biblical figures. A booklet entitled The Way of the Cross of Polish Workers, published in Nowa Huta in 1985, provides, under the caption “Jesus meets His mother Mary,” a meditation text reading as follows: “What great suffering filled Her heart, when Her Son suffered a heinous death. What great suffering filled Her heart when, on December 13, the Polish nation was subjected to Martial Law!”57 Similarly, the Station of the Cross “Jesus falls for the third time” reads as follows: The goal was near, but fatigue and the weight of the cross were breaking Jesus’s strength. The strength of Polish workers fighting for justice and respect for their labor had been extinguished too, but they were rising anew, with twice the force, assuming responsibility for the rule of law and the moral order in the life of our Fatherland.58

In the symbolic language of Solidarity, Poland is Christ and the cause of antiCommunist opposition is equal in importance to the work of salvation. Seen from this perspective, the symbol of the cross becomes not only a reference to Poland’s martyrdom and lack of sovereignty but also shorthand for the nation’s exceptional role in history and the sacred character of antiCommunist mobilization.

Solidarity’s “Sacred Politics” This framing of Solidarity’s political endeavors as endowed with a transcendent dimension correlated with the manner in which the movement set its priorities on the political scene. Solidarity’s intensive use of religious symbols and attention to demands relating to the symbolic sphere, such as calls for the erection of new monuments, contributed to a specific mode of political articulation that Roman Laba succinctly labeled “sacred politics.”59 “Sacred politics” framed the conflict with the Communist authorities as “symbolic warfare,” foregrounding emotions rather than pragmatic demands.60 While at the founding of the movement just a small proportion of Solidarity’s symbols had a religious character and economic demands were decidedly to the fore, in time, particularly under Martial Law, the symbolic 57

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Droga krzyżowa polskiego świata pracy: W oparciu o teksty Ojca Świętego Jana Pawła II (Nowa Huta Mistrzejowice: Duszpasterstwo Ludzi Pracy, 1985), unpaginated. Ibid. Roman Laba, The Roots of Solidarity: A Political Sociology of Poland’s Working-Class Democratization (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 126. The term “symbolic warfare” comes from Laba, The Roots of Solidarity, 127. See also Kubik, The Power of Symbols, 186; Kula, Narodowe i rewolucyjne, 299.

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dimension intensified, and the religious framing of Solidarity’s protests gained in strength.61 Jadwiga Staniszkis, a Polish sociologist and Solidarity’s political adviser in 1980, was among the first to analyze this feature of the movement, noting that Solidarity’s revolution followed the typical Polish template of being “experienced through changes in culture and morality rather than in the form of thorough institutional reforms.”62 Staniszkis bemoaned this tendency of “playing politics through symbols,” considering it a “virus” which, originating in the political culture of the Polish intelligentsia, had infected the workers’ movement.63 Other scholars, however, have noted that “sacred politics,” rather than simply being written into Poland’s cultural DNA, may have been a conscious strategic choice. The tactical efficacy of “sacred politics,” according to Laba, consisted in offering a narrative of the “martyred proletarian and his imminent resurrection” that “uniquely combined the European socialist tradition with nationalism.”64 Joining the ethos of the workers’ struggle with the apotheosis of the nation, Solidarity’s message appealed to different political camps within the movement and possessed a formidable mobilizing power. The fact that a workers’ protest articulated itself primarily via religious and national symbols was also conditioned by the difficulties involved in incorporating traditional symbols of the workers’ movement. First of all, these had been appropriated by the socialist state.65 Second, as social historian Marcin Kula notes, the post-1945 Polish working class became alienated from the symbols of their predecessors in interwar Poland but failed to develop their own in the postwar decades.66 Since the regime was occupying this semantic field, Solidarity essentially had the choice of either assertively reappropriating the symbols of the workers’ struggle or choosing a different symbolic repertoire entirely. Although attempts to reconquer socialist traditions were also made, Catholic visual motifs and performativity emerged as the more popular option for a number of reasons. First of all, they perfectly served the function of demarcating the opposition movement from the state because they belonged to a pool of symbols that the secular state could in no way claim for itself.67 Second, changes in religiosity that had taken place since World War II facilitated the appropriation of religious practice. The sociologist of religion Władysław Piwowarski diagnosed this process as a demise of individual 61 62

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Laba, The Roots of Solidarity, 153; Kubik, The Power of Symbols, 186; Jadwiga Staniszkis, Poland’s Self-Limiting Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 10. Ibid., 82. Laba, The Roots of Solidarity, 126. Zubrzycki, The Crosses of Auschwitz, 66. Kula, Narodowe i rewolucyjne, 283. Ibid., 118.

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spirituality in favor of the conviction that religion is, in the first place, “a tool to achieve [. . .] freedom and independence.”68 This instrumentalization of religion as a means to satisfy collective rather than strictly spiritual needs finds some reflection in documents of the time. The authors of the programmatic manifesto of national memory Kazano zapomnieć (We Were Told to Forget), published underground in 1981, declare that religion is “a source of authentic emotions, of not necessarily spiritual character, [such as] a sense of national dignity.”69 In fact, harnessing religious symbols to articulate national pride was not an exclusively postwar phenomenon, as Catholic religious symbols had also been heavily used in public expressions of patriotism during the interwar period. What might have become more pronounced by the 1980s, however, was the discrepancy between dwindling private religious convictions and the collective acceptance of religious symbols as a valid language in which to express political identity. It was thus not uncommon for atheist opposition activists to attend Catholic services solely for the empowering experience of being part of the movement.70 Another factor that fueled the rise of “sacred politics” in the decade of Solidarity was the ongoing crisis of legitimacy faced by Communist power holders. As Jan Kubik argues the fact that the regime never lived up to the standards that lay at the heart of its ideology led to a “corrosion of political culture and a gradual atrophy of the domain of values.”71 The vacuum that emerged needed to be filled with “any set of values” to provide new “standards for the political game.”72 Pre-existing templates, such as messianic nationalism, were most likely to fill the void. While this rising presence of Catholic ritual and rhetoric in the public space clearly posed a threat to the values represented by the secular state, paradoxically, during the sixteen months following the signing of the August Agreements, religiously styled oppositional activities were in fact welcomed by the authorities as a “safe” way to channel the revolutionary fervor. When, in the summer of 1981, Solidarity was preparing to unveil the memorial to the workers killed during the 1956 protests in Poznań, representatives of the state actually lobbied in favor of the celebrations following a “religious formula.”73 Similarly, ahead of the May Day demonstrations planned by the opposition in 1983, secret police in Wrocław distributed faked flyers signed by the Regional 68

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Władysław Piwowarski, Socjologia religii (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego, 1996), 181. In a 1991 poll that Piwowarski quotes here, only 10 percent of Poles qualified as “deeply religious.” Kazano zapomnieć (Siedlce: NSZZ Solidarność, 1981), 13. BN, 1.999.209. See, for example, the memoirs of an activist imprisoned in 1981–1982: Zamknięcie: Z życia wyjęci (Wydawnictwo Słowo, 1983), 18. FCDCN, R 4445 III. Kubik, The Power of Symbols, 253. Ibid., 253–254. Grzelczak, Poznański Czerwiec 1956, 429.

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Strike Committee calling on Solidarity supporters to congregate in churches for prayer on May 1.74 Containing emotionally intense mass events within predictable, ritualized formats that could, even if against the grain of popular perception, be classified by the power holders as strictly religious, helped the authorities save face, and avoid openly anti-systemic and confrontational outbreaks. While sociologists and historians seem to agree that the emergence of “sacred politics” was conditioned both by already well-established cultural paradigms and by a deficit of other viable grammars of protest, opinions are divided as to the role religious symbols played for the democratic opposition movement. While some stress the efficacy of this symbolic language in inspiring a sense of collective identity, others conclude that “oversymbolization” was actually counterproductive to the movement’s agenda. On the one hand, the marriage of Catholic symbolism with nationalism was, as Kubik notes, “instrumental in assuring Solidarity’s underground survival” during Martial Law.75 Zubrzycki goes a step farther to say that religious symbols adopted by Solidarity had a central role in helping to articulate Polish national identity and became “the stitching of the nation itself.”76 For Staniszkis, on the other hand, the heavy focus on the symbolic testified to shortsightedness and inability to push for structural change.77 Others see Solidarity’s overgrown symbolic domain merely as an attempt to compensate for the organization’s weakness vis-à-vis the all-powerful state and even as a way of avoiding “real” struggle.78 Another contentious issue is the extent to which “sacred politics” was developed with the inspiration or even approval of the Catholic Church. For many contemporaries the high circulation of religious symbols in the decade of Solidarity testified both to the respect the Church enjoyed within the movement and to the Church’s unwavering support for its goals.79 “The huge significance of the Church,” wrote one commentator in 1987, “is borne out by the presence of crucifixes, images of Virgin Mary, and portraits of the Pope attached to the gates of the factories on strike in 1980.”80 Another historian claimed that the Church supported Solidarity “from day one of its existence” and that the issue of “national sovereignty” had always been central to its agenda.81 74 75 76 77 78 79

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“Spór z RKS-em,” Solidarność Walcząca, May 20–27, 1984, 3. FSO, Gp 509. Kubik, The Power of Symbols, 257. Zubrzycki, The Crosses of Auschwitz, 76. Staniszkis, Poland’s Self-Limiting Revolution, 24. Baczko, Wyobrażenia społeczne, 233; Modzelewski, “Symbolika Solidarności,” 279. See Andrzej Micewski, Kościół wobec “Solidarności” stanu wojennego (Paris: Éditions du Dialogue, 1987); Tadeusz Narkun, Kościół, naród, władza: Czy Polacy mają szansę? (Warsaw: Periculum, 1987). FCDCN, AR7066. Narkun, Kościół, naród, władza, 28. Micewski, Kościół wobec “Solidarności,” 261–262.

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Although a number of authors credit the Church with showing sympathy towards Solidarity82 and offering a space for “free speech” and “free memory,”83 scholars predominantly agree that Solidarity’s “sacred politics” should not be mistaken for unequivocal Church backing with respect to the movement’s goals and modus operandi.84 As Brian Porter-Szücs demonstrates, Solidarity appropriated religious imagery “in defiance of the wishes of the Church leadership.”85 And, in fact, some of the most iconic political manifestations using religious symbols, such as the pickets around the floral cross in Warsaw, took place despite criticism from the Church.86 Catholic clergy also attempted to curtail demonstrations inside churches and the use of political banners during religious events such as pilgrimages.87 When, for example, riot police dispersed the May 3 demonstration in Szczecin in 1982 and protesters sought refuge inside churches, the local bishop ordered all places of worship in the city center to be closed.88 The bishop of Gdańsk reportedly forbade a group of former political prisoners, including Anna Walentynowicz, to organize a hunger strike inside a church89 and spoke against holding holy masses inside the Gdańsk Shipyard during the 1980 strike.90 There were also attempts on the part of the Church hierarchs to limit the activities of politically involved rank-and-file priests.91 A number of scholars have noted the distanced position the Church took with respect to Solidarity, summed up well in David Ost’s curt assessment that 82

83 84

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David Ost, Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-politics: Opposition and Reform in Poland since 1968 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 156. Baczko, Wyobrażenia społeczne, 207. Ireneusz Krzemiński, Solidarność, doświadczenie i pamięć (Gdańsk: Europejskie Centrum Solidarności, 2010), 134; Danuta Waniek, Orzeł i krucyfiks: Eseje o podziałach politycznych w Polsce (Toruń: Adam Marszałek, 2011), 287; Andrzej Friszke, Rewolucja Solidarności 1980–1981 (Kraków: Znak Horyzont, 2014), 43; Ost, Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-politics, 156–158; Staniszkis, Poland’s Self-Limiting Revolution, 92–93; José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 107. Brian Porter-Szücs, Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity and Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 259. Michalska-Ciarka concludes that the floral cross existed “against the will of the Church” and that loud daily demonstrations upset the priests in charge of the neighboring church. See Michalska-Ciarka, “Warszawski Krzyż z kwiatów,” 93. Narkun mentions a ban on political banners during religious services and pilgrimages issued by the Polish Episcopate. See Narkun, Kościół, naród, władza, 63. “Niektóre przejawy działalności kleru, 8.05.1982,” cited in Krawczak and Wilanowski, Kościół w stanie wojennym, 67. “Niektóre tezy przemówienia Prymasa Glempa na Jasnej Górze,” cited in Krawczak and Wilanowski, Kościół w stanie wojennym, 131. Friszke, Rewolucja Solidarności, 43. Most notably Jerzy Popiełuszko, who was admonished by Primate Glemp for not “giv[ing] more attention to his regular pastoral duties.” See Porter-Szücs, Faith and Fatherland, 261; Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World, 108.

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“Solidarity always felt far closer to the Church than the Church felt to Solidarity.”92 In Jadwiga Staniszkis’s opinion, the 1980s was a time when “the Episcopate appeared to be more interested than before in maintaining good relations with the government, and it used its stabilizing influence on Solidarity as a bargaining chip.”93 This “lack of neutrality” did not go down well with the workers, and as Staniszkis argues, it triggered a trend towards secularization among union members.94 At the same time, the fact that Church authorities showed themselves to be “demonstrably willing to work with the government”95 did not to any extent lessen the oppositionist use of religious symbols to mobilize protest. What this seeming paradox suggests is that, by the 1980s, religious symbols had become fully decontextualized from the sphere of spiritual devotion and functioned in the political realm without necessarily signaling a cause’s affinity with the agenda of the Catholic Church. Thanks to this decontextualization, symbols like the cross had the potential to be inclusive rallying signs mobilizing a range of different strands within the heterogeneous opposition movement. The diversity and even incompatibility of ideas expressed under the banner of Solidarity indeed perplexed its observers from the very beginning. The movement did not fit neatly into the dichotomy of left and right, and the eclectic nature of its postulates and symbols caused an “ideological disarray” among international onlookers.96 As Andrzej Leder puts it, Solidarity “was an interface that subsumed everything – from the Jewish revival through protoecologists and self-government supporters to nationalists.”97 One of Solidarity’s first programmatic manifestos, published in Tygodnik Solidarność in April 1981, listed the main pillars of the movement’s doctrine as “the best traditions of the nation, ethical Christian principles, a call for democratic rule, and socialist social philosophy.”98 Combining nationalism and socialism, participatory democracy, and a strong allegiance to the Church might have been confusing for Solidarity’s Western supporters, who were baffled at a workers’ movement that relied to such a great extent on nationalist rhetoric and religious symbolism, but the ambiguity and seeming inconsistency was in fact a source of strength.99 By presenting itself as a platform for “the people” to express their different opinions, early Solidarity applied a populist strategy that allowed it to appeal to a very broad base.100 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100

Ost, Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-politics, 157. Staniszkis, Poland’s Self-Limiting Revolution, 93. Ibid., 92. Ost, Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-politics, 158. Laba, The Roots of Solidarity, 149. Leder, Prześniona rewolucja, 189. Cited in Friszke, Rewolucja Solidarności, 407. Ost, Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-politics, 7–8. Rafał Pankowski, The Populist Radical Right in Poland: The Patriots (London: Routledge, 2010), 57–62.

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Given the internal political tensions within such a “multifaceted and polyphonic”101 grassroots movement, symbolic tools had a central role to play in allowing Solidarity to generate a sense of collective identity and cohesion. In his seminal work on Solidarity’s symbolism, Jan Kubik argues that it was precisely this vagueness and the indeterminate nature of its “apolitical” symbols that secured a powerful emotional response among Solidarity’s followers. Solidarity’s symbols were “apolitical,” notes Kubik, “in the sense that they were neither ‘left’ nor ‘right’; neither authoritarian nor democratic.”102 By choosing a symbolic language that was “less obviously political in form,” the movement could not only “veil” the incompatibility of its disparate ideological strains but also gain a greater political efficacy than if it had resorted to more conventionally political symbols.103 So far we have seen that a number of factors facilitated the rise of religious symbols as highly efficacious and “apolitical” means of articulating a collective identity for the Solidarity movement. Given an ongoing crisis of values, broad acceptance for the political appropriation of religion, and the inaccessibility of religious symbolism for Solidarity’s political opponents, Catholic references became a plausible source of inspiration for the broad anti-Communist opposition. However, more detailed examination is needed of the process by which certain symbols, such as the cross, emerged as the “privileged signifiers,” representing a broad spectrum of ideological positions within the movement.104 In the remainder of this chapter, I will examine how the symbol of the cross became one of the dominant rallying signs of democratic opposition in the decade of Solidarity, how it was used to determine and negotiate the boundary between “the nation” and its “enemies,” and finally how this process affected the symbol’s semantic content. In the empirical section that follows I am guided by the tenets of Ernesto Laclau’s theory of populism, and in particular his concept of the “equivalential chain.”

The Cross as a “Floating Signifier” One of the basic tenets of Laclau’s approach is that “[t]here is no hegemony without constructing a popular identity out of a plurality of democratic demands.”105 In other words, any successful populist mass-mobilization project must find key symbols to articulate the disparate political ideas that constitute a mass movement. According to Laclau, the unfulfilled “democratic demands,” articulated to power holders by “the people,” accumulate and, if the 101 102 103 104

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Ibid., 57. Kubik, The Power of Symbols, 268. Ibid., 6. The concept of the “privileged signifier” comes from Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), 87. Ibid., 95.

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system is not able to respond to each of them individually, an “equivalential relation is established between them.”106 This “equivalential chain” of postulates, gathered together in an anti-systemic cluster, helps “constitute the ‘people’ as a potential historical actor.”107 Yet, if the confrontation between the “people” and the “power holders” is to be sustainable over time, some elements of the chain have to take over the role of “anchorage,” helping to foster a recognizable “discursive identity” for the movement.108 These common denominators, which serve “the representation of an impossible whole”109 and signify a “wider universality,”110 have to originate from the equivalential chain itself, but their semantic content undergoes a certain transformation. In Laclau’s words, [any] popular identity has to be condensed around some signifiers (words, images) which refer to the equivalential chain as a totality. The more extended the chain, the less these signifiers will be attached to their original particularistic demands. That is to say, the function of representing the relative “universality” of the chain will prevail over that of expressing the particular claim which is the material bearer of that function. [. . .] That is: a popular identity functions as a tendentially empty signifier.111

The leading symbols that emerge as the “anchorage” of the populist movement, therefore, lose (some of) their original meaning and become detached from the demands they originally stood for. Instead, they begin to signify the totality of values that the populist movement considers lacking in reality, such as “freedom” or “justice.”112 In the case of a popular symbol like the cross, the concrete postulates embodied by the symbol after 1945, such as the demands for authorization to build new churches and the maintenance of religious education in public schools, faded away from its semantic content, which eventually expanded to embrace the totality of Solidarity’s demands. As we have already seen, in the 1980s the cross became not only a symbol of Solidarity’s messianic endeavor to liberate the Polish nation but also a signifier of anti-systemic protest as such and shorthand for injustice suffered under the oppressive regime. Laclau’s theory also posits that dominant symbols become sites of contention with both “the people” and “power” claiming them as part of their conflicting equivalential chains. Successfully hijacked by a movement’s adversaries, such dominant symbols can be turned into “floating signifiers” that 106 107 108 109 110 111 112

Ibid., 73. Ibid., 74. Ibid., 75, 93. Ibid., 80–81. Ibid., 95. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 96, 226.

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effectively shift the boundary between the “people” and the regime. Crucial here is Laclau’s thesis that this antagonistic frontier, central to populist logic, is not permanent but fluctuating: [T]he same democratic demands receive the structural pressure of rival hegemonic projects. This generates an autonomy of the popular signifiers different from the one we have considered so far. It is no longer that the particularism of the demand becomes self-sufficient and independent of any equivalential articulation, but that its meaning is indeterminate between alternative equivalential frontiers [. . .] [S]ignifiers whose meaning is “suspended” in that way [are] “floating signifiers.”113

What this means is that even privileged symbols may be appropriated by a group’s political opponents. For example, an oppressive regime may, by fulfilling some democratic demands, challenge the equivalential chain of its opposition. Symbols may also be linked to entirely different ideologies by reframing the dominant discourses of the conflicting camps.114 Laclau’s idea of “floating signifiers” complements and grants some depth to Victor Turner’s vision of political symbols as dynamic entities wrought in the cycle of antistructure and structure. Laclau’s theoretical tools help us to highlight, in addition to the fundamental shifts between defiance and solidification, other, more subtle, oscillations in the ontogenesis of a single symbol appropriated in turn by power holders and their opponents. We have already seen in the previous chapter how the cross, as a symbol of antistructure, was employed to negotiate the boundary between “the nation,” framed as exclusively Catholic, and the secularizing state that allegedly threatened core Polish values. While this frontier remained crucial in the decade of Solidarity and became even more hostile than before, a new aspect complicated the picture. The soaring popularity of Solidarity, which emerged as a mass movement in 1980, was a game-changing factor. It rendered the dominant symbols of the free unions, which had become divorced from the original demands they once represented, vulnerable to appropriation. For the first time, the regime, which had conceded to Solidarity’s demands in August 1980 and thereafter feared the appeal of its “sacred politics,” showed interest in reclaiming some of the symbolic territory that Solidarity had occupied with its overwhelming victory at the Gdańsk Shipyard.115 Symbols such as the cross, which denoted the equivalential chain of demands behind the 1980 revolution, 113 114

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Ibid., 131. As an example of an interruption to an equivalential chain, Laclau brings up the success of US Republicans in appealing to left-wing voters by replacing the opposition of “producers” and “parasites” with the dichotomy of the “average American” and the eliterun government machine that threatens the values of the “little guy.” See Laclau, On Populist Reason, 134–135. See Modzelewski, “Symbolika Solidarności,” 235.

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and defined the boundary between opposition and power, therefore became crucial sites of contention. The remaining part of this chapter investigates the boundary negotiated with the help of “privileged signifiers” like the cross and the ways in which both sides in the struggle – the power holders and the opposition movement – attempted to redefine certain areas of it by (re)claiming symbolic terrain from one another. In exploring three case studies that represent different kinds of boundary shift, I will illustrate the broad scope of sometimes incompatible values and ideas that came to be associated with the symbol of the cross in the 1980s. Before we can move on to consider the cross as a Laclauian “floating signifier” adopted to redraw the symbolic boundaries between antagonistic camps, we need to understand exactly where the fault lines of this fundamental divide ran.

Communists vs. “the Nation” The theory of collective action frames tells us that a political symbol remains abstract until it can be actively turned against a political opponent. It is only through defining the Other that symbols really gain the force and effectiveness required to represent the notion of “us.”116 The essential antagonists for the symbolic language of Solidarity were, naturally, the Communists. The symbolic warfare between Solidarity and the Communist state took place in two domains: that of national identity, where the movement portrayed the Communists as outcasts from the national collective; and that of workingclass struggle, where Solidarity delegitimized the socialist state as failing to truly represent workers’ interests.117 The former strategy, which organized the conflict in terms of a dichotomy between what Marcin Kula labeled “nation” and “anti-nation,” eventually took center stage in determining how the movement framed the actions of the regime.118 Portraying Martial Law as a “war against the nation” and confronting riot police during demonstrations with slogans like “Tu jest Polska” (“We are Poland”)119 were some of the ways in which the boundary between opposition and state was negotiated daily. The idea of Communists being un-Polish reappears in numerous visual and textual sources of the period. A paradigmatic example may be the poster titled Communists Have Done This unto Poles (Komuniści Polakom zgotowali ten los), which lists the sites 116 117

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William A. Gamson, Talking Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 7. Laba speaks of two levels of symbolic conflict between Solidarity and the state: the “patriotic religious opposition to national captivity” and a delegitimation of the Leninist state. Laba, The Roots of Solidarity, 144–145. Kula, Narodowe i rewolucyjne, 142, 293. See also Pankowski, The Populist Radical Right in Poland, 59. Kula, Narodowe i rewolucyjne, 295, 301.

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of brutally repressed workers’ demonstrations and features a collage of crosses – all of them actual monuments set up to commemorate victims at each of the sites.120 Besides communicating the message of mourning and directing a moral accusation towards the power holders, the poster also clearly signals the boundary between “the nation,” visualized here with the help of a forest of crosses and the Communists. The idea that Communists could not by definition be true members of the Polish nation was often accompanied by the claim that the nation as a whole unequivocally opposed Communist rule. “The new epoch of struggle came,” reads one underground publication from 1987, “the struggle against Communism.”121 The frontlines of this battle, whose stakes were nothing less than “the preservation of national existence,” were then defined as follows: On the one side was a handful of USSR-trained individuals, supported by Stalin and his Red Army, intoxicated by the victory over Germany. On the other side, stood the whole nation, instinctively apprehensive of a menace that was unprecedented in its history – marked by incessant struggles for independence.122

In this narrative, the boundary between Solidarity and the regime runs between the totality of the Polish nation and a group of Soviet emissaries, whose national identity remains conveniently unspecified. The cross as the symbol of a nation unified against the Communist threat serves, again, as the most expressive symbol of this radical cleavage. A popular protest song from the 1980s, sung to the melody of the patriotic hymn Rota, verbalizes it poignantly: As sons and daughters of Poland We solemnly swear On our Savior, His Cross, And the Queen of Częstochowa, We shall not rest before the enemy is defeated, So help us God! [. . .] The Cross will be our banner, It led our fathers to victory [. . .] . If God is with us – who is against us?123

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The sites of protest listed on the poster are Poznań 1956, Gdańsk/Gdynia 1970, Radom/ Ursus 1976, Wujek 1981, and Lubin 1982. FSO, Solidarność 2 III/46. Narkun, Kościół, naród, władza, 31. Ibid, emphasis mine. “Rota,” in Wybór pieśni śpiewanych pod krzyżem z kwiatów w Warszawie, 27. In the original: “Oto ślubujem z ręką wzwyż / Synowie Polski, córy / Świadkiem nam Zbawca, jego Krzyż / Królowa z Jasnej Góry / Nie spoczniem wpierw, niż pierzchnie wróg / Tak nam dopomóż Bóg! [. . .] Sztandarem naszym będzie Krzyż [. . .] Gdy z nami Bóg – przeciw nam któż?”

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The enemy is shown here, again, not only as excluded from the national and religious community but also as sacrilegious and violent. Another protest song contains the following stanza: As all Poland is covered in mourning, Tearing up and praying for freedom, The ZOMO [riot police] are breaking the Cross, murdering and arresting, Throwing the singing folk in prison.124

Notably, on this list of the power holders’ offenses, the desecration of the cross comes first, even before murder. Symbolic violence against a key national signifier carries more weight than physical violence. If the protests against decrucification in the late 1950s and 1960s explored a similar topos of Communists as enemies of the cross worthy of contempt for their hostility to religion, the radical exclusion of Communists from within the confines of the nation was a new rhetorical device that became prominent only in the 1980s. Historians of Solidarity connect this radicalization of the boundary between nation and anti-nation both to the escalation of violence and to the economic developments that occurred in the 1980s. Having fresh in their memory the regime’s use of violence against their compatriots in 1970, 1976, and later under Martial Law made it easier for adherents of Solidarity to portray the power holders as un-Polish.125 The other important element was economic stagnation. As Marcin Kula argues, power holders in late socialism were more likely to appear alien to a people whose basic needs they failed to satisfy.126 Given that the economic situation of many households deteriorated substantially in the 1980s, with strikes and constant shortages affecting a great majority in Polish society, fewer and fewer people felt that the socialist system had kept its promise.127 This failure to deliver made power holders seem like usurpers who had betrayed the interests of the nation. Apart from mobilizing anti-systemic protest, the strategy of excluding Communists from the national fold had one more important function. By “externalizing evil” to the small group of regime functionaries, Solidarity could symbolically absolve the rest of Polish society of collaborating with the regime or having ever supported it.128 This myth of an eternally defiant Polish nation had a mobilizing appeal, but obfuscated both the extent to which the socialist 124

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“O krzyżu kwietnym w Warszawie,” in Wybór pieśni śpiewanych pod krzyżem z kwiatów w Warszawie, 24. In the original: “Gdy cała Polska żałobą okryta / Modlitwą, łzami o swą wolność prosi / ZOMO Krzyż łamie, morduje i chwyta / Lud śpiewający do więzień unosi.” Kula, Narodowe i rewolucyjne, 275. Ibid., 91. Friszke, Rewolucja Solidarności, 28; Padraic Kenney, “The Gender of Resistance in Communist Poland,” The American Historical Review 104, 2 (1999): 418. Kowalski, Krytyka solidarnościowego rozumu, 86.

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revolution in Poland enjoyed authentic support in parts of society and the mass participation of Poles in the Communist structures of power.129 As Marcin Kula points out, in the 1970s the Polish Communist Party had 3.5 million members. Multiplied by the number of their family members, this added up to a significant portion of Polish society implicated in the Communist power apparatus.130 Yet, as Andrzej Leder observes, in spite of large swathes of Poles having enjoyed upward social mobility, many have failed to recognize their own agency in the postwar social revolution.131 Delegating the agency and responsibility for state socialism to externalized Others not only misrepresented the actual, much more fuzzy boundary between the regime’s supporters and its opponents, but crippled Poles psychologically, leaving them unable to fathom all the ramifications of the transformation period.132 The boundary between “us” and “them,” conceived of as a frontier between nation and anti-nation and symbolically externalized by means of “sacred politics,” was therefore less stable and more permeable than any of the regime’s opponents would be willing to admit. Both camps, in fact, made forays into the core symbolic territory of the other in an attempt to reframe crucial symbolic practices to their own advantage. For the Communist Party, the commemoration of workers’ protests of 1956 and 1970, initiated by the opposition and sanctioned by the unveiling of major memorials in 1980 and 1981, was one such area. It attempted to incorporate these oppositional memorial routines into the official calendar, motivated by the hope that the difficult legacy could be diffused if reframed as part of a legitimate working-class struggle against injustice. The question of who owned the history of the workers’ struggle was a crucial one for Solidarity as well – hence its attempt to embrace May Day as a cheerful community-building festival and thus win it back from the Communists. Both these endeavors, meant to redraw the boundary between nation and anti-nation, involved the appropriation of various “privileged signifiers” denoting the opposite camp. Furthermore, the fight for the moral ground and symbolic dominance in the public space sometimes played out on neutral symbolic terrain. Thus, for example, the fortieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1983 became a site of contestation which both the regime and the opposition movement wished to instrumentalize for their own purposes. These three contested anniversaries – the workers’ revolt of 1956, May Day, and the Ghetto Uprising of 1943 – will serve here as illustrations for how the symbol of the cross was deployed and appropriated by different actors, both as a boundary-maintaining and as a boundary-contesting tool. 129 130 131 132

Krzemiński, Solidarność, doświadczenie i pamięć, 119. Kula, Narodowe i rewolucyjne, 101. Leder, Prześniona rewolucja, 17–18. Ibid., 194–200.

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The Poznań Crosses Just a few months after the signing of the Gdańsk Agreements in 1980, newly established Solidarity structures in Poznań put in motion a major memorial project. They wished to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1956 workers’ revolt with a monument to the fallen. The hastily constituted Monument Building Committee soon issued an “Appeal to the Polish People,” calling for donations and announcing an open competition for a fitting design. There was one feature of the monument, however, that had been predetermined. It had to contain two core “symbols of national identity” – the eagle and the cross.133 The idea came on the heels of a similar initiative in Gdańsk, where the issue of a memorial to the slain workers had been on the agenda of the August Agreements, and where construction was already well under way. Impressed with the scale and the symbolic message of the three massive crosses in Gdańsk, the Poznań activists wished for the same effect. Consequently, despite the competition jury selecting a more modest horizontal project that involved no crosses, the committee pushed for an artistically weaker entry on the grounds that only a monument featuring a cross would meet “the social expectations.”134 The approved project, designed by a young local sculptor, Adam Graczyk, featured two massive steel crosses bound together with thick coils of rope. According to the committee’s enthusiastic review, the two crosses were to symbolize “suffering and enslavement” as well as “the solidarity of the intelligentsia with the working class.”135 The Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny went even farther in its interpretation, explaining that one of the crosses stood for Jesus “carrying the other smaller cross which symbolize[d] Poland.”136 The Poznań and Gdańsk memorial projects were part of an “explosion of collective memory” that unfolded in the sixteen months of liberalization following the 1980 strikes.137 More than a mere by-product of the political thaw, this wave of commemoration was central to Solidarity’s agenda. It was a way to “settle accounts” with the Communist state for its repressive policies and to return a sense of dignity to the disgruntled workers.138 The cross memorials were so important because, as Roman Laba observes, they were “the first monuments to the victims of Leninist states erected in the Soviet bloc since 1917.”139 They also remained a lasting material embodiment of the 133 134 135

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“Appeal to the Polish People,” cited in Grzelczak, Poznański Czerwiec 1956, 383. Grzelczak, Poznański Czerwiec 1956, 392. Review of Adam Graczyk’s project by the Monument Building Committee. Cited in Grzelczak, Poznański Czerwiec 1956, 393. Stanisław Musiał, “Poznańskie krzyże,” Tygodnik Powszechny, July 5, 1981, 1. Baczko, Wyobrażenia społeczne, 201. Staniszkis, Poland’s Self-Limiting Revolution, 24. Laba, The Roots of Solidarity, 138.

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Fig. 19. Inauguration of the Poznań Crosses. Photo: Private archive of Jacek Ćwikła.

Solidarity Revolution even after the brutal clampdown of December 1981.140 They gave Solidarity supporters both a sense of moral satisfaction at regaining ownership over “the true history” and, as David Ost puts it, a “new sense of security [. . .] that the old lies could not ride anymore.”141 Finally, the memorials elevated the upheavals in Poznań and Gdańsk to milestones “on the thorny road to freedom.”142 By linking the workers’ risings 140 141

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Friszke, Rewolucja Solidarności, 209. Kula, Narodowe i rewolucyjne, 163; Friszke, Rewolucja Solidarności, 208; Ost, Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-politics, 111. Eugenia R. Dabertowa and Agnieszka Łuczak, Walka o pamięć Czerwca ’56 (Poznań: Archiwum Wielkopolskiej Solidarności, 2001), 32.

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of 1956 and 1970 to the birth of Solidarity in 1980, these monuments embodied a new historical teleology in which, as Padraic Kenney noted, “events [. . .] seem[ed] to accelerate and build on one another until they culminate[d] in the victory.”143 Thus opposition activists of the 1980s framed the Poznań protests of 1956 as a “seedbed of the workers’ revolt that still ha[d] a bearing on the present reality.”144 The same sentiment was expressed in the dedication of the Poznań crosses – a festive document walled into the monument’s foundations which read that the memorial was also intended to honor the strikers of 1968, 1970, and 1976 as well as current Solidarity members.145 This litany of dates, later emblazoned on the Poznań monument and almost formulaically repeated in opposition circles, not only suggested a continuity of anti-Communist struggle but also gave the impression that defiance was the standard position in postwar Poland.146 Celebrating repeated local outbreaks of protest as an ongoing national struggle fed into the narrative of Poles rejecting the socialist system en masse. The crosses of Poznań quickly gained considerable symbolic resonance. Even before the steel cast was ready, carpenters from the local furniture factory volunteered to make a life-sized wooden copy to be placed at the site of the future monument.147 When the massive metal beams were ready, workers festively transported them through the town, following the route of the 1956 demonstration in a celebration that one observer described as a “via crucis of sorts.”148 At the same time, another artistic competition took place – this time for a poster announcing the inauguration. The winning entry, by prominent poster artist Jacek Ćwikła, combined the motif of the cross with a hammer and gained renown in its own right, circulating in the form of banners, flyers, pins, stamps, and other memorabilia.149 The inauguration of the monument on June 28, 1981, carefully orchestrated against a backdrop of national and religious symbols, was attended by over 100,000 spectators, including topranking Solidarity leaders and Church officials. The spectacular moment of its unveiling, with a tower crane lifting a huge banner in national colors to reveal the two twenty-one-meter-high crosses, was accompanied by the sound of church bells and a performance of the national anthem.150 Even in Warsaw, 143 144

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Kenney, “The Gender of Resistance in Communist Poland,” 399. Jarosław Maciejewski, “Po dwudziestu pięciu latach,” in Poznański Czerwiec 1956, edited by Jarosław Maciejewski and Zofia Trojanowiczowa (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 1981), 19. Grzelczak, Poznański Czerwiec 1956, 427. Various publications and visual materials distributed by the Solidarity movement incorporate the notion of continued struggle, listing the main upheavals, usually beginning with 1956. See, for example Kazano zapomnieć; Langner, Bruk był naszym przyjacielem; Narkun, Kościół, naród, władza, 34. Grzelczak, Poznański Czerwiec 1956, 933. Baczko, Wyobrażenia społeczne, 224. Jacek Ćwikła, interview with the author, Wrocław, March 15, 2019. Grzelczak, Poznański Czerwiec 1956, 449.

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Fig. 20.1. (a) Jacek Ćwikła’s poster for the unveiling of the Poznań Croses. (b) Poster for the thirtieth anniversary of the Poznań revolt. Courtesy of Jacek Ćwikła.

workers interrupted their work for a minute of silence to commemorate the Poznań victims.151 With the introduction of Martial Law, the Poznań monument, just like its counterpart in Gdańsk, became a hotly contested venue placed under heightened police surveillance. To Solidarity activists continuing their work in the underground, the monument embodied “one of the few achievements which were not undone”152 by the military backlash. Because of its symbolic significance, the Poznań memorial instantly became a venue for nonconformist gestures. Groups of people would gather there on the thirteenth day of each month to remember the victims of the regime and deposit small flyers, handwritten lists of political prisoners, candles, and flowers at the foot of the crosses. The surface of the monument was also graffitied numerous times with subversive messages including the date 1981, which was added on the night after the bloody reprisals against the workers protesting at the Wujek coal mine on December 16, 1981.153

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Ibid., 461. “Pomnik dzisiaj,” Tygodnik Mazowsze: Numer Specjalny, June 28, 1986, 6. FSO, Gp 0563. Ibid.; Dabertowa and Łuczak, Walka o pamięć Czerwca ’56, 37.

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The authorities quickly recognized the symbolic potential of the monument and kept a watchful eye over any activities in its vicinity. They removed the spotlights, disabled the audio information point, and had the vigil light extinguished, while police intensively patrolled the area.154 Soon, however, the Politburo realized that a more efficient strategy for neutralizing the subversive memorial would be to appropriate it. Solidarity periodical Tygodnik Mazowsze, commenting on official attempts to “confiscate” the monument, insisted that “the form of the cross precludes the appropriation of the symbol of 1956 by [. . .] Communist propaganda.”155 The Politburo nevertheless tried its best to accomplish just that. In May 1982, the Central Committee decided to take the upcoming commemoration of the twenty-sixth anniversary of the 1956 Poznań protests into its own hands. In an official statement it declared that June 28 “should have a permanent place in the traditions of the [. . .] Polish working class as a symbol of its struggle in the name of socialist ideals of social justice.”156 It was imperative to “overcome the enemy’s framing of the monument as a symbol of antagonism and polarization, and to turn it into a symbol of reconciliation and dialogue.”157 The attempt to interpret the twin crosses of Poznań as a symbol of unity was not entirely new. Ever since the memorial’s inauguration, official press organs had framed Graczyk’s design, whose original title was “Unity,” as a symbol of the “brotherhood of Poles.”158 In a clearly calculated manner, the Communist power holders tried to shift the focus from the manifestly anti-Communist intent of the memorial to the Christian reading of the symbol as a sign of redemption and forgiveness. The same had already happened in Gdańsk in 1980, when the authorities proposed that the Monument to the Fallen Shipyard Workers of 1970 be named a “Monument of Reconciliation.”159 The attempt to “rebrand” the Gdańsk and Poznań crosses met with the opposition’s indignation. Underground Solidarity structures condemned the takeover of the 1956 anniversary as “an exceptional act of cynicism” and “a desecration of the memory of victims who lost their lives at the hands of the very same power holders.”160 They called for a boycott of the official celebrations at the memorial, urging Solidarity supporters to attend holy masses at 154 155

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“Pomnik dzisiaj,” 6. Janusz Pałubicki, “Zdobywanie historii,” Tygodnik Mazowsze: Numer Specjalny, June 28, 1986, 1. FSO, Gp 0563. “The Outline of the 26th Anniversary of June 1956 in Poznań” by the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, cited in Grzelczak, Poznański Czerwiec 1956, 477. Grzelczak, Poznański Czerwiec 1956, 477–478. Title page of Gazeta Poznańska from June 29, 1981, cited in Grzelczak, Poznański Czerwiec 1956, 466. Modzelewski, “Symbolika Solidarności,” 242. Dabertowa and Łuczak, Walka o pamięć Czerwca ’56, 44.

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Fig. 21. A pin with the motif of krzyżomłot (hammer-cross) by Jacek Ćwikła. Private archive of Jacek Ćwikła.

local churches instead.161 Students in several schools organized “silent protests,” while many of the city’s residents showed up at the state-sponsored event wearing pins in the shape of the cross as a badge of defiance.162 Solidarity supporters, who laid down their wreaths at the monument separately from the official delegations, went so far as to make sure their flowers did not touch those brought by the representatives of the regime.163 The competing choreographies around the Poznań crosses in the summer of 1982 were part of a larger “war of symbols” in which, as Marcin Zaremba has noted, “each of the sides wished to deprive its antagonist of nationalist legitimacy.”164 In attempting to take over crucial symbols from oppositional 161 162

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Grzelczak, Poznański Czerwiec 1956, 488. The badges featured the image designed in 1981 by Jacek Ćwikła, originally as a poster, for the inauguration of the Poznań monument. It combined the form of the cross with a hammer. On the protests against the official celebrations of 1982, see Dabertowa and Łuczak, Walka o pamięć Czerwca ’56, 47. Dabertowa and Łuczak, Walka o pamięć Czerwca ’56, 48. Marcin Zaremba, Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjonalizm: Nacjonalistyczna legitymizacja władzy komunistycznej w Polsce (Warsaw: Trio, 2001), 383.

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discourse and redoubling their “patriotic” stance, the Communist authorities were following a conscious strategy. The new “ideological front” defined during the First Ideological–Theoretical Party Conference in 1982 had set the goal of “regaining the national traditions, symbols, anniversaries, and personages unlawfully annexed by the anti-socialist powers.”165 Adopting nationalist discourse, the Party apparatus sought both to appeal to the broad masses of Polish society and to discredit the Solidarity movement by presenting it as inciting civil war and thus threatening the existence of the Polish nation state.166 This nationalist course, despite being antithetical to the internationalist ideal at the foundation of Communist thought, was in fact officially sanctioned by the Soviet Union as long as it served the legitimation of socialist power holders across the Eastern bloc and was not directed against the USSR.167 Especially after the highly unpopular introduction of Martial Law, General Jaruzelski’s regime increasingly had to rely on the nationalist framing, presenting its repressive measures as attempts to save the Polish nation from a Soviet invasion.168 The attempts to hijack the symbol of the Poznań crosses for a narrative of socialist struggle for justice is a good example of a Laclauian breach of the “equivalential chain.” By incorporating the anniversary of the 1956 revolt into the official calendar, Polish Communists tried to redraw the boundary between “the people” and the “power holders,” posing as defenders of patriotic tradition. The strategy of acknowledging the Poznań crosses as an important national lieu de mémoire served the purpose of suspending the meaning of the cross as a symbol of anti-Communist resistance and turning it into an emblem of reconciliation and national unity in the face of an external threat. While Polish Communists applied a similar strategy of appropriation to other national tropes and historical figures, the case of Poznań was exceptional in that it involved a religious symbol – typically considered off-limits to statesanctioned official culture.169 The fact that Communist power holders made the risky attempt to incorporate a cross into the official memorial landscape suggests that, by the 1980s, the cross was so firmly anchored in the repertoire of Polish national symbols that even a Communist government considered it within the realm of possibility to embed it into their own “ideological front.” That this attempt did not succeed and the state celebrations of the Poznań revolt never gained much resonance was due not only to the radical nature of the appropriation but also 165

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Marian Orzechowski, “Świadomość historyczna jako płaszczyzna walki ideologicznej” (1982), cited in Grzelczak, Poznański Czerwiec 1956, 474. Kula, Narodowe i rewolucyjne, 290. Zaremba, Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjonalizm, 270. Kula, Narodowe i rewolucyjne, 291; Zaremba, Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjonalizm, 387. See Modzelewski, “Symbolika Solidarności,” 271.

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to the historical context of a turbulent decade. The state clampdown on Solidarity in 1981 led to an even more intensive othering of the power holders in oppositional discourse, which now portrayed them not only as outcasts from the Polish national community but also as downright enemies of the nation. Yet, even though the polarization between the increasingly unpopular regime and “the nation” increased in the last decade of the Polish People’s Republic, the boundary between the two symbolic realms was not absolute and still underwent constant negotiation. The two metanarratives – of socialist struggle for a just society and of Polish workers’ self-determination and emancipation from Soviet control – had more in common than either of the sides was willing to concede. Their points of agreement, such as the ideals of emancipation, equality, and social justice, as well as the memory of past grassroots upheavals against overwhelming force constituted contentious spaces that both sides wished to claim for themselves. The attempts of both sides to assert ownership over symbolic ground simultaneously served the purpose of delegitimizing their opponents. It is no wonder, then, that these symbolic wars often concerned key national symbols, myths, and venues; nor that forays into enemy territory were undertaken by both sides.

Reclaiming May Day On the morning of May 1, 1982, just a few months into Martial Law, Tadeusz Adamski was walking down the street in Olsztyn clutching an inconspicuous plastic bag. Inside he carried two carnations – one red, one white – and a poster he had designed himself, glued onto cardboard. He was making his way to a public announcement board that Solidarity used to post its communiqués in the center of the town. The streets were already full of riot police preparing for the May Day parade, but nobody stopped him. Watching out for anyone who might be observing him, he placed the poster and the flowers in the shattered glass case of the now empty announcement board and stepped back. Behind the broken pane one could now clearly see a poster in black and white with large lettering reading “May 1, 1982: For the Dignity of the Working Man.” The most noticeable thing from afar was a large black cross with a slightly slanted horizontal beam replacing the digit 1.170 The First of May has been celebrated in Poland since its inception in 1890, but was declared a national holiday by the Communist government only in 1950.171 Annual May Day parades, both in Warsaw and in countless other locations across Poland, belonged to the central “invented traditions” of the socialist bloc and enjoyed extensive media coverage. They played the role of 170 171

Tadeusz Adamski, interview with the author, Warsaw, May 6, 2019. Baczko, Wyobrażenia społeczne, 219; Kubik, The Power of Symbols, 72.

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Fig. 22. Tadeusz Adamski’s poster “May 1, 1982: For the Dignity of the Working Man.” Private archive of Tadeusz Adamski.

a “ritual of confirmation” – reaffirming the hegemonic order by relating it to the “ultimate values” that the system showcased as its guiding principles.172 Growing out of the revolutionary tradition of mass protests in demand of better working conditions, May Day marches in the Soviet bloc degenerated into ritualized performances of support for the power holders, who would typically preside over the parades from an elevated VIP tribune.173 By the 1980s, this ossified format was increasingly being met with critique. “For a majority of Poles today,” wrote a Solidarity daily on the eve of May Day 1981, “May 1 is the day on which [. . .] the propaganda glories in itself [. . .], while the daily needs, worries, and troubles of society remain ignored.”174 At 172

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Myron J. Aronoff and Jan Kubik, Anthropology and Political Science (New York: Berghahn, 2013), 103. Modzelewski, “Symbolika Solidarności,” 251. Jan Walc, “Czyje święto,” Niezależność: Dziennik NSZZ Solidarość Region Mazowsze, April 30, 1981, 1. FCDCN, A 417768 III RARA.

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the same time, however, the newly established Solidarity movement was coming to the realization that a holiday commemorating workers’ struggles could potentially be reclaimed to articulate the unions’ agenda in a way that would seriously undermine the Communist authorities.175 “It is a matter of choice,” wrote an independent daily in 1981, “if we leave the First of May to the power holders as their holiday, or if we remind everyone that this is the day of struggle for our rights [. . .] the day on which we verify how our needs and aspirations are being fulfilled by the authorities.”176 The fact that May Day was firmly rooted in the core repository of Communist symbols made the task difficult, but the introduction of Martial Law provided an important turning point. The sense of outrage it triggered turned the 1982 May Day celebrations into a mass manifestation of support for the outlawed movement.177 Opposition activists quickly realized that reclaiming May Day, especially in the situation of state violence against the workers, had huge symbolic potential. “The revival of [the May Day] tradition is particularly dangerous for the Communist power holders,” observed one underground periodical in 1984, “because it exposes in front of the whole world the falsity of Communist ideology and undermines the foundations of the whole system.”178 Solidarity’s takeover of May Day would de facto mean delegitimizing the government as no longer representing the ideals of the workers’ struggle. But, to claim May Day as their own, Solidarity had to “fill it with new content.”179 This was achieved, on the one hand, by linking the historical origins of the First of May – the 1886 Chicago Haymarket tragedy, where, after a bomb exploded during a workers’ rally, police opened fire on the protesters – to state violence against protesting workers in Poland.180 “For us Poles,” wrote an underground periodical in 1983, “Chicago repeated itself in 1956 in Poznań, in 1970 in Gdańsk, in 1981 in Silesia, in 1982 in Lubin, and may still be repeated numerous times.”181 May 1 thus became a day on which to commemorate the protesters killed in all anti-systemic uprisings as well as new casualties who died in the pacification of alternative May Day 175 176 177 178 179 180

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Modzelewski, “Symbolika Solidarności,” 244; Kubik, The Power of Symbols, 208. Walc, “Czyje święto,” 1. Kula, Narodowe i rewolucyjne, 284. “1 Maja,” Solidarność Walcząca, April 15, 1984, 1. FSO, Gp 509. Friszke, Rewolucja Solidarności, 408. The explosion, later blamed on anarchists, killed seven policemen and wounded around sixty participants, while four workers died and seventy were wounded in the subsequent police gunfire. Several anarchists were sentenced to death and executed as “spiritual instigators” of the bombings despite having no ties to the attack. See Herbert Reiter, “The Origins of May Day,” in The Ritual of May Day in Western Europe: Past, Present and Future, edited by Abby Peterson and Herbert Reiter (London: Routledge, 2016), 16. “Do Ludzi Pracy,” Biuletyn Małopolski no. 6, April 12, 1983, 1. FSO, Gp 95.

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demonstrations.182 Solidarity’s May Day manifestations became also an opportunity to demand the release of political prisoners.183 The new framing of May Day also included a nationalist note. “May Day in Poland is a part of our national history,” stated a programmatic article from 1981 entitled “Whose Holiday?”184 Casting the heritage of May Day, and socialist values more broadly, as an element of Poland’s history of national emancipation allowed Solidarity to insert the popular holiday into the patriotic calendar. “May 1 was not always our holiday, but a day of the triumph of violence,” wrote a Solidarity periodical in 1981. “[But] today it regained its radiance and sense, and the two holidays, May 1 and May 3, became one symbol of the solidary rebellion that brought about the rebirth of the nation in August 1980.”185 Listing May Day alongside the anniversary of the first constitution of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (adopted by the Sejm on May 3, 1791) must have had a somewhat jarring effect on readers, as the two holidays were traditionally seen in opposition to each other in postwar Poland.186 The attempt to link them, however, indicates how seriously the antiCommunist opposition took the project of anchoring May 1 into their narrative. The first attempt to use May Day to defy the Communist authorities had already taken place in the 1970s. In 1971, during an official First of May parade in Gdańsk, shipyard employees carried a banner demanding the commemoration of fellow workers who had been killed in the standoff with police a year earlier.187 The date was also that on which, uncoincidentally, oppositionists chose to call into being the Free Trade Unions, founded on the eve of May Day 1978.188 Alongside other references to the legacy of the Polish left, such as naming the unofficial periodical Robotnik (The Worker), founded in 1977, after the press organ of the Polish Socialist Party (1892–1948), the attempts to incorporate May Day into the oppositional calendar were part of a strategy “to reclaim from the PZPR the monopoly over the legacy of the Polish left.”189

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From 1984 onwards, oppositional May Day celebrations in Kraków included a visit to the grave of Ryszard Smagur, who was killed during the May Day march in Nowa Huta in 1983. See “Program,” Hutnik, April 11, 1984, 1. FSO, Gp 188. “Odezwa 1-Majowa,” Aktualności Serwisu Informacyjnego Regionalnego Komitetu Solidarności Małopolska, April 16, 1985, 1–2. FSO, Gp 5. Walc, “Czyje święto.” Wiadomości Dnia no. 93, April 30, 1981, cited in Modzelewski, “Symbolika Solidarności,” 250. Bartosz Korzeniewski, “Konstytucja 3 Maja,” in Polskie miejsca pamięci: Dzieje toposu wolności, edited by Stefan Bednarek and Bartosz Korzeniewski (Warsaw: Narodowe Centrum Kultury, 2014), 113–129. Baczko, Wyobrażenia społeczne, 198. Kula, Narodowe i rewolucyjne, 281. Kubik, The Power of Symbols, 16.

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It was only the alternative May Day demonstrations, however, which gained their momentum under Martial Law, that really alarmed the Communist authorities. Although the initial approach of Solidarity leaders was to boycott official May Day parades and encourage members to celebrate the day in a leisurely setting, “without the pomp,”190 and away from “the tribune occupied by our oppressors,”191 this strategy changed with time. On May 1, 1982, the first alternative demonstrations took place, often formed by groups of people leaving church services. Marching together on a day when the authorities could hardly justify dispersing such demonstrations had a strong mobilizing effect on the adherents of the now-delegalized Solidarity.192 In 1982, the underground press reported on the occurrence of multiple spontaneous marches across Poland as a transformative moment.193 “The barrier of fear has been broken,” announced the unofficial Solidarity bulletin from Kraków.194 The alternative May Day marches also developed an aesthetic of their own that was both festive and solemn. A participant in the Warsaw demonstration, which, according to opposition sources,195 50,000 people joined, reported the following: We’re walking towards the Old Town. Close to Świętojańska Street – [we encounter] a crowd of people. [. . .] We look around and see a lot of Solidarity pins and pictures of the Virgin Mary [. . .] a white banner with the slogan “Free the Political Prisoners” emerges, passed along from one person to another [. . .] Children carried by their parents wave red and white banners with the Solidarity logo [. . .] Some flags are girdled with a black ribbon. [. . .] A boy grabs a red and white flag from the façade of one of the houses and, with a red lipstick borrowed from a girl, scrawls “Solidarity” across the white background.196

National symbols dominated Solidarity’s May Day marches in 1982, alongside symbols of mourning. Commemorating the victims of Martial Law was one of the main issues on the oppositional agenda. In Nowa Huta, an estimated 15,000 workers walked in an “impressive silent march,”197 while in Olsztyn 190

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See the editorial by Tadeusz Mazowiecki, “Pierwszy i trzeci,” Tygodnik Solidarność, May 1, 1981, 1. FSO, Gp 564. On alternative May Day celebrations, see also Baczko, Wyobrażenia społeczne, 220; Modzelewski, “Symbolika Solidarności,” 253. “Odezwa 1-majowa Solidarności Małopolska,” Aktualności: Biuletyn Informacyjny Regionalnej Komisji Wykonawczej Solidarność Małopolska, April 26, 1982, unpaginated. FSO, Gp 005. Krzemiński, Solidarność, doświadczenie i pamięć, 166. “Przed 1 Maja: Rozmowa z członkiem Komisji Zakładowej,” Tygodnik Mazowsze, April 21, 1983, 1. FSO, Gp 0563. “Maj 1982: Próba wstępnej oceny,” Biuletyn Małopolski no. 10, June 1982, 1–2. FSO, Gp 95. Narkun, Kościół, naród, władza, 41. “Chodźcie z nami,” Biuletyn Małopolski no. 10, June 1982, 2–3. FSO, Gp 95. “Uroczystości 1 i 3 Maja,” Biuletyn Małopolski no. 9, June 1982, 9. FSO, Gp 95.

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Solidarity activists launched an appeal to those who participated in the official parade to “wear black, march in silence, and bow their heads.”198 The “atmosphere of mourning,” as one Solidarity May Day flyer read, was intended to counter “the sense of satisfaction and triumph” manifested by the “machine of Communist terror.”199 Just a year later, in 1983, the organizers of alternative May Day demonstrations already hoped to overshadow the official parades. “May 1 is ours,” boldly announced Wrocław-based periodical Solidarność Walcząca,200 while Lech Wałęsa proclaimed the day a “great success for Solidarity.”201 In Kraków, participants in an alternative demonstration managed not only to flaunt their banners in front of the official VIP tribune but also to sabotage the sound system, broadcasting the sound of crowing over the loudspeakers.202 The state response was also harsher. In many places across Poland demonstrations were dispersed by riot police with water cannons, and there was even a fatality in Nowa Huta.203 The following year, the movement’s radical splinter group Fighting Solidarity went so far as to suggest hijacking the official parades by mixing with the crowd and shouting subversive slogans.204 In Gdańsk, Lech Wałęsa, together with an estimated 2,000 protesters, managed to march in front of the official tribunes sporting Solidarity banners.205 At the same time, Communist authorities stepped up security measures and dispersed alternative gatherings with increasing force.206

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“Komunikaty,” Rezonans: Pismo NSZZ Solidarność Olsztyn, April 26, 1982, 1. FSO, Gp 0388. Solidarność Regionu Warmińsko Mazurskiego do Mieszkańców Olsztyna! (1982), private archive of Kazimierz Wosiek. Kornel Morawiecki, “Do Ludu pracującego miast,” Solidarność Walcząca, April 17, 1983, 1. FSO, Gp 509. “1 Maja jest to wielki sukces Solidarności,” Solidarność Walcząca, May 8, 1983, 1. FSO, Gp 509. The sound of crowing was a joke referencing General Jaruzelski’s political fraction, the Patriotic Movement of National Rebirth (PRON), which was nicknamed WRON(a) (crow) in opposition circles. “Po 1 Maja ’83,” Hutnik, May 5, 1983, 1. FSO, Gp 188. “Przebieg niezależnych obchodów święta pracy i rocznicy III maja w Poznaniu,” Obserwator Wielkopolski no. 66, May 1983, 3. FSO, Gp 0314.; “Po 1 Maja ’83”; “1 Maja jest to wielki sukces Solidarności,” 1. Kornel Morawiecki and Andrzej Lesowski, “Apel,” Solidarność Walcząca, March 25– April 1, 1984, 1. FSO, Gp 509. “1 Maja 84 w Polsce,” Solidarność Walcząca, May 6–13, 1984, 1. FSO, Gp 509. “1 Maja 84 we Wrocławiu,” Solidarność Walcząca, May 6–13, 1984, 1. FSO, Gp 509; “Komunikat Nr 12,” Aktualności Serwisu Informacyjnego Regionalnego Komitetu Solidarności Małopolska no. 9, May 21, 1985, 1. FSO, Gp 005; “Iść czy nie iść?,” Solidarność Walcząca, May 12–19, 1985, 1. FSO, Gp 509; “1 Maja z kraju,” Solidarność Walcząca, Dwutygodnik Organizacji Solidarność Walcząca Oddz. Poznań, Kalisz, Konin, Leszno, Piła, May 19, 1985, 1. FSO, Gp 509.

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But if May Day counterdemonstrations posed a challenge to the authorities, the holiday also confronted the opposition with serious questions about how to reconcile two seemingly contradictory purposes: celebrating the ideals of socialist struggle and expressing a clear anti-Communist stance. One solution to the conundrum was the use of religious imagery. As Kubik notes, the religious frame of reference was employed to help “uproot” the holiday from the Communist context.207 Catholic symbols and performativity, however, also provided the means to visually distinguish the unofficial May Day gatherings from their official counterparts. The symbol of the cross again had a crucial role to play. It both offered a topographical point of reference for spontaneous and often chaotic demonstrations and served as an emblem unequivocally marking alternative May Day celebrations as anti-Communist. Many oppositional May Day demonstrations across Poland also used floral crosses. Arranging crosses made of flowers was a high point of the 1983 demonstrations in Szczecin, Tarnów, and Poznań.208 In Poznań, the participants in the alternative May Day march, “unbothered by the police,” arranged a floral cross at the 1956 memorial while the official parade, “stunned and apprehensive,” was marching by just meters away.209 Another common practice of oppositional May Day celebrations consisted in church services invoking St. Joseph the Worker, typically scheduled at the same time as the official parades.210 Religious rituals and symbols were also used outside the churches. In Radzyń Podlaski, for example, the secret police reported that a religious procession had been scheduled for May 1, while in Częstochowa local priests allegedly encouraged residents to display religious symbols in windows along the route of the official parade.211 Elements of religious cult practice were often also used spontaneously. During the 1983 opposition May Day march in Wrocław, a crowd of approximately 1,000 people reportedly knelt down in the middle of the street and began singing a religious hymn.212 In 1982 in Olsztyn, where the underground Solidarity cell called on its supporters to lay down flowers and candles in front of the 207 208 209 210

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Kubik, The Power of Symbols, 211. “Przebieg niezależnych obchodów święta pracy i rocznicy III maja w Poznaniu,” 2–3. Ibid., 2. “Niektóre przejawy działalności kleru 8.05.1982,” cited in Krawczak and Wilanowski, Kościół w stanie wojennym, 66; “Komunikat nr 10 w sprawie obchodów Święta Pracy 1 Maja 1984,” Aktualności Serwisu Informacyjnego Regionalnego Komitetu Solidarności Małopolska, April 11, 1984, 1. FSO, Gp 005; Obserwator Wielkopolski no. 65, 1983, 1. FSO, Gp 0314. “Niektóre przejawy działalności kleru 26.04.1982,” cited in Krawczak and Wilanowski, Kościół w stanie wojennym, 59; “Niektóre przejawy działalności kleru 30.04.1982,” cited in Krawczak and Wilanowski, Kościół w stanie wojennym, 63. “Jeszcze o 1 maja,” Solidarność Walcząca, May 15, 1983, 1. FSO, Gp 509; “1 Maja we Wrocławiu,” Solidarność Walcząca, May 8, 1983, 2. FSO, Gp 509.

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ransacked unions’ headquarters, one protester, after having realized that plainclothes policemen were photographing the gathering, reportedly crossed herself ostentatiously.213 Such practices can be understood as gestures of defiance, performative means of expressing a group identity, and, at the same time, cultural codes that seem to have evoked awe and respect in both onlookers and the security forces alike. While a reporter of the underground press in Wrocław noted that riot policemen who witnessed the moment of collective kneeling smiled at the protesters and stepped aside to let them pass, an eyewitness from Olsztyn recorded that the protester who crossed herself so confounded the plainclothes policeman that he refrained from photographing her.214 The single most striking synthesis of the May Day message with religious aesthetics was, however, the cross poster from Olsztyn. Designed by the young architect Tadeusz Adamski and clandestinely printed by Kazimierz Wosiek in a run of about 500 copies, the poster was to be distributed around the city before the official May Day parade in 1982.215 Adamski, who was also the editor of the local underground periodical Rezonans, intended the May Day poster to be a clear statement that despite the police clampdown on the union’s official structures, underground Solidarity remained operational. “It was that first May Day [since the introduction of Martial Law],” he recollects, “when our colleagues were in prison and everybody was intimidated. The city of Olsztyn was full of red banners and I made this poster and knew it had to be out there in the streets.”216 For Adamski, the symbol of the cross was a signal of defiance, but also a symbol of mourning: This poster, you can see that, is a poster of gloom. My colleagues were in prison, I didn’t know how to help them [. . .] I already knew that people had been killed, miners at Wujek [. . .] Using this cross, I wanted to connect May Day with the message that for us, the entirety of Polish society, this wasn’t a holiday of the working people, this wasn’t a holiday of joy, the way it was officially staged [. . .] it was a symbol of mourning [. . .] The lettering of the word “May” creates a perspective, symbolizing crowds of people marching behind the cross. What I wanted that to show was that it wasn’t just me who felt that way, but millions of Poles, terrorized by the military, who were marching out there and that this was our May Day parade. In the upper left corner I placed a flock of flying crows [in the shape of the Nazi German eagles] that once hung on all buildings in occupied Poland. [. . .] These German eagles were popularly 213

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“1 Maj w Olsztynie: Relacja naszych sprawozdawców,” Rezonans, Olsztyn, May 3, 1982, 2. FSO, Gp 0388. “Jeszcze o 1 maja,” 1; “1 Maj w Olsztynie,” 2. Kazimierz Wosiek, “Informacja dotycząca Plakatu 1 maja 1982,” unpublished manuscript, handwritten diary, 1982, private archive of Kazimierz Wosiek. Tadeusz Adamski, interview with the author, Warsaw, May 6, 2019.

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solidarity’s sacred politics referred to as crows [. . .] And this was an analogy [. . .] That occupation took place under the symbol of the German crow, this one was an occupation under the sign of the Communist crow.217

The Olsztyn poster is both paradigmatic of Solidarity’s attempts to reclaim May 1 for its narrative and exceptional in its visual boldness.218 Building an image intended to counter the official state aesthetics around the symbol of the cross was a highly radical act of appropriation. The series of juxtapositions the design contained – black vs. red, mourning vs. joy, religion vs. atheism, a united nation vs. an external occupation force – had a clear message. The Communist agenda and aesthetics emerged here not only as antithetical to the beliefs and feelings of the “Polish nation” but also as hostile, alien, and evil. Introducing the symbol of crucifixion into May Day aesthetics, the poster also inadvertently reconnected oppositional May Day demonstrations to the religious holiday that the initiators of International Workers’ Day had considered the antithesis of May 1 – Easter.219 While early socialist activists wished to give workers “their own Easter”220 in order to loosen the grip of religion over the working class, underground Solidarity resorted to religious symbols to give the unions’ supporters a new collective identity as workers. This paradox, so vividly embodied by the Olsztyn poster, lies at the heart of the eventual failure of the anti-Communist opposition in Poland to sustainably incorporate May Day into their core symbolic repertoire. Even before the fall of Communism, it was clear that the idea of recuperating May Day had not really caught on in opposition circles. As Wojciech Modzelewski pointed out 1989, the difference between the official parades and the alternative marches was too insubstantial to create a distinct practice that would be meaningful for the collective identity of the movement.221 What is more, the fact that May Day was Communism’s most iconic holiday “tainted” it in the popular perception and gave other holidays, especially those absent from the socialist calendar, a clear advantage.222 The proximity of May Day to May 3, a holiday whose celebration was illegal in Communist 217 218

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Ibid. Underground Solidarity leaflets and periodicals published in Olsztyn before the event indicate the intention of the local oppositional activists to boycott the official May Day parade and offer an alternative counter-happening. “Przed 1 Majem,” Rezonans, Olsztyn, April 19, 1982, 1, private archive of Tadeusz Adamski; Solidarność 1 Maj, leaflet, private archive of Tadeusz Adamski. Eric Hobsbawm, “Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe 1870–1914,” in The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 284. It was the Italian socialist politician Andrea Costa (1851–1910) who said: “Catholics have Easter; henceforth the workers will have their own Easter.” Cited in Hobsbawm, “MassProducing Traditions,” 284. Modzelewski, “Symbolika Solidarności,” 252. Ibid., 254.

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Poland until 1981, was decisive too. Even if Solidarity leaders recognized the need to acknowledge the heritage of May Day, when compared with the much more lavish and elaborate May 3 celebrations, alternative May 1 demonstrations appeared half-hearted at best.223 The demise of the holiday’s importance in post-1989 Poland resulted directly from Solidarity’s failure to anchor the May Day ideals in post-transformation political discourse. Just as industrial workers virtually disappeared as significant social actors after the early years of market capitalism had swept away the factories that employed them, the values connected with the socialist workers’ struggle, such as collective action and solidarity, lost their appeal under new market conditions that prized individuality and competitiveness. Opposition attempts to delegitimize the regime by presenting Solidarity as the true heir to the May Day tradition were destined to fail because their inherent goals of embracing socialist thought and demonstrating a fundamental ideological distance from the Communist authorities were contradictory. The use of religious symbols like the cross to rebrand May Day was likewise doomed to fail because of the insuperable contradiction it implied. Nevertheless, this hybrid aesthetic, bridging between the internationalist and the national and between the socialist and the Catholic, remains a lasting trace of the dynamic, unstable, and experimental nature of the symbolic negotiations of the Solidarity decade.

The Cross in the Ghetto One afternoon in early April 1983, Marek Edelman, the last surviving commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, was sitting in his bathroom next to a running tap, dictating to his close friend, opposition journalist Teresa Bogucka, a script for the upcoming fortieth anniversary of the uprising. The secret police had just confined him to house arrest in Łódź under the farfetched pretext that Palestinian terrorists were planning his assassination, and Edelman knew that this time he would be unable to go to Warsaw himself. Each April 19, shunning any official acts of memorialization, he would walk through the ghetto in a silent march, initially alone, later accompanied by a growing group of friends and supporters. Now, with the military junta having just announced plans for official large-scale commemorative events in the ghetto and Edelman having called for their boycott, he wanted to mobilize a counterdemonstration. Teresa Bogucka, who was receiving his instructions in the bathroom, was to carry word to Warsaw’s opposition circles that 223

For example, while the alternative May 1 celebrations in Kraków were hosted by the small church of St. Joseph in Podgórze, located outside the historic city center, the May 3 anniversaries took place at the Royal Cathedral at Wawel. See “Uroczystości 1 i 3 Maja,” 9.

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participants in the alternative rally at the ghetto memorial should arrange a floral cross.224 The fortieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1983 was to be celebrated with pomp. The state-sanctioned veterans’ association ZBoWiD (Związek Bojowników o Wolność i Demokrację, the Association of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy) acted as the official organizer, but patronage over the nearly week-long series of events – including concerts, exhibitions, a major academic congress, and numerous wreath-laying ceremonies both in Warsaw and at several other locations across Poland – was claimed by General Jaruzelski himself. Invitations were extended to some 5,000 international guests, including representatives of major Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress, Yad Vashem, and the American Jewish Committee, but also celebrities such as the widow of Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King. Extraordinary security measures were put in place: paramilitary police units equipped with metal detectors and riot gear were stationed outside the hotels where delegates were staying and a thorough bomb sweep was conducted at all official venues.225 The highlight of the memorial events was the festive reopening of the sole surviving synagogue in Warsaw, newly restored with state funds.226 A ceremony awarding sixty Poles the medal of the Righteous Among the Nations was also scheduled to take place as part of the celebrations. After the official functions in Warsaw, international delegations were to attend a massive anti-war rally at Auschwitz.227 The regime, suffering from Western sanctions and bent on improving an image tarnished by its recent clampdown on the opposition, saw the occasion as a chance to present itself as open, free of ethnic prejudice, and benevolent towards its Jewish minority. Western media correctly assessed the move as a Polish attempt to break out of the international isolation that had followed the imposition of Martial Law.228 Jaruzelski’s state functionaries hoped that this could be achieved with the help of Jewish-American lobbyists who, it was expected, would be impressed by the sumptuous celebrations in Warsaw and support the lifting of US sanctions against Poland.229 At the same time, the regime also considered renewing diplomatic relations with Israel, which had been broken off by Poland after the Six-Day War. A new trade partnership 224 225

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Teresa Bogucka, interview with the author, Warsaw, May 1, 2019. John Kifner, “For Warsaw, Few Flowers at the Ghetto,” The New York Times, April 17, 1983, 9; Renata Kobylarz, Walka o pamięć: Polityczne aspekty obchodów rocznicy powstania w getcie warszawskim 1944–1989 (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2009), 331. “W 40 rocznicę wybuchu powstania w getcie warszawskim,” Trybuna Ludu, April 19, 1983, 2. Kobylarz, Walka o pamięć, 297–375. Kifner, “For Warsaw, Few Flowers at the Ghetto.” Kobylarz, Walka o pamięć, 300.

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with Israel, so the Poles hoped, might improve the domestic economic situation.230 Finally, as Polish Communists simultaneously struggled to win back their legitimacy on the home front, the anniversary of the Ghetto Uprising was to serve interior political purposes as well. In using the opportunity to showcase the nation’s suffering during World War II and the military successes of Soviet-led Polish troops in liberating Europe from fascism, the authorities sought to offer a source of positive identification with the socialist state. The official script and framing of the ghetto celebrations communicated this message very clearly. Although the presence of international Jewish delegations was crucial to the prestige of the event, Polish state actors remained center stage. As the official guests gathered at the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes on April 19, 1983, with the military band of the Polish Armed Forces performing the national anthem, the first to lay down their wreaths were the Polish official delegations. The Party organ Trybuna Ludu reported on the celebrations in minute detail: “With a loud drumroll, the delegation of the state veterans’ association was the first to lay down a wreath of red and white flowers with a sash reading ‘To the victims of fascism.’”231 Next in line were the representatives of Jaruzelski’s popular front uniting pro-governmental organizations, PRON (Patriotyczny Ruch Odrodzenia Narodowego, the Patriotic Movement for National Rebirth), whose wreath carried an equally imprecise dedication to “The Heroes of Warsaw.” Jewish delegations were the very last to access the memorial. Polish actors not only dominated the memorial celebrations but also cast themselves as the main protagonists of the 1943 events. In the functionaries’ speeches as well as in the domestic press coverage, the story of the Ghetto Uprising emerged as one of Polish heroism and of a Polish–Jewish brotherhood in the joint struggle against fascism.232 The (meager) Polish military assistance and allegedly universal moral support for the uprising among the Polish population were repeatedly stressed and juxtaposed with an absence of aid from the Western Allies. Press headlines such as “Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Part of the Martyrdom of the Polish Nation” communicated the essence of the new optics.233 The official address of Włodzimierz Sokorski, head of the Polish veterans’ association, reprinted in full in Trybuna Ludu, fleshed out the main 230 231

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Ibid., 301, 316. “W hołdzie bohaterom: Powstanie w Warszawskim Getcie częścią martyrologii narodu polskiego,” Trybuna Ludu, April 20, 1983, 1, 4. Trybuna Ludu published a series of articles devoted to the Ghetto Uprising in April 1983. See, for example, “Walka i pomoc: Sesja naukowa w 40 rocznicę powstania w getcie,” Trybuna Ludu, April 14, 1983, 2; “Nierówna walka,” Trybuna Ludu, April 16–17, 1983, 3; “W 40 rocznicę wybuchu powstania w getcie warszawskim,” 2. “Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Part of the Martyrdom of the Polish Nation,” Trybuna Ludu, April 20, 1983, 1.

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tenets of this new teleology of sacrifice and victory. “The heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising were Polish Jews and Jewish Poles,” opened Sokorski. Having insisted on the hyphenated identity of the ghetto fighters, however, he swiftly returned to the well-worn dichotomy. Poles and Jews not only “jointly faced the 1939 invasion of fascism” but also, he posited, “shared the hope of building a socialist state.”234 Their struggle was our struggle, the struggle of the Polish nation [. . .] Common were the objectives, the sacrifice, and the spilt blood [. . .] The tragedy of Warsaw Jews was part of the tragedy of the Polish nation during the Second World War. Yet heroic struggle and defiance are never for naught. Legend becomes a material power, and it bore fruit in the form of the final victory. The Soviet Army and the Polish Armed Forces fighting by its side found the country in heroic defiance of Hitlerite barbarism. The triumph in Berlin was our shared one, and in that victory there is a drop of Jewish blood too – that of the Warsaw Ghetto fighters [. . .] The struggle in the Warsaw Ghetto was a struggle for the life and dignity of the Jewish nation and other nations. Of our common fatherland. It is alive within us and will stay alive forever.235

This vision of history, positioning Jewish fighters within the framework of the Polish national struggle to liberate the country from Nazi occupation, is an act of appropriative manipulation on multiple levels. The assertion that Jewish insurgents in the ghetto, where they were subject to systematic annihilation only because they were Jewish and where they were also exposed to Polish collaboration, betrayal, and lack of empathy, felt an attachment to their Polish national identity above all others is a bold statement that can hardly be substantiated.236 What is more, assuming that the ghetto fighters, representing a wide array of political views, were all supportive of Communism is a clear misrepresentation.237 Finally, the claim of common objectives and brotherhood in arms obscures two important facts. For one, the objectives of the Jewish Combat Organization, whose members were trapped in a ghetto, sentenced to death by systematic annihilation, severely outnumbered, and doomed to failure from the beginning, were by default different from those of any other armed formation on Polish territory (even underground ones).238 Second, those Jews who survived the liquidation of 234

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“W obronie godności człowieka i narodu: Przemówienie prezesa ZG ZBoWiD,” Trybuna Ludu, April 20, 1983, 4. Ibid. See Emmanuel Ringelblum, Polish–Jewish Relations during the Second World War (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1992). See Marek Edelman, Getto walczy (Warsaw: CDN, 1983 [1945]), 44; Shmuel Krakowski, The War of the Doomed: Jewish Armed Resistance in Poland 1942–1944 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1984), 167–169. Krakowski, The War of the Doomed, 163–166.

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the ghetto and wished to continue the struggle against the Nazis by joining the Polish Home Army were not necessarily welcome and even faced deadly violence.239 While Polish–Jewish comradeship certainly did exist in some instances during World War II, antisemitic discrimination and even murders of Jews by clandestine Polish military formations are part of the picture, too.240 The official reading of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as seen from 1983 not only presented an idealized image of Polish–Jewish relations during World War II but also positioned the rising within the framework of Cold War politics. “The struggle goes on,” warned Sokorski at the Ghetto Heroes Memorial, adding that the “revanchist powers are trying to question the treaties and foundations that European peace has rested on for nearly forty years.”241 Although the head of the veterans’ association did not further specify who those powers were, the intention of distracting from Poland’s own recent human rights abuses was evident. Suggesting that any alteration of the post-1945 order could lead to another war, he denounced opposition demands for democratic reform as harmful not only to Poland but also to Europe as a whole. All in all, the state commemoration of the Ghetto Uprising was a diplomatic enterprise, seeking to send the world a message about current Polish affairs that would both reassure outsiders and exculpate the regime. This political agenda did not escape the attention of Western observers, and the instrumentalization of Warsaw ghetto fighters by the Communist authorities enraged some Jewish commentators. One of the more prominent critics of the Warsaw event, vice president of the World Jewish Congress Arthur Hertzberg, voiced his reservations in an emotionally powerful piece for The New York Times, published ten days before the anniversary. “Poland is not better for their sacrifice, nor did they die for Poland,” he wrote, explaining why he would not accept the invitation to Warsaw.242 His deeply personal statement resonated widely, even provoking a written response from

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See Krakowski, The War of the Doomed, 282–287; Michał Cichy, “Polacy–Żydzi: Czarne karty Powstania,” Gazeta Wyborcza, January 29, 1994, available at http://classic.wyborcza .pl/archiwumGW/144752/POLACY–ZYDZI–CZARNE-KARTY-POWSTANIA (accessed July 31, 2019); Anka Grupińska, Ciągle po kole: Rozmowy z żołnierzami getta warszawskiego (Wołowiec: Czarne, 2013); Icchak Zukierman, “Antek,” in Nadmiar pamięci: Siedem owych lat: Wspomnienia 1939–1946 (Warsaw: PWN, 2000), 261. See Ringelblum, Polish–Jewish Relations; Tadeusz Epsztein, Justyna Majewska, and Aleksandra Bańkowska, Wrzesień 1939: Listy kaliskie, listy płockie (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2014); Pinkas Rosengarten, Zapiski rabina Wojska Polskiego (Warsaw: Pamięć Diaspory, 2001), 53–56, 63–65; Frank Fox, “Jewish Victims of the Katyn Massacre,” East European Jewish Affairs 23, 1 (1993): 49–55. “W obronie godności człowieka i narodu.” Arthur Hertzberg, “I Can’t Go to Warsaw,” The New York Times, April 9, 1983, 23.

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a Polish diplomat.243 Yet, despite the fact that the majority of the foreign invitees declined to participate, some Jewish organizations decided in favor of going to Warsaw. The Jewish delegations hoped for a chance to lobby for more state support for Jewish heritage in Poland, the return of Jewish property, pension rights for Jewish émigrés, and the repeal of discriminatory legal acts dating from 1968, when around 20,000 Polish Jews, forced to emigrate during an antisemitic campaign, lost their Polish citizenship.244 The cross purposes of Polish state officials, misappropriating the anniversary for their own ends, and the international Jewish organizations, hoping to bring their own agenda to public attention, became especially evident in a symbolic clash that took place right at the Ghetto Heroes Memorial. As the Jewish delegations started an impromptu performance of the Israeli national anthem, their singing was drowned out by the sound of the military orchestra.245 This fundamental unwillingness of Polish state officials to hear the Jewish voice sealed the failure of the 1983 memorial events. The attempt to appropriate the symbol of the Ghetto Uprising to improve the image of an internationally discredited regime backfired as the Western press promptly denounced the historical falsehoods and propagandistic intention of the Polish government.246 The “charm offensive” aimed at the Jewish diaspora likewise failed to produce the results Jaruzelski’s regime had hoped for. Polish diplomats were soon bemoaning the complete inaction of Jewish organizations with regard to the lifting of American sanctions against Poland.247 Polish society at large, as far as official organs could discern, was also either indifferent towards, or irritated by, the lavish celebrations staged during a period of permanent shortages.248 The Jewish Community and a Jewish weekly in Warsaw received antisemitic phone calls and a bomb threat.249 Even rank-and-file Party members and propaganda organs voiced their dissatisfaction with the celebrations, complaining that they “played down the role of the Polish nation in defeating fascism.”250 This half-hearted

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Jerzy M. Nowak, Minister Plenipotentiary of the Polish Mission to the UN, responded to Hertzberg in the pages of The New York Times. His letter, published on the day of the Warsaw celebrations, presented the official Polish reading of the uprising. See Nowak, “Jewish–Polish Bond in the Face of Genocide,” 22. See also Curt Leviant, “Poland’s Insult to a Jewish Observance,” The New York Times, May 3, 1983, 26. Kobylarz, Walka o pamięć, 300, 345. Ibid., 344. See, for instance, “From Poland’s Unquiet Grave,” The New York Times, March 26, 1983, 22; Rosenthal, “The Trees of Warsaw”; Kifner, “For Warsaw, Few Flowers at the Ghetto.” Kobylarz, Walka o pamięć, 320. Ibid., 352. Ibid., 331. Ibid., 325.

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engagement, or perhaps even badly disguised disregard, on the part of Party officials was also evident in the reporting of the Party daily Trybuna Ludu, which, in its main feature on the official events, not only distorted the name of the newly renovated synagogue, but also, even more astoundingly, absurdly misspelled the word “Holocaust.”251 As an antifascist insurgence, the Ghetto Uprising had a safe place in the official commemoration calendar because, unlike the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, it lacked any anti-Soviet intention. For this reason, the Polish state authorities had been staging annual commemorations of the Ghetto Uprising since 1946. At the same time, as Marek Edelman aptly observed, the occasion did not lend itself well to propaganda use, because latent antisemitic attitudes in Poland made it difficult for Communists to appeal to wide masses using the history of the Holocaust.252 Yet, while after 1945 the anniversary had been perfunctorily observed as “an alibi for the ruling government,”253 beginning in the 1970s questions of Jewish history and Polish–Jewish relations were increasingly explored by opposition intellectuals. It was unofficial groups formed during the 1968 student protests that undertook the first cautious attempts at reviving an interest in Jewish history, heritage, and traditions in the aftermath of the most recent Communiststaged antisemitic purge.254 These intellectual pursuits gained real momentum in the decade of Solidarity.255 In 1979 a grassroots initiative of the Jewish Flying University, an informal study group that explored questions of Jewish heritage and identity, was founded in Warsaw, with strong ties to the Solidarity movement.256 The period of legal Solidarity brought forth a plethora of new publications on difficult aspects of Polish–Jewish history, 251

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The feature reporting on the reopening of the Nożyk Synagogue, whose Polish name is Synagoga im. Nożyków, distorted it as “Synagoga im. Nożyka.” Reporting on the official speeches held at the Ghetto Heroes Memorial, the newspaper cited “nigdy więcej wojny, nigdy więcej zakłady.” See “W 40 rocznicę wybuchu powstania w getcie warszawskim,” 2; “W hołdzie bohaterom,” 4. Marek Edelman, cited in Witold Bereś and Krzysztof Burnetko, Marek Edelman: Życie. Po prostu (Warsaw: Świat Książki, 2008), 313. Ibid. Stanisław Krajewski, Żydzi, Judaizm, Polska (Warsaw: Vocatio, 1997), 341–346; Stanisław Krajewski, Poland and the Jews: Reflections of a Polish Polish Jew (Kraków: Austeria, 2005), 142–162; Konstanty Gebert, Living in the Land of Ashes (Kraków: Austeria, 2008), 22–25; Stanisław Krajewski, Nasza żydowskość (Kraków: Austeria, 2010), 146–151. Stanisław Krajewski, interview with the author, October 10, 2019; Antony Polonsky, Polish–Jewish Relations since 1984: Reflections of a Participant (Kraków: Austeria, 2009); Michael Steinlauf, Pamięć nieprzyswojona: Polska pamięć Zagłady (Warsaw: Cyklady, 2001), 108–142; Anna Dodziuk, Druga dusza: O dwudziestu Festiwalach Kultury Żydowskiej w Krakowie (Warsaw: Czarna Owca, 2010), 68–71. The Jewish Flying University was disbanded after the introduction of Martial Law. See Gebert, Living in the Land of Ashes, 23; Rachel Rothstein, “‘Am I Jewish?’ and ‘What

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and more such texts were issued by underground publishing houses over the following decade.257 The unofficial marches through the ghetto led by Marek Edelman, who was active within the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR) and later in Solidarity structures, also attracted more and more opposition activists throughout the late 1970s and 1980s.258 The fortieth anniversary of the Ghetto Uprising was, therefore, an event of significant importance for the democratic opposition.259 In fact, Edelman’s testimony, The Ghetto Fights, first published in Polish by the Bund in 1945 and never since officially reprinted in Poland, reappeared in 1983 with an underground press, prefaced by his open letter calling for a boycott of the official celebrations.260 From 1983 onward, the anniversary of the uprising became a symbolic date in the opposition calendar. Going to the Ghetto Heroes Memorial on that day became for many Poles, non-Jews included, a “Polish patriotic event” and a form of demonstration against the regime.261 In 1988, the opposition not only managed to stage a mass commemoration event at the former Warsaw ghetto but also to release an underground postage stamp series marking the occasion.262

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259 260

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Does It Mean?’: The Jewish Flying University and the Creation of a Polish–Jewish Counterculture in Late 1970s Warsaw,” Journal of Jewish Identities 8, 2 (2015): 85–111. For example, Zespół Redakcyjny Solidarności Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, Marzec ’68: Sesja w Uniwersytecie Warszawskim 1981 r. (Warsaw: Studencka Oficyna Wydawnicza Sowa, 1981). FSO, 02-001-Ep0426; Edelman, Getto walczy; Jan Józef Lipski, Dwie ojczyzny, dwa patriotyzmy (Wydawnictwo Stop, 1984). FCDCN, R 8505 II RARA; Władysław Bartoszewski, Los Żydów Warszawy 1939–1943: W czterdziestą rocznicę powstania w getcie warszawski[m] (Międzyzakładowa Struktura Solidarności “V,” 1986). FSO, 02-001-Ep 2208; Roman Zimand, Piołun i popiół: Czy Polacy i Żydzi wzajem się nienawidzą? (Warsaw: Biblioteka Kultury Niezależnej, 1987). FSO, 02-001-Ep 1585; Aleksander Hertz, Żydzi w kulturze polskiej (Warsaw: Oficyna Wydawnicza Margines, 1987). FSO, 02-001-Dp 2286. Seminal publications also appeared with official publishing houses during this period. See, for example, Monika Krajewska, Czas kamieni (Warsaw: Interpress, 1982). The officially published Catholic periodicals Znak, Więź, and the weekly Tygodnik Powszechny also included special issues for the fortieth anniversary of the Ghetto Uprising. Bereś and Burnetko, Marek Edelman, 253; Stanisław Krajewski, interview with the author, October 10, 2019. Krajewski, Nasza żydowskość, 148. Edelman, Getto walczy. An English translation appeared in May 1946: Marek Edelman, The Ghetto Fights (New York: American Representation of the General Jewish Workers’ Union of Poland, 1946). Gebert, Living in the Land of Ashes, 93; Marek Edelman, cited in Witold Bereś and Krzysztof Burnetko, Marek Edelman, 363–364. The series was devoted to Bund leaders executed by the Soviets in 1941: “Przywódcy BUNDU: Członkowie II Międzynarodówki Socjalistycznej: Rozstrzelani w grudniu 1941 w Związku Sowieckim,” 1988. FSO 02–005-Xp 0218. There was also a series devoted to Marek Edelman and the Jewish Combat Organization issued by Poczta Solidarności Walczącej. FSO, 02-005-Xp 0128.

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The Communist power holders’ grand sponsorship of the 1983 commemoration of the Ghetto Uprising was therefore a de facto incursion into a symbolic domain that had been increasingly claimed by the democratic opposition. Posing as legitimate guardians of the memory of the Ghetto Uprising, both the Communist regime and underground opposition circles wished to demonstrate their holding of the moral high ground, but also an attachment to values they saw written on their own banners. Marek Edelman, interviewed by The New York Times in 1983, noted that the anniversary was “a very political event” because “[t]he question of liberty [was] the political issue.”263 But while for the Communist authorities “liberty” meant Soviet-led liberation from fascism and Communist-sanctioned national sovereignty for Poland, for the democratic opposition, the ghetto fighters stood for defiance against a totalitarian power and freedom from oppression. These two opposing framings naturally made it impossible for the state and oppositionally minded citizens to observe the day together. No one understood this better than Marek Edelman, who at that point had been shunning official functions at the Ghetto Memorial for decades. In February 1983 he wrote an open letter rejecting the official invitation to the state-organized observance and calling for it to be boycotted. The text was published by the Polish underground press as well as Western papers and resonated widely, causing major embarrassment to the Polish authorities.264 Forty years ago we not only fought for our lives, but for life in dignity and freedom. Observance of our anniversary here, where social life in its entirety is overshadowed by degradation and oppression, where words and gestures have been completely falsified, is betrayal of our struggle, is participation in something completely contradicting it. It is an act of cynicism and contempt.265

Edelman denounced the Communist authorities as lacking the moral legitimacy to officiate over the commemoration events, stating that “people who use violence, wishing to gag and subjugate the nation, have no moral right to remember those who gave their life in the defense of freedom, dignity, and humanity.”266 At the same time, Edelman made clear whom he considered a legitimate guardian of this memory. Announcing his idea of a floral cross at the ghetto memorial to an initially baffled group of his friends, he linked the alternative commemoration to the protest aesthetics of the Solidarity movement. Teresa Bogucka recollects that his proposal was at first met with disbelief 263

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Marek Edelman, cited in John Kifner, “A Leader of ’43 Warsaw Uprising Asks Boycott of Polish Observance,” The New York Times, April 9, 1983, 4. Kifner, “A Leader of ’43 Warsaw Uprising Asks Boycott of Polish Observance.” Marek Edelman, “Open Letter,” The New York Times, April 9, 1983, 4. “Iść po słonecznej stronie: Z rozmowy z Markiem Edelmanem w 40-tą rocznicę wybuchu powstania w getcie,” Tygodnik Mazowsze, April 7, 1983, 2.

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and skepticism, but after he had been placed under house arrest Edelman repeated his request and insisted on the execution of the plan.267 Events in Warsaw, however, took a different turn. Before the planned demonstration, Teresa Bogucka, who was tasked with coordinating the flower-laying operation, received visits from several Varsovian Jews protesting the idea. One of them was Roman Zimand, an author, journalist, and literary scholar involved in Solidarity and underground publishing. Finding Bogucka determined to create the floral cross, Zimand decided to torpedo the initiative on the ground. Having mobilized a few young activists to gather as many, preferably yellow, fresh flowers as possible, he ordered them to make sure that, instead of the cross, a floral “V” sign would be created.268 On the day of the demonstration, April 17, two days ahead of the official ceremony, police in anti-riot gear and armed with a water cannon dispersed the first groups of people gathering at the Umschlagplatz.269 Despite an attempt by Canadian diplomats to free him from house arrest, Marek Edelman remained in Łódź. Eventually between 400 and 1,000 protesters managed to gather at the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes.270 Zimand read out a letter from Edelman, whose message was both universalist and unmistakably political: It is not important that these were Jews, Polish Jews for generations, citizens of this town for centuries. These were people, their fate was a human fate. We know it not only from that particular time and place, but also from earlier history and, unfortunately, also later. We knew it yesterday and we know it today [. . .]. Honoring the memory of our brothers who died here, we also honor our brothers who died or are dying elsewhere. Remembering those who fought for their lives, freedom, and dignity here, we reach out to all those who fight for the same thing everywhere today.271

A former speaker of the Mazowsze Solidarity chapter, Janusz Onyszkiewicz, subsequently delivered an impromptu speech at the memorial, for which he was detained and served three months’ imprisonment.272 Małgorzata Łukasiewicz, a young Solidarity activist commissioned by Zimand to deliver 267 268 269

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Teresa Bogucka, interview with the author, Warsaw, May 1, 2019. Małgorzata Łukasiewicz, interview with the author, Warsaw, February 16, 2020. John Kifner, “Polish Police Bar March on Uprising” The New York Times, April 18, 1983, 3. Police forces estimated the crowd at 400; opposition sources and Western journalists put it at around 1,000. See Kobylarz, Walka o pamięć, 371; Kifner, “Polish Police Bar March on Uprising.” Marek Edelman’s letter was reprinted in full by the underground periodical Tygodnik Mazowsze a few days later: “40. Rocznica powstania w getcie” Tygodnik Mazowsze, April 21, 1983, 1. FSO, Gp 0563. Janusz Onyszkiewicz, cited in Ruth Ellen Gruber, “Across Warsaw Remembering Warsaw Ghetto Heroes with Yellow Daffodils,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, April 22, 2013 available at www.jta.org/2013/04/22/global/across-warsaw-remembering-warsawghetto-heroes-with-yellow-daffodils (accessed August 7, 2019).

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bucketfuls of daffodils to the ghetto monument and unaware of Edelman’s original plan, made sure that the flowers were arranged in the V shape.273 Police reports recount that, after the protesters laid down their flowers, they sang a Catholic hymn, Boże coś Polskę.274 Teresa Bogucka, detained on her way to the monument by police, did not witness the memorial event. Eventually she had to report back to Edelman that the cross performance had failed. The demonstration of April 17 received press attention both internationally and at home. The New York Times printed a large photo of the defiant crowd at the ghetto memorial raising their hands in the victory sign on its title page the next day. Trybuna Ludu reported on “a group of people” attempting to “politicize the mourning ceremony at all costs” as “a pretext for spreading an anti-government message.”275 The underground publication Tygodnik Mazowsze reprinted Marek Edelman’s address together with a statement from the Warsaw underground Solidarity structures honoring the ghetto fighters.276 Edelman’s countermarch, even without the floral cross, was thus unanimously framed as an oppositional demonstration, with Solidarity featuring as the main protagonist of the events. The ethos of the Ghetto Uprising certainly lent itself well to political appropriation. While the Party hoped to use the occasion to improve its international image, Solidarity activists saw it as an opportunity to demonstrate support for the banned trade union without running a great personal risk – honoring antifascist insurgents celebrated by the state itself offered a venue that was relatively safe. The story of those heroic insurgents, rising against an overwhelming totalitarian regime, could be inscribed into the narrative of socialist struggle, but also carried a clear message to those who were still recovering from the state reprisals of December 1981. Searching for a convenient analogy to frame the uprising, however, both camps went too far. While the Communists cast ghetto fighters as their ideological predecessors, Solidarity positioned itself as their contemporary successors. Janusz Onyszkiewicz, speaking at the memorial, made the claim that the ghetto fighters “fought for the ideals that were the foundation for the emergence of Solidarity.” But he also ended his improvised address with the bolder statement that “[i]f the heroes of the ghetto were alive today, we deeply believe they would join us in our struggle for freedom, truth, and dignity.”277 Solidarity’s local structures in Warsaw pushed the analogy even further, stating 273

274 275 276 277

Małgorzata Łukasiewicz, interview with the author, Warsaw, February 16, 2020. Stanisław Krajewski, who also participated in the demonstration, confirms the presence of the V-shaped flower installation, too. Stanisław Krajewski, interview with the author, October 10, 2019. Kobylarz, Walka o pamięć, 371; Kifner “Polish Police Bar March on Uprising.” “Dysonans,” Trybuna Ludu, April 19, 1983, 2. “Pamięci bohaterów getta,” Tygodnik Mazowsze, April 21, 1983, 1. FSO, Gp 0563. Janusz Onyszkiewicz, cited in Kifner “Polish Police Bar March on Uprising.”

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in their press release not only that the movement shared its principal values with the ghetto fighters, but that its members “have been hunted down and persecuted today for the same reason that people fighting in the ghettos were murdered back then.”278 These comparisons between the wartime fate of Jews and the plight of Solidarity activists under Martial Law were not isolated examples. Bishop Jan Etter, visiting political prisoners in an internment camp near Gniezno in 1982, reportedly equated their predicament to that of concentration camp inmates.279 There were also other attempts to appropriate the ethos of the Warsaw ghetto fighters on the part of the anti-Communist opposition. In 1985, the underground periodical Solidarność Walcząca (Fighting Solidarity) published a statement on the occasion of the forty-second anniversary of the Ghetto Uprising, stating: The Jewish insurgents – gassed, shot dead, and burnt down – have survived. In us. The nation that had for centuries lived with us in one fatherland – the nation of Polish Jews – has perished. But apart from everything else, with their last uprising, they passed down to us their priceless last will: defeat evil in combat!280

Presenting Solidarity’s radical splinter group not only as the ideological successors of the ghetto fighters but also as the incarnation of their spirit was probably the most far-reaching act of appropriation of its kind. Equating Communist persecution of opposition activists with the Holocaust and instrumentalizing the ghetto fighters in order to legitimize violent anti-Communist dissent, Solidarność Walcząca went much further than Marek Edelman might have ever intended when he opened the ghetto celebrations up to Solidarity’s protest aesthetics. And indeed, some Jewish participants in the alternative commemorations of 1983, even if they ardently supported Solidarity themselves, perceived this appropriative discourse as going too far. Edelman himself rejected the analogy, pointing out that the fight in the ghetto “was atrocious, brutal, with your life at stake, whereas in Solidarity you could at most get arrested and serve some time in jail.”281 Stanisław Krajewski, a member of the Jewish Flying University and participant in the 1983 alternative ghetto demonstration, likewise felt uneasy 278

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“Pamięci bohaterów getta.” The statement was signed by the Regional Executive Committee of Mazowsze Solidarity: Zbigniew Bujak, Zbigniew Janas, and Wiktor Kulerski. “Niektóre przejawy aktualnej działalności kleru 17.04.1982,” in Krawczak and Wilanowski, Kościół w stanie wojennym, 51. “Warszawskie Getto,” Solidarność Walcząca, April 28–May 5, 1985, 1. FSO, Gp 509. Marek Edelman, in “Nie tylko o miłości. Z Markiem Edelmanem rozmawiają Filip Luft i Tomek Kaczor, Magazyn Nieuziemiony, Warszawa 12/2009,” in Marek Edelman: Prosto się mówi, jak się wie, edited by Paula Sawicka and Krzysztof Burnetko 124–126 (Warsaw: Świat Książki, 2013), 124–126, here 126.

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about the political appropriation of the uprising by the anti-Communist opposition.282 Denouncing the analogy between the ghetto fighters and Solidarity as “out of place,” he also protested that one “cannot plant a flag on a heap of corpses,” even if the flag “represents a noble cause and intention.”283 The fact that Catholic ritual provided the form for the oppositional commemoration events, both in 1983 and later, also contributed to a specific framing of Jewish history that could be perceived as alienating. Opposition activists observed the anniversary predominantly by visiting holy masses in honor of the Jewish victims. Jewish community members were invited to attend these services.284 Although the significance of the events transcended the purely religious and had a clearly political resonance, Catholic liturgy, symbolism, and theology supplied the language and interpretive tools for grappling with a topic that for many was new and unfamiliar. This meant not only that the Holocaust was commemorated using Catholic prayers and hymns but also that its meaning was inscribed into the Christian narrative of martyrdom and redemption. “Honoring the memory of the innocent victims,” spoke Cardinal Macharski at the Kraków mass in 1983, “we pray that Eternal God accepts this sacrifice for the salvation of the world.”285 By turning Jews murdered by the Nazis into an offering for a Christian God, Polish Catholics elevated the Holocaust to the role of a theologically meaningful event. This framing extended beyond the purely religious context. During the opposition demonstration held in Warsaw in 1988 to mark the forty-fifth anniversary of the Ghetto Uprising, one of the banners displayed by the rightwing nationalist opposition grouping Konfederacja Polski Niepodległej (KPN, Confederation of Independent Poland) read as follows: “Let’s Bow Our Heads – This Is Their Golgotha.”286 The motif of crucifixion and redemption, recurring in the context of the ghetto commemorations, not only indicates the pervasive nature of the Catholic idiom in the Polish anti-Communist underground but also demonstrates that the movement lacked the language and perhaps also the sensitivity required to speak about the Holocaust. It must be remembered that opposition attempts to include the story of the ghetto in a wider narrative about reclaiming a repressed national past were made in a context of widespread ignorance about the wartime Jewish experience in Poland and also latent antisemitism in large parts of society. From the 282 283 284

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Stanisław Krajewski, interview with the author, October 10, 2019. Krajewski, Nasza żydowskość, 148. Kobylarz, Walka o pamięć, 373–374; John Kifner, “Glemp Mass Marks Uprising in Ghetto,” The New York Times, April 11, 1983, 6. Franciszek Macharski, “Homilia wygłoszona na nabożeństwie w Bazylice Mariackiej w 40 rocznicę powstania w getcie warszawskim,” Tygodnik Powszechny, May 1, 1983, 1. Tygodnik Mazowsze chose the motto as the title for its lead article on the title page. “Pochylmy głowy – to ich Golgota,” Tygodnik Mazowsze, April 20, 1988, 1. FSO, Gp 0563.

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beginning the movement’s efforts to commemorate the Warsaw ghetto were thus laced with ambivalence. While some Solidarity publications, such as a special section of Biuletyn Dolnośląski entitled “Jews and Poles,” reflected on the difficult aspects of Polish–Jewish history,287 many other texts, including those published on the occasion of the 1983 anniversary, were problematic or downright antisemitic.288 But even if the prevalent mood among oppositionally minded intellectuals was one of openness and benevolence towards Jews, the dominant Catholic idiom left little space for otherness within Solidarity. “Many of Solidarity’s Catholic ceremonies,” recalls Krajewski, “could alienate those who were involved in a secular way or were non-Catholics. To be in Solidarity meant to participate in meetings under a cross. True, the cross was widely interpreted as a universal symbol, [. . .] but this does not mean there was no problem.”289 Although Krajewski emphasizes that he himself did not feel excluded and saw the Catholic rituals to honor the dead as an expression of “values which threatened any totalitarian regime,” he bemoaned at the same time the absence of any “Jewish songs or prayers” during these events.290 The appropriation of the story of the ghetto fighters into a wider oppositional narrative of anti-totalitarian defiance and national martyrdom, interlaced with Catholic symbolism and teleology, was therefore problematic in many respects. The oppositional “takeover” of the memory of the Ghetto Uprising was undergirded with ignorance, ambivalence, and asymmetrical power dynamics in which an ethnic and religious majority manipulated and politically exploited the past of a decimated minority. Given that Marek Edelman repeatedly stressed his a-religious convictions and distanced himself from manifestations of Polish nationalism, his choice of form for what was perhaps the most contentious and politically charged Ghetto Uprising anniversary since the end of the war must have seemed puzzling to his contemporaries.291 In an interview with Adam Michnik from 1987, Edelman vehemently distanced himself from Polish patriotism, labeling 287

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“Żydzi i Polacy,” Biuletyn Dolnośląski no. 11, November/December 1980, 1. FSO, Gp 34. See also Jakub Karpiński et al., Żydzi jako polski problem (Wolna Spółka Wydawnicza, 1987). FSO, 02-001-Dp 2774. Some of the texts published on the occasion of the 1983 anniversary show clear bias in their foregrounding of Polish suffering and assistance to Jews. They also raise the question of Jewish collaboration with the Nazis. See Ewa Berberyusz, “Z grzechu antysemityzmu,” Tygodnik Powszechny, April 17, 1983, 3. Among the clearly antisemitic samizdat publications is the six-volume series Zbrodnie: Okres stalinowski (Gdańsk: Biblioteka Przeglądu Gdańskiego, 1981). FCDCN, AR2746II. See also Kwestia Żydowska: Prawda a rzeczywistość (Kraków, 1990). FCDCN, AR 1985 II. Krajewski, Poland and the Jews, 149. Ibid., 155; Stanisław Krajewski, interview with the author, October 10, 2019. On Marek Edelman’s attitude to Polish nationalism, see “Adam Michnik rozmawia z Markiem Edelmanem: Rozmowa niepublikowana 1987,” in Marek Edelman: Prosto

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it as “disgusting.” Yet, at the same time, he expressed a strong attachment to the values represented by the Solidarity movement, even if they were conveyed using symbols he did not identify with: “Jews, Socialists, the Bund, and Solidarity are one and the same thing. Virgin Marys and the [religious] pennons transmitted Solidarity’s idea, but its essence was not in the pennon, rather in the idea.”292 Following the same logic, to him the floral cross in the ghetto would have stood for the universal ideals that Solidarity shared with the Bund and not the Catholic content of the symbol itself. Yet the outer form of this “symbolic container” was not irrelevant. To deploy a cross would have been to mark the ghetto memorial with an emblem of unequivocal antiCommunist significance. At the same time, it would have meant taking advantage of the symbol’s religious status and the fact its removal always caused controversies. “The floral cross, which began to be displayed in multiple places,” recollects Bogucka, “was simply a tool of anti-Communist struggle.” It wasn’t about religion, but about the fact that the Reds wouldn’t dare to touch the flowers not to irritate the Church. And that’s how we treated [the symbol]. Everybody went to build floral crosses, believers and atheists alike – so [Marek Edelman] wanted to do that too. [. . .] Besides, it was the same as when workers initiated Solidarity unions in their factories; they would immediately organize a holy mass – not out of piousness, but because it put the authorities in a difficult situation.293

Writing about the floral cross for the ghetto in 1998, Bogucka interpreted it as “an obvious sign of community and openness [. . .] that subsumed the Jewish uprising into the Polish tradition of defiance against violence.” It “created a positive sense of togetherness” that Poles craved in the 1980s.294 At that time, the ghetto cross that had ultimately never materialized and the “positive sense of togetherness” it had been intended to foster offered a counterpoint to the ongoing bitter controversy over the Auschwitz crosses.295 There was, however, a troubling overlap between Solidarity’s deployment of Catholic symbols to subsume Jewish antifascist dissent into the tradition of Polish national uprisings and post-1989 attempts to foreground Polish suffering during World War II, peaking in the Auschwitz cross defense. Right-wing activists who planted hundreds of crosses adjacent to the camp in defense of the presence of Catholic symbols and institutions at the premises of Auschwitz I used the same protest

292 293 294

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się mówi, jak się wie, edited by Paula Sawicka and Krzysztof Burnetko (Warsaw: Świat Książki, 2013), 56. Ibid., 41. Teresa Bogucka, interview with the author, Warsaw, May 1, 2019. Teresa Bogucka, “W pralękach swoich pogrzebani,” Gazeta Wyborcza, May 23, 1998, available at http://classic.wyborcza.pl/archiwumGW/395282/W-pralekach-swoichpogrzebani (accessed August 7, 2019). Zubrzycki also juxtaposes the two incidents in Zubrzycki, The Crosses of Auschwitz, 179.

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aesthetics that had enjoyed massive popular support during the Solidarity decade. What is more, these earlier, widely morally sanctioned attempts at subsuming Jewish suffering under Christian symbolism may have influenced, a decade later, the success of the Auschwitz protagonists, who managed to capture public attention and eventually “defend” the papal cross on the perimeter of the camp. Despite the entrenched nature of this symbolic “war of position” over the legacy of the Ghetto Uprising, the competing ceremonies of 1983 revealed, yet again, the vulnerability of the boundary between nation and anti-nation, which was constantly challenged, renegotiated, and reconstituted on a varied range of symbolic battlefields. Seen in Laclauian terms, the symbolic clash over the ideological “ownership” of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising resulted from concurrent attempts on the part both of the Polish Communists and of their opposition to appropriate the ghetto heroes’ memory into competing metanarratives – of antifascist struggle for a socialist society on the one hand and of insurgent dissent against a murderous regime on the other. Even while using different symbolic means, the two camps resorted to strikingly similar framing, positioning the Ghetto Rising in a chain of Polish national upheavals. The presence of the cross and Catholic rituals in the context of the oppositional commemoration was a natural correlate of this collective mindset. A national uprising required a ritual staffage in line with the oppositional articulation of “national tradition” that celebrated momentous historical anniversaries by means of Catholic masses. The nearly universal acceptance of Christian religious symbols as an anti-Communist shorthand, even in the context of Holocaust commemoration, testifies to their complete decontextualization from the strictly religious sphere by the 1980s. Adopted even by a Jewish atheist like Edelman, the cross appeared as a Laclauian “empty signifier” whose function as the shared rallying sign of a collective oppositional identity prevailed over the particularistic and exclusionary semantic content inherent in the symbol.

Conclusions A number of scholars have already noted that the symbol of the cross had a central standing during the decade of Solidarity.296 In its most basic iterations throughout the 1980s, the cross functioned as one of the most prominent emblems of antistructure. But it was more than just a protest symbol, it communicated a set of ideas and forms of mobilization that were radically new. It was now a badge of political allegiance with the Solidarity movement, symbolizing the “equivalential chain” of Solidarity’s political demands, including the imperative to commemorate victims of recent state violence and to 296

Zubrzycki, The Crosses of Auschwitz, 179.

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address taboos in the state-sanctioned historical narrative (such as Katyn). In this way, the cross both signified past injustices and offered a means of symbolically rectifying them – as in the form of the monuments to the fallen workers of 1956 and 1970. Apart from providing a symbolic vehicle for confronting and coming to terms with traumatic and silenced aspects of the country’s recent history, the topos of crucifixion served to frame antiCommunist dissent within the Polish history of national emancipation and portray the Solidarity revolution as a messianic endeavor to liberate Poland from evil. The cross thereby both articulated immediate political goals and provided metaphysical legitimation and a spiritual genealogy for the emerging movement. In this capacity it demonstrated all the features of Turnerian antistructure, including spontaneity, creativity, and the centrality of emotional appeal over rational calculation.297 The genre of the floral cross illustrates this particularly well, with its spontaneous character, rich performativity, and popular appeal. In fact, it was thanks to the easy adaptability of the symbol for performative use that the cross quickly achieved the status of “privileged signifier” and became a canonical component of anti-systemic behavior. Marking strike areas, Solidarity headquarters, and public spaces as well as inspiring new performative genres (e.g. chants, vernacular poetry, and patriotic Ways of the Cross), it became the default signal of an anti-Communist stance. At the same time, the symbol of the cross also had applications in less obvious semantic contexts: it was used as a symbol of the struggle for social justice, for example, as on the Olsztyn May Day poster or in the form of the krzyżomłot or hammer-cross designed as one of the emblems of the 1956 demonstrations in Poznań. The attempt to use it as a central rallying sign of the alternative anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was another such extension of the cross’s core semantic content. Yet the true complexity of the symbol in this period lay not only in the polyphonic messages it carried but also in its ambivalent position within the dichotomy of structure and antistructure. While some of its mainstream manifestations – its appearances during strikes, demonstrations, and pickets – neatly fit the template of antistructural protest, other uses of the cross by Solidarity, especially in the period of its legal existence, had hegemonic traits too. As soon as the use of the cross in the public space became routinized and sanctioned by internal regulations – as when the massive cross memorials were designed and unveiled in 1980 in Gdańsk and 1981 in Poznań, or when crucifixes were hung on a mass scale in public buildings and factories – the symbol entered the realm of structure. With artistic competitions taking place and newly formed committees making executive decisions about the symbolic content of memorials, 297

See Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1974), 47.

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spontaneity was replaced with obligation and, as in the case of the Poznań debacle over the winning entry or the Białystok controversy over the Orthodox crucifix, even constraint. Monumentalized and sanctioned by the movement’s internal directives, between the August Agreements and Martial Law, the symbol of the cross ceased to pose a radical challenge to the existing order and instead began to be harnessed by a newly emerging structure. The status of the cross during the Solidarity decade is further complicated by the fact that power holders likewise made attempts to incorporate the symbol into their hegemonic narratives. Although the strategies of Polish state authorities differed over time, oscillating between marginalizing or removing the symbol (as during the renovation of Plac Zwycięstwa in Warsaw) and pushing it back into the realm of purely religious significance (by encouraging holy masses in lieu of protest marches), Polish Communists also searched for ways to claim the symbol for themselves. In doing so, they attempted to take over existing oppositional symbolic venues and genres. They not only embraced the Poznań 1956 memorial as a site of official celebrations, but in 1981 went so far as to issue a series of postage stamps featuring the crosses in Gdańsk.298 Emphasizing the Christian message of the cross as a symbol of universal redemption and forgiveness, they tried to frame the Poznań and Gdańsk memorials as venues of national reconciliation and unity. The role of the symbol as a boundary marker in this period is similarly complex. On the one hand, the cross functioned as a “privileged signifier” representing a wide array of demands but also as an open and inclusive rallying sign meant to speak to Christians, atheists, and even Jews. In this sense, the mobilizing function of the symbol corresponded to its inclusive application as a putatively universal symbol of dissent subsuming different social, ethnic, and religious groups. On the other hand, it clearly marked the boundary between nation and anti-nation, with the latter being represented by Communists expelled from the Polish national collective. The Communist power holders, however, were not the only Others defined by their alleged enmity towards the cross. Jews also occasionally featured in the oppositional underground circuit as a threat to the national community defined by the cross. The six-volume samizdat publication Zbrodnie: Okres stalinowski (Atrocities of the Stalinist Period) issued by the far-right Biblioteka Przeglądu Gdańskiego in 1981 illustrates this narrative particularly well. Featuring on one of the volumes’ covers a Star of David smashing a wooden cross from above, the authors communicate an ominous vision of an all-powerful Jewish–Communist conspiracy threatening the Polish nation.299 As a result, the boundary between nation and anti-nation as marked by the symbol of the cross becomes blurred, with 298

299

Silke Plate, Widerstand mit Briefmarken: Die polnische Oppositionsbewegung und ihre unabhängige Post in den 1980er Jahren (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 203. Zbrodnie.

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conflicting oppositional narratives oscillating between inclusive and exclusionary frames, while Communist counternarratives propose their own vision of national unity. On the threshold of systemic transformation, the cross therefore remains an overarching symbol of anti-Communist contestation that is both capacious and polyphonic but also contested, riddled with contradiction, and increasingly exclusive.

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5 The Transformation Crusades

The 1990s brought a decisive change to the status of the cross as a political symbol. With the influence of the Catholic Church on political life rising and a rollback of socialist secularization reforms, after 1989 Poland entered another phase of solidification, in which religious symbols were used to signal the shift in values of the new political reality, which some observers were quick to dub a “confessional democracy.”1 The anti-secularization turn, writ large on the agenda of the new authorities, was swiftly sanctioned by new laws. The reintroduction of religious education into public schools, the obligation that all media respect Christian values, the introduction of Christian references into military ritual, and an abortion ban – all passed within the years immediately following transformation – gave the Catholic Church and its teachings a central position in the public space. The cross, introduced into state buildings and represented in countless memorials and official ceremonies, became the symbol of a new order, while those who opposed it – “post-Communists,” liberals, pro-choice activists, and feminists – were designated the new “enemies of the cross.”2 In some respects, the caesura of 1989 bore a resemblance to that of 1918, when the Second Republic intensively employed the symbol of the cross to communicate the hegemony of the new Polish nation state in its multiethnic borderlands. References to the Second Republic after 1989 were, in fact, highly explicit. When the Parliament passed changes to the state’s name and insignia in early 1990, a group of right-wing lawmakers put forward a motion to modify the Polish national emblem by placing a crown adorned with a cross on top of the white eagle’s head. The design mirrored that of Poland’s coat of arms from the period 1919–1927. Although the motion was rejected by parliament and eventually the eagle received a crown without a cross, the initiative embodied 1

2

Barbara Stanosz, “Ateizm, agnostycyzm i antyklerykalizm w Polsce a kwestia równouprawnienia,” in Kościół, państwo i polityka płci, edited by Adam Ostolski (Warsaw: Fundacja Heinricha Bölla, 2010), 153. Bishop Józef Michalik, commenting on protests against the reintroduction of religious education into school curricula, called the protesters “foes of the cross and the Gospel.” Cited in Danuta Waniek, Orzeł i krucyfiks: Eseje o podziałach politycznych w Polsce (Toruń: Adam Marszałek, 2011), 322.

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the zeitgeist of the Polish transformation years.3 As Poland sought to redefine itself after the collapse of state socialism, symbolic references to the Second Republic served to position the Third Republic as a political descendant of the pre-1939 state. The cross thus signaled a return to a “national tradition” modeled on the interwar Polish state and its allegiance to the Catholic Church. The new state that defined itself in opposition to the period of Soviet dominance venerated the cross as a symbol of Polish selfemancipation and an emblem of rebirth, but also as visual shorthand for antiCommunism. At the same time, however, the cross came to legitimize a set of radical systemic and legislative changes that, like the abortion ban, deeply polarized Polish society. As a result, the symbol also started to connote a sense of oppression, control, and hegemony that sparked resistance, subversion, and ridicule. For a while, though, the familiar usage of religious symbols to legitimize anti-systemic protest continued in democratic Poland too. When, in June 1990, farmers demanding minimum purchase prices on basic farming produce occupied the premises of the Ministry of Agriculture, they brought with them the usual paraphernalia of anti-Communist protest: pictures of the Virgin Mary and wooden crucifixes.4 As late as 1993 the emergent populist peasant party Samoobrona (Self-Defense) protested in front of the parliament building with a cross that was several meters high.5 Yet, as Church ritual became the omnipresent frame for all official gatherings and state acts, crosses slowly lost their subversive character in the public space. Even those crosses which had served as the most emblematic memorial sites commemorating recent national upheavals suddenly lost their popular resonance and symbolic urgency. In February 1990 the new opinion weekly Wprost featured a spread entitled “1956–1990,” accompanied by a melancholy photo of a group of boys playing ball at the foot of the Poznań crosses.6 As recent hotspots of contestation were turned into quotidian cityscapes, new memorial projects of this kind failed to attract the same enthusiastic grassroots support as they had a decade earlier. As the national press reported with bitterness, the massive thirty-three-meter-high memorial cross at the Wujek coalmine in Katowice, erected in 1991 to commemorate the death of nine miners killed while protesting the introduction of Martial Law, was a case in point. With just over half the needed funds raised via donations, a year and a half after the memorial’s inauguration the building committee was still struggling to pay its debts, failing to secure adequate financial support not only from the local 3 4

5 6

Adam Leszczyński, “Jak ruszyć krzyż?,” Gazeta Wyborcza, July 17–18, 2010, 3. See a photo essay and article on the strike by Dariusz Łukaszewski and Mariusz Stachowiak, “Lemiesze na miecze,” Wprost, July 15, 1990, 16–17. Mirosław Pęczak, “Bez symboli,” Polityka, June 19, 1993, 9. “Stop-klatka,” Wprost, February 4, 1990, back cover.

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Solidarity structures, but even from President Lech Wałęsa himself.7 As the memory of anti-systemic struggle transitioned from the realm of contestation into the sphere of regular and tedious social negotiations under democratic conditions, new concerns and anxieties began to capture the public attention.

In the Throes of Transformation Anxiety, 1989–1993 The fall of state socialism, deep economic recession, and the radical reforms that Poland had just launched generated a strong sense of anxiety that articulated itself both in new forms of performative religiosity and in a grassroots outcry against the progressing clericalization of the state. On the one hand, vernacular, and often unorthodox, forms of piety – like the cult of miracleworking prophets, pilgrimages, and the construction of new local sanctuaries – boomed in the 1990s.8 In Poznań, a self-appointed “king of Poland” cloaked in a haircloth shirt and holding a crucifix prophesized in the streets, while a wave of private revelations, holy images appearing on walls, and miraculous recoveries in healing wells swept across the country.9 On the other hand, the new hegemonic position of the Catholic Church polarized Poles, triggering protests. Throughout the early transformation years the cross thus continued to inhabit the Polish political imagination, both as an emblem of the new political order and as a target of caricature in the newly emerging free media. The early 1990s were a time of rapid change that brought with it a growing sense of insecurity and apprehension. An opinion poll from April 1990 indicated that 65 percent of Poles considered their living conditions to be bad.10 A year later, 80 percent of respondents reported experiencing fear and tension, with every second Pole convinced that the situation in the country was steadily deteriorating.11 Sixty percent of young Poles wished to emigrate, and a third saw themselves as belonging to a “lost generation.”12 7

8

9

10 11

12

As of 1993, the memorial committee still owed contractors over a billion złoty (more than €300,000 in today’s money) for the construction of the cross monument, whose overall cost was 6 billion złoty. See Tomasz Szymborski, “Obiecanki,” Polityka, April 3, 1993, 7. Violetta Krasnowska, “Wysłannik Boga,” Polityka, August 28, 1993, 14; Marek Henzler and Violetta Krasnowska, “Dar od Boga,” Polityka, January 23, 1993, 9; Bogusław Gomzar, “Kościół antykościelny,” NIE, November 24, 1994, 4; Piotr Gajdziński, “Oto Polska,” Wprost, January 3, 1993, 32–35. Bogusław Mazur, “Kto zostanie królem Polski?,” Wprost, August 19, 1990, 9; Leszek Mazan, “Eksplozja cudów,” Wprost, March 3, 1991, 29; Piotr Gajdziński, “Moc oczyszczenia,” Wprost, August 2, 1992, 28–30; Maciej Łuczak, “Kuszenie pielgrzyma,” Wprost, September 27, 1992, 24–26; Krzysztof Bochus, “Popyt na cuda,” Wprost, September 27, 1992, 63–64. CBOS opinion poll from April 20–24, 1990. Cited in “W kraju,” Polityka, June 9, 1990, 2. CBOS poll conducted from May to June 1991. Cited in Jan Ozimy and Henryk Schult, “Horror i Ojczyzna,” NIE, August 8, 1991, 6. CBOS poll cited in Wiesław Kot, “Młodzież w krainie czarów,” Wprost, July 12, 1992, 20– 21.

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New illustrated press titles that emerged after 1989 thrived on and partly fueled these fears, which ranged from the perceived instability of the Polish state borders to unemployment, organized crime, and the AIDS epidemic.13 They spoke to their anxious readers with a visual language that combined emotionally potent symbols and a degree of iconoclasm. The cross often appeared in these representations of Poland’s uncertain future, establishing itself as an icon of the new epoch. In both of the two most influential opinion weeklies of the early 1990s, the Poznań-based Wprost and the Warsaw-based satirical periodical NIE, the symbol was used with high frequency to illustrate a wide range of topics.14 For example, one 1990 Wprost opinion piece on neoliberalism, privatization, and the need to curb state interventionism featured a photograph of a procession carrying a large wooden cross,15 while a text on the problems of Polish farmers from 1992 was accompanied by a cartoon of Jesus plowing a scorched field with a cross he carried on his back.16 Controversial instances of such visual commentary included a Wprost headline story on growing fears about financial crime entitled “Kill the Richman,” which was illustrated by an image of a crucified businessman in suit and tie.17 In a subsequent issue, Wprost editors had to defend their cover choice to angry readers who had complained about a “misuse of the sacral meaning”18 of the cross. Debates on the permissibility of such new, playful uses of religious symbols in the media continued throughout the 1990s as Poles began to renegotiate the boundaries of taboo in a society suddenly freed from state censorship. Crude political satire, anticlericalism, and explicit imagery bordering on the pornographic were all features of this new testing ground, where new press standards remained to be worked out and a new appetite for subversive content emerged. The climate was exemplified by the unprecedented success 13

14

15 16 17 18

See, for example, Jarosław Giziński, “Pogranicza w ogniu?,” Wprost, January 12, 1992, 42– 43; “Trumna Kotańskiego,” Wprost, August 9, 1992, 29–30; Bartłomiej Leśniewski, “Bezrobotni na niby,” Wprost, November 29, 1992, 19–21; Dorota Romaszewska, “AIDS z kroplówki,” Wprost, November 14, 1993, 32–33; Stanisław Janecki, “Śmierć na receptę,” Wprost, November 14, 1993, 34–35. Wprost first appeared as a nationwide weekly magazine in 1989 and had a liberal profile. By 1993 it reached 7.4 percent of Poles. The satirical, leftist, and staunchly anticlerical NIE was founded in 1992 by Jerzy Urban, former spokesman of the Council of Ministers (1981–1989). At the peak of its popularity NIE was the most influential Polish weekly, reaching 9.6 percent of Poles in 1992, with a circulation of over 700,000 copies and a readership spanning all social groups. See Ryszard Filas, “Czytelnictwo prasy w połowie lat dziewięćdziesiątych: Od czytelnictwa do oglądactwa?,” Zeszyty Prasoznawcze no. 3/4 (1995): 142–153, here 148. Mariola Balicka, “Zapalnik Sachsa,” Wprost, December 2, 1990, 14–15. Mariola Balicka, “Chłop w konserwie,” Wprost, April 12, 1992, 25–26. “Zabić bogatego,” Wprost, March 1, 1992, title page. Antoni Poniński, cited in Wiesław Kot, “Biznesmen na krzyżu,” Wprost, April 12, 1992, 66.

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of Jerzy Urban’s satirical weekly NIE, which made ruthless iconoclasm and programmatic anticlericalism its selling point. The great popularity of this edgy new magazine, which surged between 1991 and 1993 to make it the most read Polish opinion weekly, indicates that the early transformation years produced a demand for media outlets that challenged the new symbolic order defined by the hegemony of the Catholic Church.19

The New Hegemony of the Catholic Church In the wake of the 1989 revolution, the role of the Catholic Church changed rapidly. In a matter of months it went from being a religious organization that was influential but constrained by the conditions of politically sanctioned secularization to a powerful institution capable of exerting a massive impact on the newly emerging power structures. What allowed the Catholic Church to occupy this position of power was what Polish philosopher of religion Zbigniew Mikołejko termed “moral economy.”20 In his view, the new political elite hastily introduced a series of legal acts privileging the Catholic Church in an attempt to “pay back a debt” to the Church for real or presumed losses it had suffered under socialism.21 According to this assessment, the introduction of religious education classes into public schools, criminal sanctions for offending religious feeling, the restitution of Church property, anti-abortion law, and the concordat with the Vatican were all installments in an epochal act of Wiedergutmachung that had gained momentum with the demise of the socialist state.22 While conservatives have never ceased to emphasize that the sweeping legislative changes were mere “recompense” for past injustices inflicted on the Church and aimed only to restore a status quo ante,23 it was impossible to overlook the fact that the shift in power relations triggered a noticeable drop in the Church’s social standing. As many observers noted, the Church was leaving 19

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Filas, “Czytelnictwo prasy w połowie lat dziewięćdziesiątych,” 148; “Jak nas widzą, słyszą, oceniają, kupują,” NIE, August 27, 1992, 4. Zbigniew Mikołejko, Między zbawieniem a Smoleńskiem: Studia i szkice o katolicyzmie polskim ostatnich lat (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IFIS PAN, 2017), 97. Ibid., 97–98; Waniek, Orzeł i krucyfiks, 315, Jarosław Gowin, Kościół w czasach wolności 1989–1999 (Kraków: Znak, 1999), 196. The cabinet of Wojciech Jaruzelski (1981–1985) in particular sought the support of the Catholic Church in the face of the crisis that followed the introduction of Martial Law. A draft of the “Confessional Bill” passed by the still socialist parliament in May 1989 included a lengthy invocation addressing the need to compensate the Catholic Church for the “errors of the past.” Jerzy Wisłocki, cited in Zygmunt Rola, “Polska–Watykan: Bramy i furtki,” Polityka, July 10, 1993, 9. On the period prior to 1989, see also Krzysztof Michalski, Działalność Komisji Wspólnej przedstawicieli Rządu PRL i Episkopatu Polski 1980–1989 (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2012). Marek Budzisz, “Polityka i religia,” Rzeczpospolita, November 26, 1992, 3.

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the epoch of real socialism “materially strengthened,” “triumphant,” and armed with political leverage,24 but this had also come at a price. The popularity of the Church after 1989 never again equaled that enjoyed in the Communist period, and many Poles started to resent the institution’s political engagement and its growing influence in the post-transformation years.25 Opinion polls from the period clearly indicate that systemic transformation brought about a change in the popular perception of the Church. In 1990 the Primate of Poland, Józef Glemp (1929–2013), was the most popular public figure in Poland, enjoying the support of 81 percent of respondents. A year later his popularity had already dropped to 65 percent.26 While in 1989 an overwhelming majority of Poles (89 percent) saw the Catholic Church as serving Polish interests, three years later fewer than half of those polled still shared that view.27 A survey on Polish Catholicism from 1992 also demonstrated that a great majority of Poles (81.3 percent) objected to the “direct involvement of the Catholic Church in politics.”28 At the same time, nearly three-quarters of respondents demanded a strict separation of church and state,29 while over 60 percent thought that the Church held too much influence in Poland.30 A survey of the leading opinion magazines between 1989 and 1993 reveals how the growing influence of the Catholic Church on Polish legislation and the increased presence of religious symbols and rituals in the public realm provoked a heated debate that sent shock waves through Poland’s emerging liberal democracy. All three of the most popular opinion weeklies of the period – the satirical NIE, liberal Wprost, and leftist Polityka – raised concerns about what they saw as an “uncontrollable and steadily progressing process of clericalization” that threatened Polish democracy,31 and the advent of a “triumphant Church,” which, with “an army of its functionaries [. . .] pose[d] a danger to 24

25

26

27 28

29 30 31

Mirosław Chałubiński, “Polityka, Kościół, aborcja,” in Polityka i aborcja, edited by Mirosław Chałubiński (Warsaw: Agencja Scholar, 1994), 100, 103, 105. See also José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 96–97, 107–108; Brian Porter-Szücs, Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity and Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 257–258. Mikołejko, Między zbawieniem a Smoleńskiem, 52, 75; Jerzy Kolarzowski, “Polski spór o aborcję: Konsekwencje rozstrzygnięć legislacyjnych,” in Polityka i aborcja, edited by Mirosław Chałubiński (Warsaw: Agencja Scholar, 1994), 189. See OBOP opinion polls from 1990 and 1991. Cited in “Z kraju,” Polityka, June 2, 1990, 2 and “Z kraju,” Polityka, June 29, 1991, 2. An OBOP poll cited in Chałubiński, “Polityka, kościół, aborcja,” 131. Ewa Nowakowska, Janina Paradowska, Jerzy Baczyński, and Wiesław Władyka, “Polski katolicyzm anno domini 1992,” Polityka, December 5, 1992, 1, 14–15. Ewa Szemplińska, “Ex Cathedra,” Wprost, February 23, 1992, 29. M.L., “Obawa, zazdrość, respekt,” Wprost, September 22, 1991, 20–21. Zbigniew Mach, “Pogrzeb na ołtarzu,” Wprost, November 22, 1992, 34–36. See also Bogusław Mazur, “Demokracja pod krzyżem,” Wprost, January 27, 1991, 17.

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freedom.”32 With Wprost cautioning against Poland’s mutation into a confessional state, Polityka sounding the alarm about “Catholic fundamentalism” filling the vacuum left by socialist doctrine,33 and NIE proclaiming Poland as “Rome’s colony,”34 the critical post-transformation media were now also monitoring the Church’s abuse of power by means of investigative journalism. The early 1990s thus saw a lot of press coverage of misconduct among Church officials, including abuses of the customs exemption for Church charities, mistreatment of pupils during religious education classes, and a lack of transparency in the restitution of Church property.35 In fact, post-transformation media identified the ongoing clericalization of the state as a new source of anxiety alongside rising unemployment, economic hardships, and existential insecurity. Leading magazines reported that Poles “fear the domination of the Church”36 and published numerous dystopian visions of the country’s future. In a 1989 piece entitled “Science Fiction,” Wprost raised concerns about the Church-sponsored anti-abortion law, which it said would lead to the emergence of a restrictive state in which contraceptives were banned and women would undergo obligatory uterine examinations before leaving the country as well as being forced to conserve miscarried foetuses in jars for presentation to special monitoring committees.37 NIE predicted that by 1996 Church-driven reforms would eventually trigger a violent backlash and Church functionaries would have to descend into Warsaw’s unfinished metro tunnels to “take refuge from the attacks of [a] radically anticlerical society.”38

The Cross in Political Satire All three large opinion weeklies of the early transformation period – Wprost, Polityka, and NIE – took a clear position in favor of the strict division of church and state. They also championed the principles of a secular liberal society. 32 33

34 35

36 37 38

Ozimy and Schult, “Horror i Ojczyzna,” 6. Mazur, “Demokracja pod krzyżem”; Barbara Stanosz, “Dokąd zmierzamy,” Polityka, May 25, 1991, 3. Aleksander Krakowski, “Rzymska kolonia,” NIE, March 25, 1993, 5. See, for instance, Maciej Wiśniowski, “Interes na umieraniu,” NIE, October 31, 1991, 3; Agnieszka Sowa and Rafał Smoczyński, “Taca z podwójnym dnem,” Wprost, January 12, 1992, 15–16; Mirosława Dołęgowska-Wysocka, “Od komunizmu do klerykalizmu,” NIE, May 7, 1992, 4; Maciej Wiśniowski, “Hospicjum – napęd benzynowy,” NIE, January 14, 1993, 3; Dariusz Cychol, “Krzyżem po ryju,” NIE, October 13, 1994, 6. On the local controversies related to the restitution of Church property, see Jan Marx, “Krzyżacy na Jasnej Górze,” NIE, October 17, 1991, 6; Jan Marx, “Groteska w kaplicy,” NIE, December 5, 1991, 8; Mariusz Gorzka, “Cnota ubóstwa,” Wprost, June 28, 1992, 27–28; Elżbieta Szczucka, “Ostatni ostry dyżur,” Polityka, August 21, 1993, 5; Przemysław Ćwikliński, “Czarny wariant prywatyzacji,” NIE, January 23, 1992, 6. Ozimy and Schult, “Horror i Ojczyzna,” 6. Władyslaw Balicki, “Science Fiction,” Wprost, July 30, 1989, 8–9. Piotr Gadzinowski, “Rok 1996,” NIE, January 14, 1993, 2.

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Alongside reportage, numerous op-ed pieces, expert interviews, and investigative articles probing abuses of power among local Church representatives, Wprost and – to an even greater extent – NIE voiced their disapproval of what they saw as dangerous theocratic tendencies in a large number of political cartoons.39 The genre of satire that emerged in this period is of interest not only because satirical production is a very sensitive indicator of changing relations of power, but also because it plays the role of a social vent and provides a platform for the abreaction of feelings of inferiority and oppression. If humor in nondemocratic societies is the weapon of “the weak citizen against ruling institutions,” it provides a vehicle of criticism enabling citizens to “respond non-violently to social and political distress” in developed democracies too.40 The fact that the early 1990s saw a surge in jokes and cartoons referencing the clergy suggests that the public registered the new hegemonic role of the Church in post-transformation Poland and that it caused discomfort.41 Both Wprost and NIE, which published visual satire by some of the most prominent Polish political cartoonists, used the medium intensively to highlight their position on the official anti-secularization turn and to test the new boundaries of taboo in an emerging censorship-free publishing circuit. Jerzy Urban’s NIE in particular excelled at this kind of satire. And the symbol of the cross lent itself well to the magazines’ purposes as a motif that both provided an air of iconoclastic subversion and could be easily adapted in infinite visual representations. In this way, the symbol came to encapsulate the anxieties triggered by the new hegemonic position of the Church and provided a tool of seditious social critique. NIE ruthlessly caricatured the influence of the Catholic Church in Poland, not only as having reached absurd heights but also as having become a form of violence. A recurrent visual metaphor encapsulating this vision was the outline of the Polish territory planted with crosses. As a move to reform Poland’s municipal organization got under way in 1991, the magazine published a map of the country displaying its diocesan borders and twenty-six black crosses marking the proposed new seats of local government.42 Other variations on the motif included a game of tic-tac-toe placed inside the contours of the state and a sandbox in the shape of the Polish territory filled with wooden crosses and dedication plaques that mocked a new trend for having Church officials bless state

39

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42

As NIE had a satirical profile, it published the largest amount of visual satire and therefore provides the richest source of reference here. Arie Sover, “Introduction,” in The Languages of Humor: Verbal, Visual, and Physical Humor, edited by Arie Sover (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 3. Sławomir Kmiecik, Wolne żarty! Humor i polityka czyli rzecz o polskim dowcipie politycznym (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1998), 251. Anonymous, “Nowy podział kraju,” NIE, April 4, 1991, 5.

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Fig. 23. The Polish Contribution to Strengthening the Troops of the NATO Pact: (clockwise) the Commander in Chief, the Guard of Honor, Intelligence, the Mechanized Regiment. Anonymous, published in NIE, January 6, 1994.

buildings and institutions at their inauguration.43 The cross thus came to connote control and subjugation, but also the militant character of the Church as a new political player. In a number of cartoons the cross even features as a weapon-like object, held threateningly like a gun or accompanied by other accessories of violence such as boxing gloves or harnesses.44 A cartoon entitled “The Polish Contribution to Strengthening the Troops of the NATO Pact,” for example, pictures a platoon of frocked Catholic priests standing at attention and presenting a row of uniform crosses.45 Perhaps the most radical image of this kind is Tomasz Rzeszutek’s 1991 cartoon showing a Church official proclaiming a “State of Clergency” (Stan Kościelny) – a pun on General Jaruzelski’s announcement of Martial Law (Stan Wojenny) ten years earlier.46 43

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Janusz Wójcik, untitled, NIE, January 10, 1991, 5; Anonymous, “Nasza piaskownica,” NIE, May 7, 1992, 7. Anonymous, “Nie oddamy ani guzika,” NIE, August 15, 1991, 3; Anonymous, “Siostrzeniec biskupa,” NIE, July 23, 1992, 6; Mirosław Hajnos, untitled, NIE, September 10, 1992, 5; Anonymous, “Ty, wstąpiłeś już do ZChN?,” NIE, February 4, 1993, 2. Anonymous, “Polska propozycja wzmocnienia sił paktu NATO,” NIE, January 6, 1994, 5. Tomasz Rzeszutek, “Ogłaszam na całym obszarze Rzeczypospolitej – Stan Kościelny!!!,” NIE, August 8, 1991, 3. I am indebted to Agata Masłowska for the translation of the pun.

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Satirical representations of the Church as a wealth-accumulating institution provide a variation from the motif of subjugation. In cartoons of this kind the cross features as a symbol of the Church’s growing financial power. A cartoon of a piggy bank with a cross-shaped coin slot and an image of acrobats walking on cross-shaped stilts – accompanying an article on irregularities in the restitution of Church property – are good examples here.47 In instances such as these, the cross is used as shorthand for the Church’s usurpation of power and becomes an attribute of both occupation and exploitation. The ubiquity of the symbol of the cross in political cartoons of the period confirms the extent to which it had become a default shorthand for the Church’s rising influence. A more careful look, however, reveals that it remained an extremely capacious metaphor. While in some cases the cross simply served as a pars pro toto of the Catholic Church as an institution, at other times it carried a more abstract meaning signifying anti-modernization forces or even serving as the antithesis of freedom and democracy.48 Among

Fig. 24. Jacek Frąckiewicz, untitled, Wprost, April, 1993. 47

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Jacek Frąckiewicz, untitled, Wprost, April 4, 1993, 33; Janusz Wieczorek, untitled, NIE, December 5, 1991, 8. Another interesting example is Andrzej Czeczot’s series of cartoons commenting on the social costs of restituting Church property, which features the eviction of a hospital and an orphanage. See Andrzej Czeczot, “Prześwięcenie chorych,” NIE, November 28, 1991, 4–5; Andrzej Czeczot, “Sierociniec,” NIE, November 28, 1991, 4–5. For example, Stefan Wielgus, “Totalitaryzm,” NIE, January 10, 1991, 5; Witold Mysyrowicz, “Polska suwerenna . . .,” NIE, October 15, 1992, 1; Witold Mysyrowicz, “Dość już tej pornografii,” NIE, July 30, 1992, 6.

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Fig. 25. Witold Mysyrowicz, “Limits to Freedom,” NIE, June 20, 1991.

the most poignant examples are a 1991 image of an imposing golden cross falling from above and crushing the word “democracy” and Witold Mysyrowicz’s “Limits to Freedom,” in which an individual is trapped inside a cross-shaped perimeter.49 A related motif was politicians pictured as mere pawns of the Church.50 Józef Burniewicz’s caricature of Lech Wałęsa casting a cross-shaped shadow and Sławomir Łuczyński’s image of a suit-wearing individual as a puppet on strings attached to a cross steered by an ominous hand carried this message well.51 Political satirists reserved particular scorn for Social Democrat politicians with a record in Poland’s United Workers’ Party (PZPR) who now ostentatiously expressed their religiosity in public.52 Cartoons picturing former Communists lying prostrate in church or assisting in opulent religious rituals provided hyperbolic counterparts to actual press images of left-wing politicians publicly engaging 49

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Anonymous, “Demokracja,” NIE, June 27, 1991, 3; Witold Mysyrowicz, “Granice wolności,” NIE, June 20, 1991, 5. See Stok, untitled, Polityka, December 12, 1992, 24; J. Naumienko, “Vox dei, vox populi,” Wprost, February 24, 1991, 4; Andrzej Czeczot, “Posłowie wraz z katechetą udają się na Wotywę,” NIE, July 16, 1992, 5; Anonymous, “Niech będzie pochwalony . . .,” NIE, December 12, 1991, 1. Similar motifs can be found in respect to policemen and the military: e.g. a group of uniformed policemen worshipping an oversized, cross-shaped, Primate Glemp, see Zbigniew Olchowik, untitled, NIE, January 10, 1991, 5. Józef Burniewicz, untitled, NIE, March 18, 1993, 4; Sławomir Łuczyński, untitled, NIE, January 20, 1994, 2. See Henryk Sawka, “Towarzyszu Szmaciak, już nie musicie,” Wprost, October 3, 1993, 22; Henryk Sawka, “Zawsze w Partii . . .,” Wprost, May 26, 1991, 18; Anonymous, “Kampania wyborcza komuchów,” NIE, August 15, 1991, 5.

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Fig. 26. Józef Burniewicz, untitled, NIE, March 18, 1993.

in religious devotion.53 The symbol of the cross thereby came to signify both the turncoat mentality of a new breed of political opportunist and new standards of overt devotion that had become part and parcel of post-1989 political culture. The symbol of the cross also featured prominently in visual satire tackling the Polish aspiration to “return” to Europe, a theme that was among the central narratives of post-transformation political discourse, in which the country’s turbulent systemic transition and painful economic reforms were framed within a horizon of hope, progress, and success.54 In the visual satire of the period, conversely, Poland’s “return” to Europe appears at cross-purposes with the ongoing process of countersecularization, which threatens to hamper the modernizing project. Tensions resulting from the incompatibility of liberal democracy with the privileged position of the Catholic Church find expression in satire that often employs the symbol of the cross to represent the backward, antiEuropean forces that would eventually cause Poland’s international isolation. The most poignant caricature of this kind is Henryk Sawka’s “Poland Returns to Europe,” published in Wprost in 1990, which features Poland personified as a racy but ragged woman resolutely treading westwards, harnessed by a priest who wields a cross in his raised hand.55 A more aesthetically minimalist version of this motif appeared in NIE in 1991: an image of two crosses threateningly 53

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Most conspicuous, perhaps, was the visit of President Wojciech Jaruzelski to a sanctuary in Licheń in 1990. See Zbigniew Szymczak, “Podzwonne dla prezydenta,” Wprost, November 18, 1990, 24–25. See Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 277–293. Henryk Sawka, “Polska wraca do Europy,” Wprost, December 23–30, 1990, 29.

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aimed at (or blocking) a closed door bearing the sign “Europe.”56 The anxiety that Poland’s “confessional democracy” could put the country’s future in jeopardy was also poignantly articulated by Witold Mysyrowicz’s image of Poland as a lonely island with a large cross planted at its center, dramatically submerging into the ocean.57 A similar trope also appeared in a 1993 cartoon picturing a fortune teller asked about Poland’s future whose crystal ball splits into shards as a black cross violently emerges from within it.58 Disquiet that the privileged position of the Catholic Church might thwart Poland’s access to the Western world related to an underlying sense of inferiority vis-à-vis the rest of Europe that satiric authors intensively exploited.

Fig. 27. “Europe,” by an anonymous author, published in NIE on June 6, 1991.

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Anonymous, “Europa,” NIE, June 6, 1991, 5. Witold Mysyrowicz, untitled, NIE, April 23, 1992, 8. Anonymous, “Pan pytał o przyszłość Polski?! . . .,” NIE, July 29, 1993, 7.

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The cross features in such caricatures as a symbol of civilizational backwardness and obscurantism.59 Mysyrowicz’s 1993 cartoon, which travesties the popular marketing slogan of the transformation years Teraz Polska! (Poland Now!), depicts a cross-wielding “new Pole” as uneducated, anti-modern, xenophobic, and nationalist.60 This paradigmatic post-transformation Pole is a Frankenstein-like conglomerate of incongruent features: he is both implicated in the Communist past and displays his allegiance to the Solidarity movement; violent, but manifesting his religiosity; lacking in education and addicted to alcohol, yet aspiring to a career in the capitalist system. Finally, the cross also came to serve as a visual metaphor for the demise of old values. An anonymous NIE cartoon from 1991 pictured a crucified victory (V) sign, while another from 1993 featured the familiar Solidarity logo held together only by an assembly of screws, ropes, adhesive tape, and a wooden cross.61 And just as the NIE cartoonists mourned the apparent death of Solidarity’s ethos, they also used the aesthetics of crucifixion to express nostalgia for the People’s Republic, placing the initials PRL (Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa), pierced by three large nails, on a cross too.62 The sheer number of times the symbol of the cross appears in visual satire of the period indicates that it both provided a code readers found legible and had an emotional charge that guaranteed strong resonance. The simplicity and high visual adaptability of the symbol contributed to its popularity, allowing a range of different meanings to be conveyed. But while the cross came to serve as one of the most productive visual metaphors capturing the anxieties of the post-transformation period, it also remained an object of contention with an extremely tangible presence in the public space.

The Cross in the Public Space One of the most contentious sites of heated debate concerning the cross was the Polish Sejm (Parliament). A crucifix was mounted in the upper chamber’s plenary hall on the private initiative of a Peasant Party senator, Henryk Czarnocki, who hung it behind the presidium table early on the morning of October 30, 1992, before the official start of the day’s proceedings. In his address to the chamber later that day Czarnocki called upon senators to rise and sing the hymn Boże coś Polskę to celebrate both “the withdrawal of Russian 59

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See also Sławomir Łuczyński, untitled, NIE, August 11, 1994, 7; Janusz Wieczorek, “Polska dla Polaków,” NIE, January 21, 1993, 8; Henryk Sawka, “Musimy wrócić do Europy, aby nauczyć ją prawdziwych wartości!,” Wprost, June 30, 1991, 10. Witold Mysyrowicz, “Tera Polska!,” NIE, August 5, 1993, 1. J.S., untitled, NIE, January 3, 1991, 7; Witold Mysyrowicz, “Solidarność,” NIE, May 13, 1993, 6. Witold Mysyrowicz, “PRL,” NIE, July 21, 1994, 6.

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troops [from Poland] and the hanging of this cross.”63 After authorization was received from the speaker of the senate, the crucifix was eventually relocated to a spot above the entrance door to the plenary hall, where it remains to this day. The affair caused controversy not only because the symbol’s presence in the seat of Poland’s legislative power violated the constitutional principle of a secular state, but also because its introduction into the plenary hall took place in defiance of any democratic procedure.64 This was not the only dispute of its kind. A few months later, a petition signed by 154 members of parliament reached the speaker of the lower chamber, demanding that a crucifix be displayed in the plenary hall of the Sejm too. The MPs justified their request by insisting that a crucifix would provide “a reference to the thousand years of Poland’s history during which the country ha[d] drawn its strength and resilience from this symbol of love and reconciliation.”65 They also posited that the presence of the symbol would facilitate the process of “building an independent, democratic, and just Poland.”66 Although their initial request was not granted and the electoral victory of Social Democrats in 1993 presented a further obstacle, a crucifix – made of wood originating from the altar of the Virgin Mary of Częstochowa – was eventually placed in the lower chamber shortly after the 1997 elections. Just like five years prior in the Senate, the act had no legislative character whatsoever. A group of MPs from the right-wing party Akcja Wyborcza Solidarność, which had recently become part of the ruling coalition, hung the crucifix by night, just before the inaugural session of the newly elected parliament.67 For its advocates, the presence of the cross inside the parliament building was to signal the end of the Communist rule and be a visible marker of Poland’s “return” to its pre-1939 democratic traditions, although the pre-1939 plenary hall of the Sejm never featured a crucifix.68 For defenders of the constitutional separation of church and state, the arbitrary actions of individual members of parliament created a dangerous precedent which risked the “symbolic marginalization of those citizens who do not identify with [Catholicism]”69 and 63

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Henryk Czarnocki, cited in Ryszard Bender, “Krzyż to symbol narodu polskiego,” Radio Maryja, November 8, 2011, www.radiomaryja.pl/bez-kategorii/krzyz-to-symbol-narodupolskiego (accessed February 15, 2020). On the principle of laicity guaranteed by the Polish constitution, see Wojciech Brzozowski, Bezstronność światopoglądowa władz publicznych w Konstytucji RP (Warsaw: Oficyna, 2011). Czesław Sobierajski, “O krzyżu w Sejmie RP,” Niedziela no. 11 (2010): 35. Ibid. Marek Zagajewski, “Dwa państwa – jeden kraj,” Zdanie 1/2 (2012): 28–37; Maciej Chodołowski, “Krzyż w Sejmie nie zawisł ukradkiem,” Gazeta Wyborcza, October 22, 1997, https://classic.wyborcza.pl/archiwumGW/260441/Krzyz-w-Sejmie-nie-zawislukradkiem (accessed February 19, 2020). Bender, “Krzyż to symbol narodu polskiego.” Wojciech Sadurski, “Neutralność światopoglądowa,” Polityka, December 8, 1990, 7.

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threatened the constitutional equality of all denominations.70 Yet, despite the fact that the measures taken to introduce the symbol into the parliament building were not legal, its position became permanent, and all subsequent parliamentary initiatives of left-wing parties to remove it have failed.71 Opinion polls over the last thirty years have indicated a rising rate of approval for the crucifix’s presence in the parliament building over time. According to a poll from 1992, only a slim majority of Poles (50.9 percent) supported the presence of religious symbols in public institutions at that time, while most respondents disapproved of religious rituals performed during state celebrations and ostentatious demonstrations of religiosity by politicians.72 By 2011, 60 percent of Poles believed that a cross should be present in the plenary hall of the Sejm and 88 percent declared they did not have a problem with its presence in schools or offices either.73 At the same time, analysts have concluded that removing a cross from the public space would constitute a “symbolically forbidden” gesture in Poland.74 The proliferation of crosses in public spaces that occurred after 1989 came to signal not only the rising importance of the Catholic Church, but also the beginning of a new political order. Polish poet and Nobel Laureate Czesław Miłosz concluded in 1991 that “Catholic language took the place of Marxism” in Poland.75 Indeed, this mechanism of direct replacement was sometimes 70 71

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Waniek, Orzeł i krucyfiks, 371. In 1997 the Social Democratic Alliance considered filing a query with the Constitutional Tribunal about the legality of the crucifixes in the Sejm and Senate buildings. However, the head of the tribunal, Andrzej Zoll, argued that the issue did not fall within its competence. In 2011 the pro-secularist party Ruch Palikota petitioned the speaker of the Sejm to remove the crucifix from the plenary hall and, faced with a refusal, filed a civil court case arguing that the symbol’s presence in Parliament infringed on its members’ freedom of denomination. In 2013 the Warsaw Court of Appeal ruled that the cross did not infringe on personal rights. The latest initiative to remove the crucifix from the parliament building came from Partia Razem MP Magdalena Biejat in 2019. See “Z krzyżami do Trybunału,” Gazeta Wyborcza, October 28, 1997, https://classic.wyborcza.pl/archiwumGW/260952/ Z-krzyzami-do-Trybunalu (accessed February 21, 2020); “Krzyż pozostanie w sali sejmowej,” Gazeta Wyborcza, December 10, 2013, https://classic.wyborcza.pl/archiwumGW/ 7822407/Krzyz-pozostanie-w-sali-sejmowej (accessed February 21, 2020); “Magdalena Biejat o krzyżu w Sejmie: ‘Uważam, że powinno się go zdjąć,’” Gazeta Wyborcza Warszawa, December 12, 2019, https://warszawa.wyborcza.pl/warszawa/ 7,54420,25506848,warszawska-poslanka-sld-uwazam-ze-powinno-sie-zdjac-krzyz.html (accessed July 17, 2022). Nowakowska, Paradowska, Baczyński, and Władyka, “Polski katolicyzm anno domini 1992,” 1, 14–15. Beata Rogulska, Komunikat z badań: Obecność krzyża w przestrzeni publicznej (Warsaw: CBOS, 2011), 2–3. Katarzyna Nadana-Sokołowska, “Debata, której nie było: Kościół katolicki w Polsce,” in Polityka i aborcja, edited by Mirosław Chałubiński (Warsaw: Agencja Scholar, 1994), 467–494, here 474. Czesław Miłosz, “Państwo wyznaniowe,” Gazeta Wyborcza, May 11–12, 1991, 8.

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Fig. 28. Obelisk of The Fighters for People’s Poland in Łańcut, 1992. Photo: courtesy of NIE.

evident even in physical spaces. When the town of Łańcut in south-eastern Poland celebrated the coronation of Our Lady of the Scapular in 1992, an outdoor altar built for the occasion in the main market square included a massive cross positioned atop an existing structure – which happened to be the obelisk of The Fighters for People’s Poland, erected in 1969 to commemorate, among others, fallen Red Army soldiers.76 The unorthodox idea of adapting a relic of the old regime to serve as the base for a cross did not escape the attention of NIE photo journalists, who documented the transformation 76

The monument returned to media focus again in 2010 when it was renamed The Independence Monument and repurposed to commemorate the Polish soldiers who fought against the Nazi and Soviet aggression of 1939. See Magdalena Mach, “Awantura wokół pomnika w Łańcucie: Recykling pamięci,” Gazeta Wyborcza Rzeszów, September 16, 2010, https://classic.wyborcza.pl/archiwumGW/7282975/RECYKLINGPAMIECI (accessed February 22, 2020); “Odsłonięcie Pomnika Niepodległości,” Miasto Łańcut, www.lancut.pl/asp/en_start.asp?typ=13&sub=0&menu=3&artykul=666&akc ja=artykul (accessed February 22, 2020).

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with biting sarcasm.77 Yet what seemed to them to be a local oddity in fact exemplified a practice that was much more widespread in this period. As the Polish episcopate was publicly calling for “a comeback of visible signs of Christian life to the streets,”78 manufacturers of bronze casts were registering a surge of orders from the Catholic Church, which by that point commissioned every third large-scale monument in Poland.79 Indeed, in the 1990s cityscapes across East-Central Europe started to undergo a rebranding process in which their socialist heritage was gradually erased, while the new memorial aesthetics often showcased religious symbols.80 Warsaw was a good case in point. In the fervor to bring visibility to historical events silenced by the Communist regime, post-transformation memory brokers not only showcased Catholic symbols in the public space but went so far as to overwrite spaces of high symbolic importance to Jews. Two particularly poignant examples are the monument to the victims of Soviet deportations, consisting of a train carriage filled with crosses (built 1995), and a large wooden crucifix dedicated to Jerzy Popiełuszko (1996). Both were placed at highly symbolic spots in the former Warsaw ghetto.81 Catholic symbolism has thus come not only to dominate new urban landscapes, but also at times to eclipse the memorial agendas of Poland’s Others. Not surprisingly, the practice of planting outdoor crosses in the posttransformation decade became a source of tension between the Catholic Church and Poland’s religious minorities. While the cross controversy at Auschwitz was among the more internationally resonant cases of this kind, other local conflicts, especially between Catholics and the Orthodox in the eastern borderlands, also played out in the public space.82 When the Catholic 77 78

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G., “Tajemnica krzyża,” NIE, October 22, 1992, 4. Stanisław Stefanek, cited in Wydawnictwo Sióstr Loretanek, Głośmy Ewangelię życia: Antologia tekstów i wypowiedzi z przebiegu walki o prawo do życia dzieci nie narodzonych (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Sióstr Loretanek, 1997), 208. See Bartłomiej Leśniewski, “Przenośny monument,” Wprost, June 21, 1992, 65–66. Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen, “From Socialist to Post-Socialist Cities: Narrating the Nation through Urban Space,” Nationalities Papers 41, 4 (2013): 487–514; Arnold Bartetzky, “Changes in the Political Iconography of East Central European Capitals after 1989 (Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, Bratislava),” International Review of Sociology 16 (2006): 451–469; Ekaterina Makhotina, “Between Heritage and (Identity) Politics: Dealing with the Signs of Communism in Post-Soviet Lithuania,” National Identities, 4 (2020): 1–20. On the renaming of streets in Poland, see Bartłomiej Różycki, “Przemianowywanie ulic w Polsce 1989–2016: Charakterystyka zagadnienia,” in W kręgu wyobrażeń zbiorowych: Polityka, władza, społeczeństwo, edited by Andrzej Dubicki, Magdalena Rekść, and Andrzej Sepkowski (Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2019), 145–172. See Elżbieta Janicka, Festung Warschau (Warsaw: Krytyka Polityczna, 2011), 67, 76–81. Geneviève Zubrzycki, The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in PostCommunist Poland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). On the discrimination suffered by Poland’s religious minorities in the post-1989 period, see Stanisław Podemski, “Najsilniejszy bierze wszystko,” Polityka, March 20, 1993, 7.

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parish in Jabłeczna, in somewhat untransparent circumstances, assumed ownership of a local Orthodox cemetery in 1993, the Catholics articulated their claim to the territory by planting a Latin cross larger than the existing Orthodox one on the contested graveyard.83 The construction of new Catholic wayside crosses was also a bone of contention between Polish and Belarusian authorities, with the latter resenting the expansion of Polish Catholic missionaries into Belarus in the immediate post-1989 period and protesting the practice during state visits from Polish officials.84

Crosses in Public Schools The most intense conflict over the presence of crosses in the public space erupted, however, in 1990, after the Polish Ministry of Education, bypassing parliamentary authorization, issued a directive obliging public schools to hold religious education classes on their premises. After the Communist authorities had definitively removed such classes from the public school curriculum in 1961, they had been taught solely on Church premises.85 The directive of August 1990, however, not only reintroduced religious education into schools, but also stipulated that “in classrooms where a majority of pupils attend religious education classes, a cross on the wall will be permitted and a collective prayer may also be introduced at the beginning and end of the school day.”86 This hastily prepared reform and its unorthodox character, failing to meet the standards of democratic debate and parliamentary consent, was among the most controversial legal changes of the transformation period. While Polish bishops welcomed the act, hailing it as “redress for one of the injustices suffered by [Polish] society under the totalitarian regime,”87 political pundits expressed significant concern. “Once we have introduced religion into public schools,” warned the weekly magazine Polityka, “we will become a different country, something will crack, an unwritten rule,

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In response to this, the Orthodox community placed an even larger Orthodox cross on the cemetery too. Dorota Lipińska, “Trupożerny biskup,” NIE, October 21, 1993, 6. Witold Żygulski, “Agent w sutannie,” Wprost, September 15, 1991, 30–31; B.D., “Przedmurze na Dnieprze,” NIE, September 1, 1994, 7. Between 1944 and 1961 there were periods in which religion was part of public school curricula; in the immediate postwar period it was even obligatory for a time. The early 1950s saw the first systematic attempts to remove the classes. During the thaw of 1956, however, religion returned to the public school system. See Hanna Konopka, Religia w szkołach Polski Ludowej: Sprawa nauczania religii w polityce państwa (1944–1961) (Białystok: Dział Wydawnictw Filii UW w Białymstoku, 1995). Cited in Mariusz Janicki, “Trudna lekcja religii,” Polityka, August 18, 1990, 6. “List biskupów: Religia do szkół,” Gazeta Wyborcza, June 18, 1990, https://classic.wyborcza.pl /archiwumGW/6020681/LIST-BISKUPOW-Religia-do-szkol (accessed February 25, 2020).

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Fig. 29. R. Śniegowski, untitled, Wprost, May 13, 1990.

a large part of our aspirations to join the modern democratic world.”88 Wprost, likewise, condemned the regulation in an editorial entitled “Religion – Very Good, Democracy – Fail,” arguing that “a symbiosis of church and state [. . .] w[ould] cause enormous harm to [Polish] political culture.”89 NIE raised doubts about the voluntary character of newly introduced religion classes, reporting cases of parents being pressured to register their children, while Gazeta Wyborcza wrote about school officials 88 89

Janicki, “Trudna lekcja religii.” Bogusław Mazur, “Piątka z religii, dwója z demokracji,” Wprost, May 13, 1990, 19–20. See also Marek Zieleniewski, “Religia w szkole: Grzech monopolu,” Wprost, September 2, 1990, 7–8.

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cajoling parents into consenting to crucifixes in classrooms.90 Political cartoonists responded to the debate with a spate of images featuring children carrying cross-shaped schoolbags or sweating under actual oversized crosses on their shoulders.91 The symbol of the cross thus came to represent both the desecularization agenda of the Church and the rightwing parties allied with it, and the anxieties of those who resented the forfeiture of secular public schools. According to polls from 1990, about 60 percent of Poles were in favor of religious education classes being taught in public schools, while less than a third voiced the opposite opinion.92 Two years later, however, the majority of Poles were against religious education grades being listed on school certificates, and in 1993 nearly 60 percent wished that religion was taught on parish premises instead of in schools.93 Despite some protests from parents and students over the first couple of years, the presence of the classes in public schools was soon sanctioned by the highest judicial bodies in the state.94 After State Ombudsman Ewa Łętowska filed a request for the Constitutional Tribunal to examine the compatibility of the directive with the Polish Constitution and the tribunal ruled on its legality in 1991, the next directive of the Ministry of Education (April 1992) not only permitted the presence of crucifixes in all school rooms, regardless of the wishes of parents or pupils, but also included a template text for prayers which could be recited before and after classes.95 This directive again attracted the attention of the state ombudsman, who challenged it for, among other things, allowing an “excessive display” of religious symbols on school premises. But the Constitutional Tribunal once more dismissed the complaint and declared the directive compatible with existing laws.96 The temporary administrative solution 90

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Sonia Fańska, “Program kleru programem narodu,” NIE, January 17, 1991, 4; Michał Wojciechowski, “Religia w szkole,” Gazeta Wyborcza, August 23, 1990, https://classic .wyborcza.pl/archiwumGW/6006520/Religia-w-szkole (accessed February 25, 2020). R. Śniegowski, untitled, Wprost, May 13, 1990, 19; Tomasz Rzeszutek, “Program kleru programem narodu,” NIE, January 17, 1991, 4. See also Durko, “Kowalski, do kaplicy!!,” NIE, October 20, 1994, 4. Jerzy Głuszyński, “Dzwonek na religię,” Polityka June 16, 1990, 7. CBOS opinion poll from May 1992, cited in “Religia w szkole,” Gazeta Wyborcza, May 26, 1992, https://classic.wyborcza.pl/archiwumGW/6030049/Religia-w-szkole (accessed February 25, 2020). Demoskop poll from April 1993, cited in Chałubiński, “Polityka, Kościół, aborcja,” 129. “Egzamin z Pana Boga,” Wprost, April 26, 1992, 1, 29. “Rozporządzenie Ministra Edukacji Narodowej z dnia 14 kwietnia 1992 r. w sprawie warunków i sposobu organizowania nauki religii w szkołach publicznych,” Dziennik Ustaw no. 36 (1993): 590–592. Out of eight problematic sections raised by the state ombudsman, the Constitutional Tribunal ruled that three passages of the contested directive were incompatible. It ruled, for example, that parents did not have to file any formal declaration with school authorities if they did not want their children to attend religious education classes. See: “U 12/92

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sanctioning the presence of Catholic crosses in public schools was thereby legally solidified for decades to come. The cross thus became a stable element of the Polish pedagogical landscape, not only because it was now on display in every single classroom, but also because it entered into school curricula as a subject in itself. A periodical issued by the Ministry of Education in 1993 as a resource for teachers of industrial arts featured an exercise for primary school children which consisted in crafting a crucifix for the classroom. The author of the manual noted that “with the variety of construction types and the large choice of possible materials [. . .] [crucifixes] allow for the application of nearly all the technologies featured in the industrial arts curriculum.” What is more, “given the widespread cult of the cross, pupils can be expected to work earnestly and carry out the task with conscious discipline.”97 With the symbol of the cross so well integrated into educational routines, the presence of crucifixes in the Polish classroom soon became a fact of nature: quotidian, invisible, and, as Zbigniew Mikołejko put it, “semantically neutral.”98

The Cross in Defense of Morality In 1992, under a banner reading “Down with sexual anarchy in Poland – May God save Poland,” a group of parishioners led by a Catholic priest picketed in front of a sex shop in the small town of Lesko in southeast Poland. The “defenders of morality” would gather in front of the contested establishment several times a week singing religious songs, praying and, on one occasion, installing a six-meter-high cross at its entrance. After they announced a hunger strike, the owner of the sex shop eventually gave up his business.99 The protest in Lesko, covered widely in the Polish press, was just one of the more spectacular interventions of the anti-pornography campaign that swept across Poland in the early 1990s. As censorship restrictions were lifted in 1990, the Polish publishing market opened up to pornographic content in response to high demand. However, the sudden mushrooming of pornographic press titles, video rentals, and sex shops across the country also triggered some anxiety in parts of society and in the

Orzeczenie Trybunału Konstytucyjnego z 1993-04-20,” www.orzeczenia-nsa.pl/orzecze nie/u-12-92/oswiata/17d1afa/8.html?q=nauczanie+religii&_haslo=O%C5% 9Bwiata&_sad=Trybuna%C5%82+Konstytucyjny&_okres=1993&show=okres&pth=% 2Fszukaj (accessed February 25, 2020). 97 Józef Kućmierowski, “Treść i forma krzyża: Propozycje zadań technicznych,” Wychowanie techniczne w szkole no. 1 (1993), 37–42, 38. 98 Mikołejko, Między zbawieniem a Smoleńskiem, 90. 99 Gajdziński, “Oto Polska,” 34.

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Catholic Church.100 The anti-pornography protests, educational initiatives, and legislative acts that followed were intended to protect public morality, but quickly became part of a larger debate about the freedom of the media and the status of “Christian values” within Poland’s public sphere. Press reports from the early 1990s give a vivid sense of the intensity of the disputes that engaged the public. As “anti-pornography committees” formed in thirty-two towns across Poland, multiple attacks on local sex shops took place, including arson attempts. Meanwhile, press accounts also circulated of organized groups buying sex toys and condoms in bulk in order to destroy them.101 The Catholic media and politicians of the Christian National Alliance (Zjednoczenie Chrześcijańsko-Narodowe, ZChN) played a prominent role in this campaign in defense of public morality. While the Catholic paper Słowo Powszechne accused Polish Radio of offending religious feeling by broadcasting Sympathy for the Devil by The Rolling Stones,102 local ZChN activists from Poznań compiled a blacklist of books, films, and TV shows that allegedly disrespected the religious feeling of Catholics.103 There were also lawsuits filed by one of ZChN’s leading politicians, Marek Jurek, who sued a newspaper for publishing a photomontage alluding to the image of the Virgin Mary.104 All these campaigns culminated in 1992 legislation obliging radio and television stations to respect “Christian values” and take heed of religious sentiment among their audiences.105 Public opinion received the regulation with mixed feelings, with 64 percent of Poles considering it a form of censorship and the liberal press warning against “a fundamentalists’ attack [. . .] in the name of God.”106 100

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Iwona Sznajderska, “Urex – przyjemne z pożytecznym,” Gazeta Wyborcza, October 3, 1993, https://classic.wyborcza.pl/archiwumGW/6001266/UREX—przyjemne-z-pozy tecznym- (accessed February 27, 2020); Janusz Michalak, “Pornookólnik,” Wprost, April 7, 1991, 23–24; Z. Runecki, “Biskupi przeciw pornografii,” Gazeta Wyborcza, May 9, 1990, https://classic.wyborcza.pl/archiwumGW/6013390/Biskupi-przeciwpornografii (accessed February 27, 2020); Agnieszka Jędrzejczak, “Pornografia w Sejmie,” Gazeta Wyborcza, February 18, 1991, https://classic.wyborcza.pl /archiwumGW/6050131/PORNOGRAFIA-W-SEJMIE (accessed February 27, 2020). Michalak, “Pornookólnik,” 23–24; Łukasz Banasik, “Ksiądz kradnie majtki Urbana,” NIE, May 22, 1997, 3. “Coś z życia,” Polityka, June 23, 1990, 16. “Ostatnie kuszenie cenzury,” Wprost, July 4, 1993, 31–32, here 31; “Biała księga, czarna lista,” Gazeta Wyborcza, May 28, 1993, https://classic.wyborcza.pl/archiwumGW/ 124852/Biala-ksiega–czarna-lista (accessed February 27, 2020). The contested image consisted of a photo of the singer Madonna holding in her arms Marek Jurek, in the role of the baby Jesus. See Zygmunt Rola, “Biegli w uczuciach,” Polityka, October 30, 1993, 7. On the ZChN index of books and films, see “Ostatnie kuszenie cenzury,” 31; “Biała księga, czarna lista.” “Ustawa z dnia 29 grudnia 1992 r. o radiofonii i telewizji,” Dziennik Ustaw no. 7 (1993): 64. CBOS opinion poll from December 1992, cited in Rzeczpospolita, December 29, 1992, 2; Tadeusz Konwicki, “Fundametaliści atakują,” Wprost, February 3, 1991, 12; “Ostatnie kuszenie cenzury,” 31–32.

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Testing the boundaries of the newly won freedom of expression and seeking new mechanisms of social control, the stakeholders in this debate again made heavy use of the symbol of the cross. In an issue from 1992, Wprost juxtaposed the crucifix with a female nude, while NIE published a cartoon featuring Poland’s national emblem, the white eagle, dressed in a T-shirt and shorts and sporting around its neck a cross with the slogan “Enough of this pornography!”107 The defenders of public morality likewise used the metaphor of the cross. When Gazeta Wyborcza criticized a sex education textbook prepared by the Ministry of Education in 1993 for lacking any information on contraceptive methods, the speaker of the ministry publically scolded the paper for “spitting on the crucifix.”108 In one instance, a cross even became the actual site of a confrontation. In Białystok, a newly revealed monument to the Solidarity movement consisting of three metal crosses extending out of a massive boulder found itself at the center of the anti-pornography campaign in 1997, when journalists from the satirical NIE chose it as the site of a provocative intervention. On a Sunday morning, NIE envoys placed a pair of oversized polka-dot panties on the foundation of the monument, arguing that the cracked boulder resembled human buttocks. In large lettering the underwear bore the slogan “NIE dla pornografii,” which can be translated both as “No to pornography” and “NIE for pornography.”109 The panties, which were removed after three hours by an alarmed local priest, caused nationwide outrage, with two journalists who had participated in the stunt subsequently facing trial for offending religious feeling.110 While pornography and the defense of public morality remained hotly debated topics for years to come, the most thorny and controversial issue in the early transformation years – one that truly polarized the Polish society – was abortion. The discussion around the 1993 legislation delegalizing abortion except in cases of rape, incest, risk of maternal health, or severe fetal malformation mobilized an unprecedented amount of grassroots activism on both sides and was characterized by highly emotional and religiously laden rhetoric. 107

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Mariusz Gorzka, “Stosunek reglamentowany,” Wprost, August 23, 1992, 52–53; Witold Mysyrowicz, “Dość już tej pornografii,” NIE, July 30, 1992, 6. For a similar motif, see also Witold Mysyrowicz, untitled, NIE, March 12, 1992, 3. “Jest ustawa, można karać,” Gazeta Wyborcza, March 16, 1993, http://classic.wyborcza.pl /archiwumGW/118563/JEST-USTAWA–MOZNA-KARAC (accessed February 27, 2020). Banasik, “Ksiądz kradnie majtki Urbana,” 3. The journalists were ultimately given a fine. See “Majtki na mieczach?,” Gazeta Wyborcza Białystok, February 22, 2001, https://bialystok.wyborcza.pl/bialystok/ 1,35241,150814.html (accessed February 27, 2020); “Bielizna na pomniku,” Rzeczpospolita, February 10, 2000, https://archiwum.rp.pl/artykul/263293-Bielizna-napomniku.html (accessed February 27, 2020).

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Crusade in Defense of “the Unborn” A crying woman is stretched out on a gynecological chair, a male physician on her left and a priest on her right. While the priest raises his finger over the patient in admonishment, the gynaecologist, who has just finished stitching shut the woman’s vagina, proclaims triumphantly “Let Poland be Poland!”111 A large black cross hangs directly over the patient’s head, framing the naked female body as trapped among gynecological instruments, a prayer book, and a chalice with holy water.112 This cartoon, which appeared in NIE as a commentary on the ongoing abortion debate, poignantly highlighted not only the asymmetrical power relations between the omnipresent Church, interfering in female reproductive rights, and women stripped of the ability to make decisions about their bodies, but also the nationalist and religious framing that dominated the debate. Although there have been many facets to the abortion debate in Poland over the years – including the social, the legal, and the economic – religious language and symbolism have, from the beginning, taken center stage. Framing the abortion ban in terms of a religious mission to save Poland from God’s wrath and to prevent the crucifixion of “the unborn,” proponents of the law catapulted the discussion to an unprecedented level of emotional intensity and defined the vocabulary and the stakes of the conflict for decades to come.113 Anti-abortion legislation was given very high priority by the posttransformation power holders, despite the fact that the number of legally performed abortions was actually decreasing in the 1980s.114 Nonetheless, the resolution calling for “the protection of the unborn” was, as Joanna Mishtal notes, only the second legislative change introduced by the new parliament after 1989.115 To some contemporaries, this heightened focus on reproductive rights seemed out of proportion. “In an economically devastated country,” wrote philosopher Barbara Stanosz in 1992, “with a society subject to ongoing pauperization, failing health services, an ailing education system, inefficient state administration, and an uncontrollable surge in crime – the

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The caption “Let Poland be Poland” referred to Żeby Polska była Polską (1976), a popular protest song and an informal anthem of the Solidarity movement, with lyrics by Jan Pietrzak and music by Włodzimierz Korcz. Tomasz Rzeszutek, “Aby Polska była Polską,” NIE, May 30, 1991, 7. Agnieszka Graff notes how Polish liberals have adopted the language introduced into the debate on reproductive rights by the Catholic Church, giving up neutral vocabulary such as “fetus” and “pregnancy” for “child” and “conception.” See Agnieszka Graff, Rykoszetem: Rzecz o płci, seksualności i narodzie (Warsaw: WAB, 2008), 230–231. Data from the Ministry of Health listed 135,500 abortions performed in 1985, 122,500 in 1987, and 59,400 in 1990. Cited in “W kraju,” Polityka, June 29, 1991, 2. Joanna Mishtal, The Politics of Morality: The Church, the State, and Reproductive Rights in Postsocialist Poland (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015), 40–41.

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marginal, from the point of view of the duties of the state, problem of abortion has, over the last few years, focused the attention of legislative bodies.”116 The conflict over the right to abortion which unfolded in the immediate post-transformation period appeared to contemporary observers to be part of a much more fundamental struggle about the future model of state and society in Poland.117 This view was shared by both sides of the debate, even if they defined the stakes differently. Opponents of the legislative changes saw the anti-abortion bill as the last step on the road towards transforming Poland into a confessional state.118 Stanosz saw the massive campaign to mobilize support for the bill among churchgoers and schoolchildren as a watershed in consolidating the base for the new “ruling ideology.”119 But while liberals regarded the abortion debate as a touchstone for “Poland’s integration with the civilized world,”120 the right-wing parties and the Catholic Church maintained that averting “the genocide of the [Polish] nation”121 was “the first test” for the newly sovereign and democratic state.122 “Once he, the unborn, does not have to fear our democracy,” argued ethicist Tadeusz Styczeń in 1990, “we will not have to fear for our democracy.”123 By the same token, a failure to pass the antiabortion bill would, for its proponents, have constituted “a heinous tribute to totalitarianism”124 and even the “suicide of democracy.”125

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Barbara Stanosz, “Grzeszna inność,” Polityka, May 16, 1992, 3. Magdalena Środa, “Dyskusja nad moralnymi, filozoficznymi i prawnymi aspektami karalności przerywania ciąży,” in Próba porozumienia: Forum “Polska 1992: Problem karalności przerywania ciąży,” edited by Danuta Danek and Anna Titkow (Warsaw: Helsińska Fundacja Praw Człowieka, 1993), 28. Chałubiński, “Polityka, Kościół, aborcja,” 105–106. Stanosz, “Dokąd zmierzamy.” Stanosz, “Grzeszna inność.” Wydawnictwo Sióstr Loretanek, Głośmy Ewangelię życia, 11; Jerzy Buxakowski, “O nowe spojrzenie na problemy ludnościowe w ustawodawstwie: Przedłożenie dla Senackich Komisji: Ustawodawczej i Zdrowia, Warszawa – 11 kwietnia 1990 r.,” Ethos 3, 3/4 (1990): 407–418. Tadeusz Styczeń, “Wstęp: Państwo solidarne z nienarodzonym czy totalitaryzmu ciąg dalszy?,” in Nienarodzony miarą demokracji, edited by Tadeusz Styczeń (Lublin: Instytut Jana Pawła II KUL, 1991), 15; Tadeusz Styczeń, “Nienarodzony – miarą i szansą demokracji,” in Nienarodzony miarą demokracji, edited by Tadeusz Styczeń (Lublin: Instytut Jana Pawła II KUL, 1991), 37; Tadeusz Styczeń, “W sprawie człowieka poczętego i nienarodzonego: Przedłożenie wobec Senackich Komisji: Inicjatyw i Prac Ustawodawczych oraz Zdrowia i Polityki Społecznej, Warszawa – 11 kwietnia 1990,” in O nowe spojrzenie na problemy ludnościowe w ustawodawstwie: Przedłożenie dla Senackich Komisji: Ustawodawczej i Zdrowia, Warszawa – 11 kwietnia 1990 r., edited by Jerzy Buxakowski (Pelplin: publisher unknown, 1990), 3. Styczeń, “W sprawie człowieka poczętego i nienarodzonego,” 3. Styczeń, “Wstęp: Państwo solidarne z nienarodzonym czy totalitaryzmu ciąg dalszy?,” 10. Styczeń, “Nienarodzony – miarą i szansą demokracji,” 22.

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The question of limiting existing access to legal abortion surfaced very early in the transformation period, and the final legislation was passed hastily and against massive public resistance. The first parliamentary project in this area, the “Legal Defense of the Conceived Child,” was already taking shape in March 1989 amidst the Round Table negotiations.126 The first controversial bill penalizing abortion never made it to the floor of the Sejm, but served as a template for the next initiative proposed by the freshly elected Senate in the autumn of 1989. That project, which envisioned prison sentences both for physicians who performed abortions and for women who underwent them, was hotly debated over the following few years but likewise eventually rejected. Meanwhile, however, in 1991 the Association of Physicians passed a new code of medical ethics which allowed health care providers to refuse to carry out legal procedures on grounds of conscience. An estimated third of Polish gynecologists subsequently invoked the regulation, refusing to perform legal abortions or prescribe contraceptives.127 Despite vigorous protests and calls for a referendum – a petition demanding a referendum on the issue was signed by 1.3 million Poles – the Sejm eventually voted in favor of an abortion ban in January 1993.128 That law, which permitted abortion only in cases of risk to maternal health, severe fetal abnormalities, and pregnancies resulting from incest or rape, remained in force until 2021, when abortion law was further tightened.129 The 1993 anti-abortion legislation did not enjoy broad support when it was introduced.130 According to a poll from 1991, 49 percent of Poles believed abortion 126 127 128

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Chałubiński, “Polityka, Kościół, aborcja,” 133–145; Kolarzowski, “Polski spór o aborcję.” Mishtal, The Politics of Morality, 64. Some sources in fact state that 1.7 million signatures were collected in favor of the referendum. See Katarzyna Nadana-Sokołowska, “Debata wokół emancypacji kobiet i mniejszości seksualnych po 1989 roku,” in Debaty po roku 1989: Literatura w procesach komunikacji: W stronę nowej syntezy, edited by Maryla Hopfinger, Zygmunt Ziątek, and Tomasz Żukowski (Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN, 2017), 172. The 2021 ruling delegalizes abortion in the case of severe fetal abnormalities. For a timeline of legislative initiatives concerning the abortion law, see Federacja na Rzecz Kobiet i Planowania Rodziny, “Kalendarium 20 lat prac legislacyjnych nad ustawą o planowaniu rodziny,” in 20 lat tzw. ustawy antyaborcyjnej w Polsce: Raport 2013 (Warsaw: Federacja na Rzecz Kobiet i Planowania Rodziny, 2013), 50–58. See also Miła Kwapiszewska, Łukasz Moniuszko, and Jacek Raniszewski, Aborcja w polskich sporach społeczno-prawnych lat 1919–1997 (Kraków: Avalon, 2018); Kazimiera Szczuka, Milczenie owieczek: Rzecz o aborcji (Warsaw: WAB, 2004). From the early 2000s until 2010 social support for the existing law rose steadily, culminating in a majority of Poles declaring that women should have no right to abortion on demand in early pregnancy. The trend changed again after the attempt at tightening the abortion ban in 2016, which triggered mass street protests across Poland. In a poll from 2019, 53 percent of Poles declared their support for a woman’s right to abortion on demand. See Magdalena Chrzczonowicz, “Aż 53 proc. za aborcją na żądanie do 12. tygodnia: Bliżej Europy, dalej od Kościoła,” OKO.press, March 1, 2019, https://oko.press/az-53-proc-za-aborcja-na-zadaniedo-12-tygodnia-blizej-europy-dalej-od-kosciola-sondaz-oko-press (accessed February 28, 2020). After the Constitutional Tribunal ruled a near total abortion ban in 2020, support for the right to abortion further increased.

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should be legal in some cases, while 31 percent thought it should be available on request. Only every fifth respondent supported a full abortion ban.131 Threequarters of all Poles were also in favor of a referendum on the issue – which never took place.132 In 1993, 80 percent of women feared that the anti-abortion law would worsen the material situation of Polish families.133 Even Solidarity’s women’s section strongly objected to the abortion ban, presenting the union’s leader, Marian Krzaklewski, with poll results from several regional factories showing that 80 percent of workers were against the criminalization of abortion.134 It was for this reason that the unpopular bill, or what Wprost journalists labeled more broadly as “political gynecology,” captured the attention of the whole country.135 Beginning in 1989, a number of protests in defense of the existing liberal abortion law began to spring up in different parts of Poland. Pro-choice demonstrators often clashed with prolife counterdemonstrators.136 The mood of the moment was highly explosive, with emotions running high on both sides. In 1990, a pro-choice picket in Poznań was “put to flight” by a group of aggressive pro-life activists. A few months later, the Warsaw seat of the League of Polish Women, which was collecting signatures against the new abortion bill, received a bomb threat.137 In 1991 Wprost even reported the story of a young man who had cut off his penis inside the cathedral of Szczecin, allegedly in a gesture of protest against the tightening of abortion law.138 Again the symbol of the cross regularly accompanied the debate on abortion, used with equal intensity by campaigners on both sides of the conflict. “What happened to all our children?!,” read a dramatic slogan on one banner brought to Parliament by pro-life protesters in 1991. Beneath the stencilled question stretched a field of small black crosses.139 A similar motif, with 1,800 small crosses printed against an outline map of Poland, featured on flyers that pro-life activists sent to all left-wing MPs, claiming that the number represented the amount of abortions performed daily in Poland.140 Pro-life 131 132

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CBOS poll from 1991, cited in “W kraju,” Polityka, May 25, 1991, 2. CBOS, Komunikat z badań: Opinia społeczna o przerywaniu ciąży (Warsaw: CBOS, 1992), 1. “Kobiety nie chcą zakazu aborcji,” Gazeta Wyborcza, November 16, 1993, http://classic .wyborcza.pl/archiwumGW/138618/Kobiety-nie-chca-zakazu-aborcji (accessed February 28, 2020). Mishtal, The Politics of Morality, 41. Janusz Michalak and Maciej Łuczak, “Śmierć w próbówce,” Wprost, April 14, 1991, 18– 19. Bartłomiej Leśniewski, “Klincz nad brzuchem,” Wprost, April 14, 1991, 19–20. “Polityka i obyczaje,” Polityka, May 12, 1990, 3; Wojciech Jurczak, “Głośny krzyk” Wprost, April 14, 1991, 20–21. Jurczak, “Głośny krzyk,” 20–21. Ewa Nowakowska, “Dużo współczucia dla kobiety,” Polityka, February 2, 1991, 10. Ibid. According to data from the Ministry of Health, the number of abortions performed in 1990 equaled 126 per day.

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Fig. 30. Pro-choice banners using the symbol of the cross. “Woman, give us a soldier!” and “Religious murderers: make yourselves babies out of clay!” Source: Wprost, November 22, 1992.

discourse also frequently referred to the metaphor of crucifixion. “We ask all Poles not to walk indifferently by these places, where Christ is being crucified in the little bodies of unborn children,” appealed a 1996 pro-life picket in front of a private gynecological clinic in Warsaw.141 In another proclamation of this type, Youth for Life (Młodzi za Życiem) activists called on Poles to gather and pray in front of “the Calvaries of today” or “clinics of death” where they 141

“Stanowisko Ruchu ‘Młodzi za Życiem’ Warszawa, 11.09.1996,” in Głośmy Ewangelię życia: Antologia tekstów i wypowiedzi z przebiegu walki o prawo do życia dzieci nie narodzonych, edited by Wydawnictwo Sióstr Loretanek (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Sióstr Loretanek, 1997), 42–44, here 44.

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believed illegal abortions were being performed.142 A literal “Calvary of the Unborn,” was created at a popular pilgrimage site in Licheń, in western Poland, where a twenty-five-meter-high outdoor Golgotha included a grotto with the symbolic grave of an aborted fetus and the plea “Mommy, Daddy, my Polish nation: don’t kill me!” The chapel, which also featured sculptures of two mourning parent figures and a large crucifix, was meant to be the highlight of visits to the sanctuary for pilgrims, who, as one local priest put it, “seeing this site once, would never in their lives be supporters of abortion again.”143 Pro-choice activists in Poland likewise utilized the symbol of the cross. In November 1992 Wprost published a photograph of a picket at an undefined location, its members brandishing two banners with large black crosses on them. One depicted a grave and read “Woman, give us a soldier!,” while the other displayed a dramatic entreaty: “Religious murderers: make yourselves babies out of clay!”144 If the former referred to the cross as a Christian symbol of death, the latter clearly pointed to the Catholic Church as being morally responsible for the future consequences of forcing abortion underground. Political satire of the day also picked up on the subject of abortion and, more broadly, the sexual morals preached by the Catholic Church. NIE in particular devoted a lot of space to the subject, publishing, among other examples, a cartoon of an executioner with an axe in one hand and a cross in the other captioned “Decapitation for abortion” (1992).145 Several other cartoons of the period included the symbol of the cross, often positioned on top of or substituting for genitalia, as visual shorthand for the Church’s growing control over sexuality and reproductive rights.146 The cross thus featured in the abortion debate of the early 1990s as a powerful visual tool used on both sides of the barricade. For proponents of the bill, invoking the crucifixion of innocents helped to justify the need for tighter abortion law on eschatological grounds. Some of them, like the priest who publically called for exorcisms to be performed on Polish MPs in favor of access to legal abortion, saw the debate about the contested change in legislation as a front line in the fundamental clash between good and evil.147 For others, the cross stood both for the deaths of the “unborn,” anthropomorphized in the act of 142

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Agnieszka Brylska, “Ruch Młodzi za Życiem,” in Głośmy Ewangelię życia: Antologia tekstów i wypowiedzi z przebiegu walki o prawo do życia dzieci nie narodzonych, edited by Wydawnictwo Sióstr Loretanek (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Sióstr Loretanek, 1997), 215–217, here 215. Cited in Gajdziński, “Moc oczyszczenia,” 29. “Dzieje grzechu,” Wprost, November 22, 1992, 2. Witold Mysyrowicz, “Topór za skrobanki,” NIE, January 30, 1992, 8. See Tomasz Rogowski, untitled, NIE, June 20, 1991, 5; Anonymous, untitled, NIE, January 23, 1992, 4. Ryszard Halwa, “Kazanie w kościele Św. Aleksandra, Warszawa, 11.09.1996,” cited in Wydawnictwo Sióstr Loretanek (ed.), Głośmy Ewangelię życia, 41.

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Fig. 31. Cartoon by an anonymous author, NIE, January 23, 1992.

receiving a symbolic burial, and for the feared extinction of the whole Polish nation that would supposedly come to pass if abortion remained legal. At the same time, the cross served opponents of the anti-abortion bill in redirecting attention from the fetus to the suffering of women who, deprived of access to legal abortion, were now forced to resort to illegal and potentially risky procedures. Finally, on pro-choice banners and in political satire of the time, the symbol of the cross also functioned as a visual shorthand for the Catholic Church, depicted as omnipresent, oppressive, and unsympathetic to women.

A Communist Crucified If politics and eschatology intersected in the abortion debate to a hitherto unprecedented extent, the single most extreme manifestation of the proclivity of post-transformation Polish political life towards religious performance was the case of Roman Samsel. Shortly after the first presidential elections of 1990, when Lech Wałęsa was forced to stand in a second ballot against the entirely unknown Polish-born Canadian businessman Stanisław Tymiński, Samsel, a former journalist of the Communist party organ Trybuna Ludu, published a book with the sensationalist title All about Stan Tymiński. In that book, which received a fair amount of media attention, he revealed that the former presidential candidate had literally attempted to crucify him on May 1, 1990, at

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Tymiński’s farm near Toronto in an effort to redeem Samsel of the “sin” of having belonged to the Communist Party.148 Samsel, who was then a lecturer in Polish literature at the Catholic University of Lima, met Tymiński in Peru in 1986. He soon became fascinated by the charisma of the future presidential candidate, and agreed to go to Canada to ghostwrite the book that would become Tymiński’s political manifesto.149 In the journalist’s own account, Tymiński, who was an ardent anti-Communist, “chose” him for the crucifixion “as an embodiment of the People’s Republic of Poland.”150 Stan believed that after he flew into Warsaw he would see rows of crosses along [major street] Aleje Jerozolimskie with culprits stretched out on them. He laughed out loud when talking about it. He wanted to set an example. And I, exposed to public scorn, was supposed to be that example.151

Tymiński’s vision for Samsel, for which he managed to win the journalist’s consent, was that on May 1, the Communist high holiday, he would be stripped of his clothes, tied with ropes to a cross, and left to hang.152 The prospective victim embraced this scenario, hoping that a public act of repentance would provide him with symbolic absolution and catharsis. “Tymiński has purified me through the punishment of crucifixion,” Samsel recounted later in a press interview. “After the act I experienced a relief which has endured.”153 What Samsel, as a former PZPR member, wanted to unburden himself of was a sense of collective guilt for the wrongdoings of the Communist regime, which he saw himself implicated in. “I will be crucified,” he wrote in his book-length account of the event, “for the pride of the party that I belonged to, for the smallmindedness of its leaders, who believed, in their conceit, they were leaders of the nation. I will let them crucify me for the callousness of the Party and for its disregard of people’s will and dignity.”154 By literally taking on his shoulders the sins of the Communist Party, Samsel both confronted his own past and diagnosed a widespread anxiety of the transformation period – a sense of shame and fear that pushed many to conceal or deny their recent biographies. People in Poland are very quick to attempt to erase their past. They are afraid to admit they ever belonged to the PZPR. It is a huge red mark on 148

149 150

151 152 153

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Roman Samsel and Małgorzata Waloch, Wszystko o Stanie Tymińskim (Toruń: Comer, 1991). Stanisław Tymiński, Święte psy (Warsaw: Officina, 1990). Roman Samsel, Dałem się ukrzyżować Stanowi Tymińskiemu (Warsaw: Instytut Wydawniczy Książka i Prasa, 1992), 68. Samsel, Dałem się ukrzyżować Stanowi Tymińskiemu, 71. In the final act of crucifixion, Samsel kept his clothes on, however. Piotr Najsztub, “Roman Samsel wyjaśnia,” Gazeta Wyborcza, March 26, 1991, https://classic .wyborcza.pl/archiwumGW/6052937/Roman-Samsel-wyjasnia- (accessed March 5, 2020). Ibid., 146.

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the transformation crusades one’s biography [. . .]. They will bring certificates from a doctor, a psychologist, an angel, the devil, the dentist, from God himself, saying that they were abroad, that they were on the run from Communism, that they were sick, in a mental asylum, suffering from cancer, [. . .] had nothing whatsoever to do with the Party, and that they would cross to the other side of the street if they saw a Party member.155

While Samsel seems to have shared this sense of shame for his Party membership with his compatriots, he also believed that only a symbolic act of expiation could ensure a true transformation of Polish society. “All those who belonged to the Communist regime, bound themselves with Communism, yielded to Communism, pandered to Communism, and drew profit from Communism [. . .] must repent for lacking intelligence and clear-sightedness,” he insisted. “They can do it in their own conscience,” he added, since “nobody yet demands that they do it publicly and on their knees, in front of the new god, the holy free market.”156 Even if Samsel’s account of the crucifixion at times reads as sarcastic or at least ambivalent, when asked about the meaning of the act in later interviews he repeatedly emphasized that what motivated him was a genuine need for atonement.157 He also understood his role as that of a trailblazer and “the first Communist to hang on a cross.”158 His numerous written revelations about the ritual, including the 1992 paperback Dałem się ukrzyżować Stanowi Tymińskiemu (I Let Stan Tymiński Crucify Me), which featured a photo of the crucifixion on its cover, also suggest that Samsel wished to reach a wider audience with his message.159 The Polish press received Samsel’s book with amusement, reprinting certain passages and mentioning it briefly as a political curiosity.160 Gazeta Wyborcza commented on the performance at greater length, calling it “political folklore” capable of “provok[ing] revulsion or distaste.”161 But even if the symbolic crucifixion never really sparked a discussion or the public reckoning Samsel had hoped for, the bizarre production deserves some attention here. With its radical ritual form and redemptive promise, the exemplary crucifixion of a rank-and-file Communist by the future maverick presidential candidate 155 156 157

158 159

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Samsel, Dałem się ukrzyżować Stanowi Tymińskiemu, 55–56. Ibid., 77. Najsztub, “Roman Samsel wyjaśnia”; Samsel and Waloch, Wszystko o Stanie Tymińskim, 71–93. Samsel, Dałem się ukrzyżować Stanowi Tymińskiemu, 89. In 2002 Samsel returned to the subject one more time, publishing Pokuta (Repentance), in which he re-evaluated his relationship with Stanisław Tymiński. See Roman Samsel, Pokuta: Stan Tymiński – patriota czy blagier? (Staszów: Staszowskie Towarzystwo Kulturalne, 2002). “Krzyż Samsela,” Wprost, March 17, 1991, 49; “Pantaleon i przyzwoitki,” Polityka, May 25, 1991, 15; “Polityka i obyczaje,” Polityka, May 11, 1991, 3. Najsztub, “Roman Samsel wyjaśnia.”

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encapsulated some of the fundamental anxieties of the transformation period. Samsel’s crucifixion drama gave expression on the one hand to the stigma of Party membership, a sense of exclusion, and an identity crisis among those who had collaborated with the ancien régime, and on the other to the opportunism, denial, and ostentatious religiosity of the new political elite. The crucifixion of the PRL’s Everyman – in the person of Roman Samsel – spoke to the desires of post-transformation society. It was both punitive and redemptive, both a spectacle of symbolic lynching and a vehicle of absolution for “the Communist,” who gained the chance to cleanse himself of his alleged “guilt.” Moreover, the fact that, of all possible forms of public atonement, it was crucifixion that offered the script for this political performance is symptomatic of the mood of that time. As wonder-working prophets were proliferating across the country, catering to a new wave of vernacular piety, and the symbol of the cross was becoming an omnipresent marker of decommunization in the public space, a political crucifixion certainly responded to some commonly shared fears and aesthetic codes.

Conclusions In the immediate post-1989 period the symbol of the cross continued to provide a focal point for the attention of various political actors and to define new front lines. Just like during the Solidarity decade, it continued to play the role of a “privileged signifier” and a synecdoche for a whole set of issues, ranging from public morality to education. Yet this time it did not articulate the demands of a communitas of protest, but corresponded to actual reforms sanctioning the Christian worldview in Polish public life. In posttransformation Poland the cross became a visual marker of the new order and came to function as a shibboleth to a new (national) community which not only coalesced around a fresh set of values and rituals, but came to be defined by new Other(s). The already familiar category of the “enemies of the cross,” until now reserved for Communists, kept expanding after 1989. Alongside former Party functionaries, liberals and even officials of the new democratic institutions could now be included under the label. For example, in a sermon delivered during the Easter week celebrations of 1993, the Primate of Poland, Józef Glemp, criticized State Ombudsman Tadeusz Zieliński for undermining the directive to reinstate religion in schools, calling his efforts “a campaign in favor of delegalizing the cross.”162 Bishop Józef Michalik similarly declared opponents of the directive to be “enemies of the cross and the Gospel.”163 At the same time, however, as the new structure was consolidating, converting its rituals into institutionalized routines and introducing sanctions for 162 163

Józef Glemp, cited in “Łamanie krzyżem,” Wprost, May 2, 1993, 1. Józef Michalik, cited in Waniek, Orzeł i krucyfiks, 322.

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violations of the new symbolic order, dissent against the new hegemony was already brewing. One of the radical changes that the transformation period brought was that the emerging antistructure began, to a hitherto unseen degree, to adopt sacrosanct symbols of structure to challenge the existing order. The symbol of the cross was thus for the first time reappropriated as an emotional catalyst in mobilizing against the structure that placed that very symbol on its banners. It became the target of caricature and political jokes, appeared on protest banners, and became a default shorthand for the militant character of the Church, the control it exerted in the new state, and its oppressive anti-modern ideology. By appropriating the symbol in antistructural visual culture, pro-secularist and pro-choice activists were able not only to ridicule their opponent, but also to redirect audience sympathy to those negatively affected by new legislation (e.g. women deprived of access to legal abortion). This subversion of the symbol allowed for comic relief and open provocation, perhaps even generating a sense of community (as was most evident in the growing readership of NIE in the early 1990s), but it was also promptly countered with some serious sanctions. Those who hijacked the symbol of the cross had to be prepared for harsh criticism, ostracism, and even legal ramifications. This negotiation of the boundaries of free expression and taboo that took place with such intensity in the throes of the early transformation period left a lasting impression on the political imagination of subsequent decades. The fault lines separating pro-secularist, liberal, and progressive forces from ultraconservatives who married nationalist rhetoric with Catholic symbolism were there to stay. And so were the performative scripts both camps used to rally support or articulate protest.

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6 Religious Populism and Its Opponents

In the vote to determine Poland’s Word of the Year 2011, the word “cross” ranked third, following “presidency” and “crisis.”1 As Poland was recovering from the shock of the 2010 plane crash in Smolensk, which killed the country’s president Lech Kaczyński and ninety-five other members of an official delegation en route to the memorial at Katyn, the nation’s attention was once again captured by a story involving a cross – one that very much embodied the tensions the catastrophe triggered. Its main protagonist – a wooden cross more than four meters in height – was planted by a group of boy scouts in front of the Presidential Palace in Warsaw on April 15, 2010, just five days after the tragic crash.2 Placed amid a sea of candles and flowers that grieving Varsovians had spontaneously left there during those intense days of national mourning, the cross became the central point for increasingly political gatherings that were to continue on that spot for months to come. Its fiercely contested presence at the very seat of Poland’s executive power gave rise to perhaps the most iconic symbolic clash in the country’s post-1989 history, both bringing into focus Poles’ post-transformation anxieties and revealing a new cleavage in Polish society that would determine the country’s political landscape for years to come. The controversy around the Smolensk cross began to take shape in May 2010 when staff of the Presidential Palace removed the cross from the sidewalk after it suffered storm damage. While the cross was being repaired, a Committee for the Defense of the Cross formed, vocally demanding its return and accusing the administration of attempting to erase the memory of the crash from the public space.3 After Bronisław Komorowski of the conservative-liberal Civic Platform (PO, Platforma Obywatelska) won the presidential election in early July, beating the late President Kaczyński’s brother Jarosław, a whole community of “cross defenders” coalesced, demonstrating open allegiance to the latter and accusing both Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Civic 1

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Jerzy Bralczyk, Andrzej Markowski, and Walery Pisarek, “Słowo roku 2011,” Słowa na czasie, www.slowanaczasie.uw.edu.pl/slowo-roku-2011 (accessed March 25, 2020). Edyta Gietka, “Krzyż, czyli My i Oni,” Polityka, July 10, 2010, 22–24. Iwona Szpala and Tomasz Urzykowski, “Krzyż dzieli harcerzy,” Gazeta Wyborcza, July 17– 18, 2010, 3.

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Platform and the newly elected president of having assassinated President Kaczyński.4 As conspiracy theorists and cross defenders grew increasingly radical in their message, gaining more and more media attention, secularist voices began to make themselves heard too, demanding the cross’s removal. At the same time, the environs of the Smolensk cross were gradually becoming a stage for daily verbal encounters, physical clashes, public devotions, and other performative interventions.5 The conflict around the cross grew in intensity after the president-elect announced his decision to move it “to a more fitting location.”6 At the beginning of August, during an attempt to transfer the cross to a nearby church by means of a religious procession, the situation escalated as a group of cross defenders aggressively confronted a delegation of churchmen and boy scouts, abusing them verbally and preventing the ceremony’s completion.7 The shocking standoff under the cross and the failure of the administration to end the conflict in a nonviolent way hit a nerve. While the cross defenders and their supporters celebrated their victory as a “sign from God,”8 the largest Polish daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, raised alarm about “a triumph of anarchy and fanaticism,”9 with its moderate Catholic pundits writing of a “disgrace” and a “war on democracy.”10 The events in front of the Presidential Palace also mobilized pro-secularists, who took to the streets in a massive demonstration on August 9 to demand the removal of the cross. Organized via social media and attracting predominantly young protesters, the demonstration was a carnivalesque event meant to ridicule cross defenders and challenge the taboos around the symbol of the 4

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Although PO was often portrayed by the right-wing press, and demonized by the PiS party, as a liberal party, the party’s profile in the 2010s did not correspond to policies that would typically be understood as “liberal” in the Western context. While PO was economically pro-liberal, its social outlook remained conservative (as regards, for instance, its position on the legalization of abortion, same-sex marriages, soft drugs, etc.). Zbigniew Mikołejko, “Polska wojna symboliczna,” Polityka, August 14, 2010, 17–18; Wojciech Wybranowski, “Nowa awantura o krzyż,” Rzeczpospolita, July 12, 2010, A4; Jarosław Stróżyk and Agnieszka Niewińska, “Nocne rozmowy pod krzyżem,” Rzeczpospolita, August 5, 2010, A5. Bronisław Komorowski, “Nie chodzi o to, żeby ludzi bolało,” Gazeta Wyborcza, July 10– 11, 2010, 14–16. The plan for moving the cross to the church was the result of trilateral negotiations between the president’s office, scouting organizations, and the Catholic Church. See Katarzyna Wiśniewska, Katarzyna Szpala, and Grzegorz Szymanik, “Krzyż do Świętej Anny,” Gazeta Wyborcza, July 22, 2010, 1; Wojciech Wybranowski, “Eskalacja wojny o krzyż smoleński,” Rzeczpospolita, July 13, 2010, A4; Agnieszka Niewińska and Jarosław Stróżyk, “Smoleński krzyż zostaje,” Rzeczpospolita, August 4, 2010, A3. Cited in “Wygrali wojnę krzyżową,” Gazeta Wyborcza, August 5, 2010, 1. Adam Leszczyński, “Bitwę pod krzyżem przegrali wszyscy,” Gazeta Wyborcza, August 4, 2010, 1. Jan Turnau, “Hańba,” Gazeta Wyborcza, August 4, 2010, 2.

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cross itself. The iconoclastic character of the protest captured public attention for a long time. Media across the board reported in detail on irreverent banners and chants as well as props such as a cross made of beer cans and a crucified teddy bear.11 While left-wing and pro-secularist outlets hailed the march as the birth of a long-awaited grassroots movement “against the dominance of the Church over the state, law, and public space,”12 scandalized right-wing observers bemoaned the “moral nihilism”13 and “pagan profanation” that, in their view, resulted from the event. As cross defenders and their opponents continued to clash in the center of Warsaw, several diplomatic scenarios for ending the conflict presented themselves but failed to win a general consensus. Seeking a compromise with the cross defenders, who insisted that the wooden cross should remain in place until the victims of the crash had been appropriately commemorated in that very location, the administration installed a commemorative plaque on the façade of the building. The form and scale of the memorialization, however, were heavily criticized, triggering further vehement protest.14 After the plaque had been profaned with feces within days of its installation and a protester carrying a grenade was detained shortly thereafter, any hope of a timely ending to the conflict faded away.15 Another noteworthy initiative was put forward by the victims’ families, who proposed transporting the cross to Smolensk and planting it at the actual site of the crash. But their idea also failed to win the support of all the interested parties.16 The protests 11

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Mirosław Czech, “‘Bóg,’ ‘Honor,’ ‘Do Kościoła,’” Gazeta Wyborcza, August 11, 2010, 2; Niewińska and Stróżyk, “Smoleński krzyż zostaje”; Paweł Tunia, “Próba siłowego przeniesienia krzyża,” Nasz Dziennik, August 10, 2010, 2. Jerzy Urban, “Krzyż – znak rozbawienia” NIE, August 19, 2010, 1. Elżbieta Morawiec, “Walka władzy z pamięcią albo palikotokracja,” Nasz Dziennik, August 19, 2010, 11; Michał Łuczewski, “Katastrofa, Mesjasz, Krzyż,” in Katastrofa: Bilans dwóch lat, edited by Jan Filip Staniłko (Warsaw: Instytut Sobieskiego, 2012), 104. Wojciech Czuchnowski and Wojciech Szacki, “Jest tablica i krzyż: Obrońcy krzyczą: Hańba!,” Gazeta Wyborcza, August 13, 2010, 4; “Czy ta tablica godnie upamiętnia żałobę?,” Gazeta Wyborcza, August 13, 2010, 18–19; Małgorzata Pabis, “Eskalacja konfliktu w interesie PO,” Nasz Dziennik, August 13, 2010, 1; Agnieszka Niewińska, Ewa K. Czaczkowska, and Józef Matusz, “Jest tablica, czy będzie pomnik?,” Rzeczpospolita, August 13, 2010, A4; Sławoj Leszek Głódź, “Od budowy pomnika nie uciekniemy,” Rzeczpospolita, August 18, 2010, A5. “Zbezczeszczona tablica pod pałacem,” Gazeta Wyborcza, August 18, 2010, 3. Wojciech Czuchnowski, Piotr Machajski, Paweł P. Reszka, and Iwona Szpala, “Krzyż, desperaci i sfrustrowani policjanci,” Gazeta Wyborcza, August 19, 2010, 3. Jarosław Stróżyk, “Rodziny na Wawelu, PiS pod krzyżem,” Rzeczpospolita, September 11– 12, 2010, A4; Marcin Wojciechowski, “Pielgrzymka rodzin ofiar do Smoleńska: Serca po katastrofie,” Gazeta Wyborcza, October 11, 2010, 1; Justyna Prus-Wojciechowska, “Szloch i płacz w Smoleńsku,” Rzeczpospolita, October 11, 2010, A4; Marcin Kołodziejczyk and Bianka Mikołajewska, “Dwa i pół kilometra,” Polityka, October 9, 2010, 20–21.

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around the cross continued for another month before, after 155 days and many rounds of negotiations, it was finally moved to a chapel inside the palace.17 By that time, the middle of September 2010, 77 percent of Poles welcomed the decision, with over 60 percent disapproving of the cross defenders and considering their picket “a form of anarchy that undermined the legal order of the state.”18 Yet the disappearance of the cross did not end its tremendous symbolic appeal. Defenders continued to picket at its original site, bringing along other, smaller crosses or arranging floral crosses on the ground.19 The site also remained the venue for monthly commemorative rallies held by Jarosław Kaczyński and his supporters for eight more years.20 Each of these meetings, which combined a very pronounced political profile with public acts of devotion, relied heavily on the symbol of the cross. Demonstrators carried a large wooden cross at the head of their march as a symbolic replacement for the one that had been removed, laid down lit candles arranged in the shape of a cross, and held multiple smaller crucifixes in their hands. Memorial crosses devoted to the Smolensk catastrophe also appeared in other places across Poland and beyond.21 One makeshift memorial cross of this type was even placed in front of the parliament building.22 The long public debate on how 17

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The cross was moved to the presidential chapel on September 16 and nearly a month later, on November 10, it was transferred to its final destination, St. Anne’s Church. Wojciech Czuchnowski, “Nie ma krzyża pod Pałacem,” Gazeta Wyborcza, September 17, 2010, 1; Matylda Młocka and Wojciech Wybranowski, “Krzyż zabrany do pałacu,” Rzeczpospolita, September 17, 2010, A3. Krzysztof Pankowski, “Opinie o wydarzeniach przed Pałacem Prezydenckim, tzw. obrońcach krzyża i ich przeciwnikach,” in Po katastrofie smoleńskiej CBOS. Opinie i Diagnozy nr. 17, edited by Mirosława Grabowska (Warsaw: CBOS, 2010), 88, 90. See also “Krzyż smoleński przeniesiony,” Rzeczpospolita, September 17, 2010, A1; Kamila Baranowska, “Zadowoleni z decyzji prezydenta,” Rzeczpospolita, September 17, 2010, A4. Młocka and Wybranowski, “Krzyż zabrany do pałacu,” A3. Monthly memorial rallies (miesięcznice smoleńskie in Polish) were held in front of the Presidential Palace ninety-six times. The last of them took place on April 10, 2018, on the eighth anniversary of the catastrophe. The gatherings, which combined a very pronounced political profile with religious elements, triggered a lot of opposition and in 2016–2018 even regular counterprotests. See Rafał Łuczkiewicz, Tu obywatele! Kontrmiesięcznice obywatelskie 2016–2018 (Warsaw: Rafał Łuczkiewicz, 2019). Smolensk crosses were erected, among others places, in Trzebnica, Ełk, and Budapest. Numerous Smolensk memorials also incorporated the symbol of the cross, for instance in Dzierżawy and Kętrzyn. “Nowy pomnik upamiętnia Katyń i . . . Smoleńsk,” Nowa Gazeta, November 3, 2016, https://nowagazeta.pl/artykul/nowy-pomnik-upamietnia-katyn -i-smolensk/894496 (accessed March 27, 2020); “Odsłonięto pomnik ‘Memento Smolensk’ w Budapeszcie. Przemawiali Morawiecki, Kaczyński i Orban,” Wprost, April 6, 2018, www.wprost.pl/kraj/10115918/odslonieto-pomnik-memento-smolensk -w-budapeszcie-przemawiali-morawiecki-kaczynski-i-orban.html (accessed March 27, 2020); Joanna Skibniewska “Kaczyński bije papieża,” NIE, November 18, 2010, 6. Gietka, “Krzyż, czyli My i Oni.”

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to officially commemorate the victims of the crash in the capital also kept returning to the symbol of the cross. After the presidential elections of 2015, won by the Law and Justice (PiS, Prawo i Sprawiedliwość) candidate Andrzej Duda, party leader Jarosław Kaczyński called for the original Smolensk cross to be reinstated in front of the Presidential Palace.23 While this never happened, another vision that emerged at that time was of a monument to Lech Kaczyński consisting of a tower in the shape of a cross that would overshadow Warsaw’s signature building – the Palace of Culture.24 In 2021, the Polish National Bank issued a commemorative 20 złoty banknote with the image of the Smolensk cross.25

The Smolensk Cross Affair For the purposes of this book, the controversy around the Smolensk cross is a fascinating case to consider for a number of reasons, not least due to the centrality that many – especially right-wing – commentators assigned to the events of 2010. Some went as far as to call the Smolensk catastrophe “the greatest tragedy in Poland’s postwar history,”26 “a zero hour,”27 and even “a turning point for the future of our country and Christian culture.”28 Indeed, in view of the spectacular victory of the PiS party in the 2015 elections, in which Jarosław Kaczyński’s faction mobilized its electorate around the core narrative of the “assassination” at Smolensk, the long-term consequences of the 2010 events are hard to overlook. The plane crash and ensuing period of national mourning have also attracted a significant amount of critical analysis as well as inspired a profusion of other publications ranging from reportage,29

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Agata Kondzińska, Iwona Szpala, Bartłomiej Kuraś, and Małgorzata Skowrońska, “Ruchomy pomnik smoleński?,” Gazeta Wyborcza, March 21, 2016, http://wyborcza.pl /1,75398,19797380,ruchomy-pomnik-smolenski.html (accessed March 27, 2020). Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, “Krzyż i harcerz,” Tygodnik Solidarność, September 17, 2010, 33. Narodowy Bank Polski, “Lech Kaczyński: It Is Worth Being a Pole,” www.nbp.pl/homen .aspx?f=/banknoty_i_monety/banknoty_kolekcjonerskie/2021_kaczynski_20zl_en.html (accessed January 18, 2022). Kluby Gazety Polskiej, “Apel w sprawie ofiar Smoleńska,” in Prawda zwycięży: Homilie upamiętniające tragicznie zmarłych pod Smoleńskiem wygłoszone w warszawskiej bazylice archikatedralnej, edited by Marian Piotr Romaniuk (Warsaw: Prohibita, 2013), 44. Jacek Karnowski, “Od redakcji,” in wPolityce.pl: Polska po 10 kwietnia 2010 r., edited by Artur Bazak, Jacek Karnowski, Michał Koenowski, Paweł Nowacki, and Izabela Wierzbicka (Warsaw: Michał Karnowski, 2011), 8. Artur Bazak, “Żyjemy w cieniu niewypowiedzianej wojny,” in wPolityce.pl: Polska po 10 kwietnia 2010 r., edited by Artur Bazak, Jacek Karnowski, Michał Koenowski, Paweł Nowacki, and Izabela Wierzbicka (Warsaw: Michał Karnowski, 2011), 13. Teresa Torańska and Elżbieta Lewczuk, Smoleńsk (Warsaw: Wielka Litera, 2013); Joanna Lichocka, Przebudzenie (Kraków: Wydawnictwo M, 2012).

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memoirs,30 and memorial albums31 to fiction,32 poetry,33 and homilies34 in addition to films,35 theater productions,36 music,37 and artworks.38 There is likewise ample existing scholarly literature on the aftermath of the Smolensk catastrophe which covers a range of different disciplinary angles, 30

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Wacław Prażuch, Katyń II: Słońce wschodziło czerwone (Tarnów: Biblos, 2011); Barbara Stanisławczyk, Ostatni krzyk: Od Katynia do Smoleńska historie dramatów i miłości (Poznań: Rebis, 2011); Zuzanna Dawidowicz, Lawa: Rozmowy o Polsce (Kraków: Arcana, 2012). Jan Dubaj and Małgorzata Kotwica (eds.), Pamięci polskiej Golgoty wschodu: 70. rocznica Katyń 1940–2010: Wielka tradedia polskiego narodu (Kielce: Koło Nr 1 ŚZŻAK, 2011); Mirosław Skowron and Iwona Havranek, eds., Pamiętamy Smoleńsk 10.04.2010 (Warsaw: Murator, 2011); Waldemar Chrostowski, Oburzeni (Kraków: Biały Kruk, 2012). For an analysis of “Smolensk novels,” see Zygmunt Ziątek, Anna Sobolewska, Jerzy Zygmunt Szeja, and Katarzyna Nadana-Sokołowska, “Warianty powieści smoleńskich,” in Debaty po roku 1989: Literatura w procesach komunikacji: W stronę nowej syntezy, edited by Maryla Hopfinger, Zygmunt Ziątek, and Tomasz Żukowski (Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN, 2017), 396–426. The Smolensk cross defense also reverberated in literary works such as Joanna Bator, Ciemno, prawie noc (Warsaw: WAB, 2012), 48–49, which contains a parodic scene featuring street clashes between followers of a local prophet picketing in the city center with crosses and counterdemonstrators who build an image of the Virgin Mary out of Coca-Cola tins. Agnieszka Battelli, Hanna Dobrowolska, Alicja Jach-Lejkert, and Natalia Tarczyńska (eds.), Antologia smoleńska: 96 wierszy (Łódź: Stowarzyszenie Solidarni 2010), 2015; Poeci ofiarom katastrofy smoleńskiej: Antologia wierszy, selected by Bogusław Janik (Gębice and Pępowo: Gmina Pępowo, 2013); Janusz Dariusz Telejko (ed.), Pamiętamy . . .: Bóg, Honor, Ojczyzna: Antologia wierszy poświęconych katastrofie smoleńskiej 10.04.2010 r. (Bielany Wrocławskie: Wydawnictwo Wektory, 2011). Waldemar Gliński, . . . pozostal tylko bęben i bęben gra nam . . . marsz żałobny: Medytacje z czasu żałoby: W hołdzie Poległym pod Smoleńskiem 10 kwietnia 2010 r. (Łódź: Archidiecezjalne Wydawnictwo Łódzkie, 2010); Marian Piotr Romaniuk (ed.), Prawda zwycięży: Homilie upamiętniające tragicznie zmarłych pod Smoleńskiem wygłoszone w warszawskiej bazylice archikatedralnej (Warsaw: Prohibita, 2013). For analysis of filmic representations of the Smolensk catastrophe and its aftermath, see Mirosław Przylipiak, “Memory, National Identity, and the Cross: Polish Documentary Films about the Smolensk Plane Crash,” in Iconic Turns: Nation and Religion in Eastern European Cinema since 1989, edited by Liliya Berezhnaya and Christian Schmitt (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 217–236. Paweł Wodziński, Mickiewicz. Dziady. Performance (play), based on Adam Mickiewicz’s Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve), Teatr Polski, Bydgoszcz, 2011. Michał Lorenc, “Suita ‘Pamięć’ Michała Lorenca,” TVP, 2018, www.tvp.info/36747239/ suita-pamiec-michala-lorenca (accessed March 30, 2020); Muariolanza, “Przerwany Lot,” in Muafrika, Sonic Records, 2010; Sponti Nova “Tu-154 Stacja,” in “Sponti Nova: Pamięci ofiar katastrofy smoleńskiej,” 2013, https://muzyka.interia.pl/pop/newssponti-nova-pamieci-ofiar-katastrofy-smolenskiej,nId,1660614 (accessed March 30, 2020); a “Festival of Smolensk Song” took place 2018 in Toruń. See, for example, Jadwiga Solińska, 96 krzyży: Pamięci ofiar katastrofy smoleńskiej (Lublin: Liber, 2012); Aleka Polis, “Żyjąc, nurzamy się w śmierci,” 2017, YouTube, www .youtube.com/watch?v=mPtxvsuNqRA (accessed July 10, 2022); Paweł Althamer, Prezydent (sculpture), 2018.

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including the sociological and political, but also the performative,39 mediatheoretical,40 and even theological.41 Scholars have examined the impact the disaster has had on Polish–Russian relations,42 how it has been represented in the media and popular culture,43 and even what neologisms it has inspired.44 The period of national mourning and the symbolic conflicts that transpired during that time have attracted particularly much attention. The posthumous mythologization of Lech Kaczyński has been tackled from a number of perspectives.45 The emergence of the “Smolensk myth,” or the narrative that framed Kaczyński’s death as heroic and part of God’s plan to “reinvigorate the nation,”46 has also come under a lot of scrutiny alongside what the scholar of 39

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Dariusz Kosiński, Teatra polskie: Historie (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 2010). Agata Sierbińska, “Tłum smoleński,” Widok: Teorie i praktyki kultury wizualnej 6 (2014): 1–19; Jacek Dziekan, Od rytuału do konfliktu: Mediatyzacja żałoby posmoleńskiej (Gdańsk: Katedra, 2018). Janusz Szulist, “Polaryzująca funkcja krzyża w narodzie,” Studia Gdańskie 36 (2014): 111–123. Alexander Etkind, “Coda: Katyn-2,” in Remembering Katyn, edited by Alexander Etkind et al. (Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2012), 132–152. Katarzyna Buszkowska, “Smoleńska matnia,” in Debaty po roku 1989: W stronę nowej syntezy, edited by Maryla Hopfinger, Zygmunt Ziątek, and Tomasz Żukowski (Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN, 2017), 363–384; Tomasz Żukowski, “Kryteria prawdziwości i poetyka powtórzenia,” in Debaty po roku 1989: W stronę nowej syntezy, edited by Maryla Hopfinger, Zygmunt Ziątek, and Tomasz Żukowski (Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN, 2017), 385–395; Ziątek, Sobolewska, Szeja, and NadanaSokołowska, “Warianty powieści smoleńskich”; Zygmunt Ziątek and Anna Jakubas, “W poszukiwaniu alternatywnych wspólnot,” in Debaty po roku 1989: W stronę nowej syntezy, edited by Maryla Hopfinger, Zygmunt Ziątek, and Tomasz Żukowski (Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN, 2017), 427–466; Barbara Kaleta, “Kreowanie wizji sporu o krzyż smoleński na łamach prasy – analiza porównawcza,” Studia Slavica 2 (2014): 277–287; Piotr Gliński and Jacek Wasilewski, Katastrofa smoleńska: Reakcje społeczne, polityczne i medialne (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IFIS PAN, 2011); Mirosław Przylipiak, “Walka o krzyż – dwa spojrzenia,” in Sacrum w kinie dekadę później: Szkice, eseje, rozprawy, edited by Sebastian Konefał, Magdalena Zelent, and Krzysztof Kornacki (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 2013), 219–237. Agata Dębczyńska, Smoleńska nowomowa: Cechy językowe debaty publicznej w latach 2010–2014 (Łódź, Archaegraph, 2016). Jarosław Rokicki, “Katastrofa smoleńska w świetle koncepcji ‘kozła ofiarnego’ René Girarda,” Bezpieczeństwo: Teoria i Praktyka no. 42 (2011): 77–97; Gliński and Wasilewski, Katastrofa smoleńska; Łuczewski, “Katastrofa, Mesjasz, Krzyż,” 87–108. Paweł Sendyka, “Narodziny mitu smoleńskiego,” Zeszyty Naukowe Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego: Prace Etnograficzne 41 (2013): 43–50; Jarosław Rokicki, “Powrót misji cierpienia: Społeczne tworzenie porządku po chaosie tragedii smoleńskiej,” Polska w mediach: Media w Polsce, edited by Zbigniew Pucek and Joanna Bierówka (Kraków: Krakowska Akademia im. Andrzeja Frycza Modrzewskiego, 2012), 47–68; Krzysztof Jaskułowski, “Mity narodowej żałoby,” Przegląd Polityczny 100 (2010), 15–22; Przemysław Czapliński, “Dwa pogrzeby, jedna implozja,” Przegląd Polityczny 100 (2010), 25–29; Wojciech Józef Burszta, “Powrót ideologii,” Przegląd Polityczny 100 (2010), 32–35.

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religion Zbigniew Mikołejko has termed the “Smolensk religion” or the pseudoreligious cult of “Smolensk martyrs.”47 The Smolensk cross defense has been the focus of much of this scholarly attention, and the community of the cross defenders has inspired a few short sociological studies.48 Krzysztof Jaskułowski has addressed how the symbolic and ritual practices of the cross defenders, rooted in “nationalized Catholicism,” permitted them to negotiate a positive group identity and delegitimize their political opponents.49 Ireneusz Krzemiński analyzes the group as a social movement, focusing on its structures, objectives, and master frames and describing how the initial gathering motivated by a will to commemorate the crash victims institutionalized itself politically and became a vehicle for undermining democratically elected state officials.50 The counterhegemonic potential of the group has also been noted in other studies, which frame the cross defenders either as radical “folk revolutionaries”51 or as “the mob”52 that tapped into the Romantic paradigm of struggle against an overwhelming adversary or, alternately, drew its group cohesion from subalternity. How this anti-establishment zeal came to be harnessed by hegemonic forces has been investigated by Michał Wróblewski, who looks at how different stakeholders in the conflict – particularly the Catholic Church and the PiS party – instrumentalized the frustration of the economically disenfranchised cross defenders to promote their own ideological and political agenda.53 Nonetheless, in spite of this intense interest in the events of 2010 among Polish scholars, the symbolic clashes that took place in front of the Presidential Palace have not received the kind of systematic analysis that would situate them within a longer historical perspective and grant equal attention and “thickness” of description to the cross defenders and their opponents. The symbolic conflicts in front of the Presidential Palace constituted the first manifestation of antistructure since 1989 to utilize the symbol of the cross as its rallying sign. Given the rich tradition of such antistructural mobilization in 47

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Zbigniew Mikołejko, Między zbawieniem a Smoleńskiem: Studia i szkice o katolicyzmie polskim ostatnich lat (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IFIS PAN, 2017), 125–164. Krzysztof Jaskułowski, “W obronie krzyża: Rzecz o używaniu i nadużywaniu symboli w polityce,” Dyskurs: Pismo Naukowo/Artystyczne ASP we Wrocławiu 16 (2013): 74–93; Krzysztof Jaskułowski, “Polityka krzyża,” in Wspólnota symboliczna: W stronę antropologii nacjonalizmu (Gdańsk: Katedra, 2012), 147–164; Michał Wróblewski, “Wierni jako zasób kontrhegemoniczny: Spór o krzyż w kontekście teorii hegemonii,” Kultura Popularna 1 (2014): 14–35; Ireneusz Krzemiński, “Narodowo-katolicka mowa o Polsce,” Czas Kultury 4 (2017): 50–64; Kaleta, “Kreowanie wizji sporu o krzyż smoleński.” Jaskułowski, “W obronie krzyża,” 90–91. Krzemiński, “Narodowo-katolicka mowa o Polsce,” 63. Kosiński, Teatra polskie: Historie. Sierbińska, “Tłum smoleński.” Wróblewski, “Wierni jako zasób kontrhegemoniczny,” 28–33.

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Poland, the Smolensk cross defense was able to draw on a wealth of earlier protest scripts and symbolic repertoires, inscribing itself into what Jan Kubik has termed “the historically established culture of rebellion.”54 The protesters in front of the Presidential Palace, however, invoked the familiar symbolism of Romantic uprisings and of the anti-Communist opposition under radically different conditions – those of full state sovereignty and liberal democracy. This transposition of older protest scripts into a new, seemingly inapposite, context is what makes the case so interesting. How was antistructural rhetoric coined in times of partition and Soviet influence adapted to the age of liberal democracy? And how can we explain the transformation of the symbol of the cross, which after 1989 emerged as the emblem of the new political and ideological hegemony, into the symbol of the challengers to the post-1989 political order? In many respects, the Smolensk cross controversy can be seen as a late consequence of 1989. After all, the cross defenders, alongside the PiS party, positioned themselves as critics of Poland’s systemic transformation – framing it as failed, incomplete, and unjust. This premise allowed them to rally support among those who had been disenfranchised in the post-transformation period and, in a clearly populist manner, to style themselves as representatives of “the people” wronged by supposedly corrupt post-1989 elites.55 This master narrative foregrounded both the radical boundary between “us” and “them” and the reading of 1989 as a false caesura. A spokesperson for the Cross Defense Committee, for example, interpreted the clashes in front of the Presidential Palace as “part of an ongoing process” in which “the ruling party and the media [. . .] disparage and exclude a huge social group.”56 At the same time, another vocal supporter of the cross defenders went as far as to say that the “second Katyn” served to consolidate the power structures of the “pseudodemocratic Third Republic,” which was “merely a continuation of the People’s Republic.”57 In this way, the conflict over the cross not only emerged as a vivid illustration of the maltreatment of “the people” by the power holders – a classic figure of populist rhetoric – but was also framed as a new caesura – marking a true “awakening” of “the people” and the beginning of a new era. There is, however, another link between the transformation period and the events of 2010 that has remained largely overlooked. The conflict over the 54

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Jan Kubik, The Power of Symbols against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of State Socialism in Poland (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 187–188. See also Mikołejko, “Polska wojna symboliczna,” 16; Wróblewski, “Wierni jako zasób kontrhegemoniczny,” 33; Sierbińska “Tłum smoleński,” 14. Krzysztof Plewka, cited in Tunia, “Próba siłowego przeniesienia krzyża.” Stanisław Małkowski, “Kościół a państwo w Polsce po 10 kwietnia 2010 r.,” in wPolityce. pl: Polska po 10 kwietnia 2010 r., edited by Artur Bazak, Jacek Karnowski, Michał Koenowski, Paweł Nowacki, and Izabela Wierzbicka (Warsaw: Michał Karnowski, 2011), 138.

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cross on Krakowskie Przedmieście reactivated one of the central polarizing debates of Polish political life of the early 1990s – that over the presence of religious symbols in public spaces. Although debates about the public presence of such symbols had continued beyond the first post-1989 decade,58 it was the controversy of 2010 that revealed the continued existence of largely dormant pro-secularist currents that had first manifested themselves in the early posttransformation years. In other words, the Smolensk cross affair forced advocates of a secular state out into the streets again. Finally, and most importantly, in reactivating the pro-secularist demographic, the 2010 symbolic clashes in Warsaw created unique conditions for the emergence of two parallel antistructures which used one and the same central symbol – the cross. The “defenders,” presenting themselves as continuators and heirs of the Polish freedom fighters, saw the cross as a sign of defiance against illegitimate power. Aligned with PiS, whose candidate Jarosław Kaczyński had just lost the presidential election, the protesters designated the democratically elected government and president as usurpers, blaming them for the plane catastrophe and even speculating about a conspiracy to assassinate the late President Lech Kaczyński. The secularist counterdemonstrators, in turn, fought against what they perceived as Catholic hegemony in the public space, demanding from the authorities a stricter separation of the domains of church and state. While the antistructural character of the former group has been universally recognized, that of the latter has so far been largely overlooked. The following case study will thus approach both groups as antistructural communitas, investigating their symbolic strategies from the perspective of the longue durée; the ways in which they defined their Others; and the extent to which they adapted, subverted, or challenged the available historical templates of antistructural protest.

The Cross Defenders For right-wing commentators and pundits, the cross in front of the Presidential Palace had the status of something organic, neutral, and almost transparent. Its presence appeared in their accounts as 58

The Auschwitz cross controversy, beginning in the late 1980s with protests over the presence of a Carmelite convent on the site and escalating in 1998, provoked the hitherto most intense discussion of this kind. For a detailed analysis of that case, see Geneviève Zubrzycki, The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in PostCommunist Poland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Other, similar debates about the presence of Catholic religious symbols in public spaces concerned plans to open a Catholic chapel inside the parliament building – eventually the chapel was constructed on the premises of the neighboring Parliamentary Hotel and blessed on May 1, 1993, by the Primate of Poland, Józef Glemp – and, a few years later, in 1997, the introduction of the crucifix into the plenary hall of the Sejm.

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“obvious,”59 “natural,”60 and “universally accepted.”61 It seemed appropriate not only because, as they emphasized, it was part of culturally shared rituals of mourning, but also because it activated other, deeply internalized and familiar, images of collective dissent that lingered in the Polish collective memory. A number of analysts have already noted that the events of 2010 brought with them a “renaissance of national symbolism”62 and set Poles on a rhetorical journey in time “deep into the nineteenth century” to “the language of traditional Polish martyrology”63 that some observers have gone so far as to call “Thanato-messianic fascism.”64 This use of language and symbols helped to frame the Smolensk catastrophe as, as Krzysztof Jaskułowski puts it, “yet another tragic event in the history of the Polish nation, which was, again, permitted to partake in the suffering of Christ” by means of a “cyclical sacrifice of the lives of her best sons.”65 This almost compulsive return to the narrative of Poland’s perennial suffering might seem unsurprising, given that each period of dissent in the country’s modern history mobilized a similar messianic repertoire stemming from the nineteenth century. Each iteration of this familiar protest script is, however, worthy of attention, as it reveals a selective intention and translational creativity, making the “return” to the past a journey to a new destination each time. Although the nineteenth-century messianic myth reverberated in rightwing narratives of the Smolensk catastrophe to a considerable degree, the historical period that provided the principal interpretive frame for the cross defenders was the era of Solidarity. Both activists on the ground, who were involved in physically preventing the removal of the cross, and the right-wing media supporting them spoke of the conflict in 2010 as “the Polish People’s 59

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Tomasz Żukowski, “Długa wędrówka przez mgłę: Poglądy Polaków na katastrofę smoleńską,” in Katastrofa: Bilans dwóch lat, edited by Jan Filip Staniłko (Warsaw: Instytut Sobieskiego, 2012), 79. Łuczewski, “Katastrofa, Mesjasz, Krzyż,” 100. Żukowski, “Długa wędrówka przez mgłę,” 79. Burszta, “Powrót ideologii,” 34. See also Andrzej Draguła, “Rzecz o narodowości krzyża,” Więź 625 (2010): 56–67; Jaskułowski, “W obronie krzyża,” 85. Stefan Chwin, “Narodowy melodramat,” Przegląd Polityczny 100 (2010): 11. See also Agata Bielik-Robson, “Totem i tabu. Polskiej tanatologii ciąg dalszy,” in Żałoba, edited by Sławomir Sierakowski and Agata Szczęśniak (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2010), 160–165, Sebastian Duda, “Polski mesjanizm i nowa lewica,” in Żałoba, edited by Sławomir Sierakowski and Agata Szczęśniak (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2010), 188–197. Agata Bielik Robson, “Tanato-mesjano-faszyzm. O ostatnich odsłonach polskiej symboliki mesjańskiej,” in Żałoba, edited by Sławomir Sierakowski and Agata Szczęśniak (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2010), 206–213. Krzysztof Jaskułowski, “Polityka krzyża,” in Wspólnota symboliczna: W stronę antropologii nacjonalizmu (Gdańsk: Katedra, 2012), 154.

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Republic all over again.”66 While to one defender the attempt to move the cross “was reminiscent of Martial Law,”67 a sympathetic PiS politician claimed that “the hit squads coming to disturb people at prayer” in front of the Presidential Palace behaved like the Communist riot police (ORMO).68 In a number of other public statements, defenders of the Smolensk cross equated the attempts of Komorowski’s administration to transfer the cross to a church with notorious cross removals ordered by the Communist authorities, such as the dismantling of the Katyn cross in the Powązki cemetery in 1981 and the fiercely contested decrucification at the school in Miętne in 1984.69 Following this analogy, the cross defenders compared themselves to the striking shipyard workers of 1980,70 and to participants in anti-Communist demonstrations.71 Although the events of the 1980s – still vivid in the living memory of many of those involved – offered the most immediate reference point for the Smolensk cross defenders, episodes from the early socialist period, such as the Nowa Huta cross defense of 1960, also served as parallels to the 2010 controversy.72 Smolensk cross defenders drew the analogy between anti-Communist dissent and their own actions not only on the discursive level, but also through performative strategies and aesthetic codes. Participants in the rallies that took place in front of the Presidential Palace displayed the victory gesture, chanted “Precz z komuną!” (“Down with the Communists!”), used the characteristic Solidarity font on their banners, and arranged floral crosses.73 Coal miners in gala uniforms, briefly joining the watch over the cross in July 2010, likewise served as visual references to the iconic strikes of the 1980s and embodied the 66

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Barbara Fedyszak-Radziejowska, “Walka z krzyżem to powtórka z PRL,” Nasz Dziennik, August 11, 2010, 11. See also Ignacy Dec, “Nie zdejmę krzyża,” Nasz Dziennik, September 11–12, 2010, 18. Marek Głowacki, cited in Lichocka, Przebudzenie, 78–79. The same comparison was used by the PiS MP Jolanta Szczypińska, cited in Wybranowski, “Eskalacja wojny o krzyż smoleński.” Zbigniew Romaszewski, “Demokracja odwetu,” Rzeczpospolita, August 11, 2010, A12. For a similar comment, see also Jarosław Zieliński, cited in Stróżyk, “Rodziny na Wawelu, PiS pod krzyżem.” Some commentators likened the actions of Komorowski’s administration to the violent pacification of workers’ protests in 1970. See Morawiec, “Walka władzy z pamięcią albo palikotokracja.” Jan Pospieszalski, “Ten krzyż jest wyrzutem sumienia,” Rzeczpospolita, July 22, 2010, A13; Stefan Melak, cited in Młocka and Wybranowski, “Krzyż zabrany do pałacu.” “Jerzy,” cited in Stróżyk and Niewińska, “Nocne rozmowy pod krzyżem.” Wojciech Wencel, cited in Lichocka, Przebudzenie, 165. Stanisław Michalkiewicz, “Obraz Matki Bożej też aresztowano,” Nasz Dziennik September 18–19, 2010, 15; Paweł Lisicki, “Nie tracić miary rzeczy,” Rzeczpospolita, July 13, 2010, A2; Mieczysław Gil, “Jak usuwano krzyż w Nowej Hucie,” Tygodnik Solidarność, August 20, 2010, 4. See Ewa Stankiewicz (dir.), Krzyż, Film Open Group, 2011, DVD, available at https:// gloria.tv/post/tUqAPTeQLFUe6dGtinqTnwnAR (accessed June 4, 2020), at 5:03; Młocka and Wybranowski, “Krzyż zabrany do pałacu.”

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ethos of the uncompromising anti-Communist stance.74 The cross defenders thus made heavy use of Solidarity’s symbolic repertoire, including the icon of Our Lady of Częstochowa, portraits of Jerzy Popiełuszko and Pope John Paul II, and the logotype of “Katyń” with the letter “t” replaced by a cross. Older symbols that had likewise been highly popular during the Solidarity decade also reappeared around the Smolensk cross – in particular the combination of the letters “P” and “W” for “Poland Fights” (Polska walczy), which originated during World War II, and the nineteenth-century patriotic song Boże coś Polskę. References to earlier Polish struggles for sovereignty and national independence were far less numerous during the 2010 cross defense than those to the Solidarity decade. The Battle of Warsaw of 1920 – the major victory against the Soviet forces in the Polish–Soviet war – was the most prominent among them.75 Stanisław Małkowski, a Catholic priest and one of the most vocal Smolensk cross defenders, cheered protesters on with a couplet: “Raise the cross high, put the rosary on / till the Bolshevik is gone, gone, gone.”76 He was also the one to insist that the conflict around the cross was “a repetition of what happened in 1920.”77 Other observers also made a mental link between the two events, suggesting, for example, that it would be most appropriate to move the Smolensk cross to a church on the ninetieth anniversary of the battle – which fell around the time of the Smolensk cross controversy.78 The Polish–Soviet war of 1919–1920 seemed to resonate in 2010 mostly because it could be related to the dominant Martial Law/Solidarity frame through the figure of the Communist foe. The same was true of symbolic elements deriving from the period of the partitions, which were likewise incorporated into the Smolensk cross defense via Solidarity’s protest templates.79 On the one hand, this aesthetic, inspired by the 1980s, was in tune with the expressions of national mourning that followed the tragic plane crash in 74 75 76

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Paulina Jarosińska, “Górnicy zaciągnęli wartę,” Nasz Dziennik, July 23, 2010, 12. See Tunia, “Próba siłowego przeniesienia krzyża.” Stanisław Małkowski, in Stankiewicz (dir.), Krzyż, at 1:37:33. In the Polish original: “Krzyż do góry, różaniec w dłoń. Bolszewika goń, goń, goń.” Stanisław Małkowski, cited in Jaskułowski, “W obronie krzyża,” 86. Michał Kleiber, in Wiadomości TVP Info, August 12, 2010, cited in Krajowa Rada Radiofonii i Telewizji, Raport z monitoringu na temat prezentowania w programach telewizyjnych przebiegu wydarzeń związanych z zamiarem przeniesienia krzyża sprzed Pałacu Prezydenckiego do kościoła Św. Anny (Warsaw: Analiza Biura KRRiT, 2010), 32. The single most intensively used reference to the partition period was a couplet, falsely attributed to Adam Mickiewicz, which had in fact been adopted as a protest slogan only during the Solidarity period: “Tylko pod krzyżem, tylko pod tym znakiem / Polska jest Polską a Polak Polakiem” (“Only under the cross, only under this sign / Poland is Poland and a Pole is a Pole”). The Smolensk cross defenders, just like the Auschwitz cross defenders of 1998, often cited the couplet on their banners. On the use of the verse during the Auschwitz cross controversy, see Zubrzycki, The Crosses of Auschwitz, 191. The origin of the couplet is a poem by Karol Baliński, Śpiewakowi Mohorta bratnie słowo (London: High Holborn, 1856), 15.

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Smolensk. Looking for ways to express their sorrow and anxiety, Poles resorted to symbolic practices and memorial topographies that had first emerged during the Solidarity decade. As had happened during the period of Martial Law, students at residence halls in Kraków coordinated among themselves on the day after the catastrophe to turn their tower blocks into giant light installations displaying crosses made up of lighted windows.80 The Gdańsk

Fig. 32. Light installations on the students’ halls of residence in Kraków, April 11, 2010. Photo: Krakowska Studencka Agencja Fotograficzna AGH, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. 80

Aneta Zadroga and Michał Osienkiewicz, “Wielkie krzyże na akademikach,” Gazeta Wyborcza Kraków, April 12, 2010, https://krakow.wyborcza.pl/krakow/51,44425,7760499 .html?i=0 (accessed April 8, 2010).

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monument to the workers killed during the 1970 strikes as well as Katyn crosses across the country became sites of memorial rallies and spontaneous gatherings.81 Solidarity banners and large wooden crucifixes featured as the most prominent props during the official memorial service for the victims of the crash held on April 17, 2010, in Warsaw.82 At that point, tropes of antiCommunist dissent, canonized and ritualized throughout the two post-1989 decades, provided a ready script for pathos and offered familiar icons and venues for staging a united nation. On the other hand, borrowing Solidarity’s aesthetics and constructing an analogy between the oppressive Communist regime and the attempts of democratically elected state officials to solve the cross conundrum in front of the Presidential Palace had a strong delegitimizing function. “We are not yet being beaten with batons and do not yet undergo mass arrests,”83 stated one of the cross defenders in an interview, suggesting that the Komorowski administration might still resort to measures familiar from the Communist period. Another right-wing observer went so far as to say that the presidential administration had already surpassed Communist methods, arguing, after the removal of the cross in September, that “even Communists were afraid of such radical actions against the cross.”84 Even if such analogies have a powerful rhetorical effect, the successful transposition of language and protest aesthetics originating in a period of dissent against an undemocratic regime into an entirely different context – that of liberal democracy – is not a given. There is clearly no one-to-one correspondence between the antagonism of the late socialist period – involving power holders within an externally imposed authoritarian system and their disenfranchised subjects – and divisions between democratically elected political camps. How was this incompatibility bridged? And how did the Smolensk cross defenders frame their cause to make their symbolic repertoire seem apposite and their antistructural demand that the ruling president and prime minister step down appear justified?

The Moral Register A number of analysts have noted that the Smolensk cross controversy has given rise to a new “Manichaean political theology”85 in which political cleavages are made to appear as a “clash of good and evil”86 or an act of 81 82 83 84

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Kosiński, Teatra polskie: Historie, 106–108. See Alina Mrowińska (dir.), 10.04.2010: Bądźmy razem, Telewizja Polska, 2011, DVD. Wojciech Wencel, cited in Lichocka, Przebudzenie, 165. Marek Nowakowski, “W nihilistycznym transie,” Tygodnik Solidarność, September 17, 2010, 18–19. Jacek Żakowski, “Czas reformacji,” Polityka, August 21, 2010, 15. Krzemiński, “Narodowo-katolicka mowa o Polsce,” 55.

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“struggle between God and Satan.”87 The confrontation between the cross defenders aligned with the PiS party and the ruling president of the centerright Civic Platform was framed not merely in terms of a dispute between political adversaries, but as a war against a “metaphysical enemy.”88 This strategy, which Chantal Mouffe terms the “moralization of politics,” is characteristic of right-wing populism, which constructs “the ‘we’/‘they’ opposition constitutive of politics [. . .] according to moral categories of ‘good’ versus ‘evil.’”89 By “holding forth about doing good, sympathizing with the victims, [and] expressing indignation about the wickedness of others,”90 political subjects idealize themselves as representatives of “the people,” which is “presumed to be morally pure and unerring in its will.”91 At the same time, political opponents become “absolute enemies”92 who, in the most extreme genocidal applications of this rhetoric, have to be annihilated.93 This “moral register”94 allowed the cross defenders to present the analogy between anti-Communist dissent of the 1980s and their protest as congruous. If the political elites of 2010 were framed as morally corrupt, they could more easily be likened to Communist authorities, despite the fact that their policies, methods, and degree of legitimacy differed widely. The idea of “ungodliness” provided such a convenient bridge because anti-Communist protesters had likewise delegitimized the power holders of the Polish People’s Republic not only as puppets of the Soviet Union, but also as morally contemptible. It is remarkable, however, how selective the Smolensk cross defenders were in highlighting the immoral features of the past Communist regime. While secularization measures were deemed particularly abominable, other repressive policies such as limitations on freedom of expression or the dispossession of landowners were never mentioned. The “evil” character of late socialism and liberal democracy was measured in terms of a single policy: their attitude to religious symbols in the public space. Using that as a benchmark for moral corruption, the Smolensk cross defenders managed to establish an equivalence between a democratically elected liberal government and an authoritarian regime, allowing the protesters of 2010 to frame their own actions as a bulwark against evil. 87 88 89 90 91

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Kosiński, Teatra polskie: Historie, 235. Mikołejko, Między zbawieniem a Smoleńskiem, 137. Chantal Mouffe, On the Political: Thinking in Action (London: Routledge, 2005), 75. François Flahaut, cited in Mouffe, On the Political, 74. Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 20. Mouffe, On the Political, 76. See Mitja Velikonja, “In Hoc Signo Vinces: Religious Symbolism in the Balkan Wars 1991– 1995,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 17, 1 (2003): 25–40. Mouffe, On the Political, 75.

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In this way the cross defenders could present themselves both as the avantgarde of moral renewal and as avengers – fighting the elites over their alleged responsibility for the Smolensk plane crash, but also satisfying a popular desire for retribution for economic hardships and social marginalization.95 For Wróblewski, the fantasy of righteous revenge offered by the Smolensk cross defenders was a late backlash against systemic transformation and the radical social and cultural change that had come on its heels.96 According to Mikołejko, the origins of the “banks of rage”97 that the Smolensk community capitalized on went back to the unprocessed trauma of feudal serfdom.98 However deep the reservoirs of anger really were, it was the “moralization of politics” that allowed the cross defenders to succeed in linking their protest with that of Solidarity, delegitimize their opponents as moral heirs of the Communist regime, and hijack the symbolic repertoire of the Solidarity era for their own agenda. The way in which this last objective was accomplished reveals something about the dynamic nature of the Polish culture of rebellion, which has undergone continuous translation and evolution. While nationally specific cultural scripts are generally expected to be relatively immutable and reproduced by sheer repetition rather than creative adaptation, the Smolensk cross controversy illustrates well how national protest templates are rarely inherited one to one, but rather are modified, reshuffled, and reassembled.99 Despite many overt visual references to the Solidarity revolution, the Smolensk cross defense only transposed late socialist protest scripts selectively. While it wholeheartedly embraced what Kubik and Kotwas have termed “Christian patriotism,”100 or somber ritual forms steeped in religious idiom and pathos, playful subversion or humor, as exemplified, for instance, by the nonconformist street performance initiative The Orange Alternative (Pomarańczowa Alternatywa), did not make its way into the Smolensk protest canon.101 95

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See Wróblewski, “Wierni jako zasób kontrhegemoniczny,” 28; Mikołejko, Między zbawieniem a Smoleńskiem, 159. Wróblewski, “Wierni jako zasób kontrhegemoniczny,” 28. Peter Sloterdijk, Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 59. Mikołejko, Między zbawieniem a Smoleńskiem, 157–158. On national cultural scripts, see Michael Bernhard and Jan Kubik (eds.), Twenty Years after Communism: The Politics of Memory and Commemoration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 286. Marta Kotwas and Jan Kubik, “Symbolic Thickening of Public Culture and the Rise of Right-Wing Populism in Poland,” East European Politics and Societies and Cultures 33, 2 (2019): 439. On the history of The Orange Alternative, see Waldemar Fydrych, Pomarańczowa Alternatywa – Rewolucja Krasnoludków/Orange Alternative: Revolution of Dwarves/Die Orange Alternative: Revolution der Zwerge (Warsaw: Fundacja Pomarańczowa Alternatywa, 2008); Barbara Górska and Ben Koschalka (eds.), Pomarańczowa

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Instead, its characteristic features included what Zbigniew Mikołejko identified as “Smolensk religion”: a narrative and performative frame which, by offering common ritual and quasi-religious forms of expression, managed to unite heterogeneous agendas, including protest against the democratic order, liberal culture, and the constrains of the free market economy.102 Antiintellectual, emotion-based, and formally excessive, “Smolensk religion” had a compulsive character, aimed to avert an imagined threat, and sought to purify the in-group by means of elaborate, obsessively repeated, hypertrophied rituals.103 Another important feature of this kind of performativity was its iconophilia.104 Indeed, while we have seen that the symbol of the cross was already accompanied by other (religious) images, ornaments, and objects during the Nowa Huta defense of 1960 and the Auschwitz cross war of 1998, the Smolensk cross affair took this visual density to another level. And if we can look for the origins of this visual excess in Polish folk religiosity – its focus on materiality, magical character, and Baroque hypertrophy,105 the symbolic palimpsest of the “Smolensk religion” can also be analyzed from the perspective of a theory of nationalism. The instrumentalization of Solidarity’s protest scripts in ritual practices that spoke to different senses can be considered through the lens of ethnosymbolism, which, as Anthony Smith has argued, lies at the heart of how people bond emotionally with their nation. Elements like dress, symbols, rituals, and artifacts together with ethnic myths and “ethnoscapes,” or places invested with collective significance, all constitute a “popular basis of nationalism.”106 Geneviève Zubrzycki’s category of the “national sensorium” is essentially based on the same premise: nations naturally “possess” symbolic repertoires shaped by historical events, and it is such “shared sets” of myths, images, practices, and elements of material culture that “generate ‘a nation.’”107 Their efficacy, according to Zubrzycki, increases when “the myths that comprise them are complementary, reinforcing, or overlapping.”108 Marta Kotwas and Jan Kubik explore this question further, investigating clusters of symbols and the intensity of their interwovenness in relation to their mobilizing potential for right-wing populism. In their theoretical model, if

102 103 104 105

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Alternatywa – happeningiem w komunizm (Kraków: Międzynarodowe Centrum Kultury, 2011). Mikołejko, Między zbawieniem a Smoleńskiem, 126–127. Ibid., 145–146. Jaskułowski, “W obronie krzyża,” 91. See Mikołejko, Między zbawieniem a Smoleńskiem, 168; Jaskułowski, “W obronie krzyża,” 91. Anthony D. Smith, The Nation in History (Lebanon: University Press of New England, 2000), 61, 66–67. Geneviève Zubrzycki, “History and the National Sensorium: Making Sense of Polish Mythology,” Qualitative Sociology 34 (2011): 21–57, here 22, 24. Ibid., 22.

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symbols are only “loosely assembled” and can be “read” separately, each symbol will “resonate with a different discursive community.”109 Such combinations of symbols can speak to and mobilize large and “culturally dissimilar” demographics. If, however, the connection between the symbols is of a “thick” type and they “appear to constitute a single whole,” their appeal is limited “to a discursive community that is ‘ready’ to embrace the wholesale vision that it represents.”110 To illustrate this dichotomy, Kotwas and Kubik juxtapose the symbolic system of Solidarity, as a “loosely related” type, with that of contemporary Polish right-wing populists. The wide appeal of the iconic trade union, the authors argue, rested on its foregrounding of the idea of solidarity among people of different social and political backgrounds, adopting symbols that, even if they originated in the Catholic repository, like the Latin cross, “did not seem to have been interpreted by the audience as a single, exclusionary symbol of Polish-Catholic identity.”111 In contrast, the more recent iterations of similar symbolic constellations adopted by rightwing populist actors in Poland represent a “thick” model offering a “highly specific understanding of ‘the nation’” that is exclusionary, monovocal, and, therefore, attractive to more homogeneous and usually smaller groups of people.112 Applying this model to the way the Smolensk cross defenders combined religious and national symbols into evocative protest collages can give us more insight into diachronic change within the “national sensorium” and the translatability and adaptability of historically established symbolic building blocks within a national “culture of rebellion.” The palimpsest of selected historical references and analogies explored by the Smolensk cross defenders corresponded to their eclectic use of symbols, probably best characterized by its assemblage-like quality. The environs of the Smolensk cross came to host an accumulation of images and objects often superimposed on each other and combined into clusters that reinforced one another by means of aggregation. The symbol of the cross was often used as a canvas for other emblems, such as national flags; images of the white eagle; photographs of the late presidential couple, John Paul II, and Jerzy Popiełuszko; and icons of Our Lady of Częstochowa and Jesus Christ.113 In some cases, protesters in front of the Presidential Palace displayed crosses with other smaller crosses attached onto them.114 Other symbols they used were similarly modified. Cross defenders pinned tiny crosses onto the national flags 109 110 111 112 113

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Kotwas and Kubik, “Symbolic Thickening of Public Culture,” 443. Ibid. Ibid., 444. Ibid., 443–444. Grzegorz Szymanik, “My, fanatycy. A co!,” Gazeta Wyborcza, August 5, 2010, 3; “Krzyż zostaje przed pałacem,” Dziennik, August 4, 2010, A1; Karol Falko, “Dlaczego Lech Kaczyński zasługuje na pomnik,” Tygodnik Solidarność, September 17, 2010, 24–25. Łuczkiewicz, Tu obywatele!, 35.

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and exhibited a small tapestry picturing the white eagle dressed in a scapular and carrying a small cross.115 They also planned to nail a large brass eagle onto the actual Smolensk cross – an idea which was ultimately never executed.116 This aesthetics of assemblage relied on repetition and multiplication – a strategy first developed by the defenders of the papal cross at Auschwitz in 1998. Just as the protesters led by Kazimierz Świtoń had planted hundreds of wooden crosses at the gravel pit in Oświęcim, Smolensk cross defenders brought multiple smaller crosses to the site as a means to “protect” or, if need be, replace the central cross.117 Some observers consequently worried that a “forest of crosses” just like that at Auschwitz would appear in Krakowskie Przedmieście as soon as the Smolensk cross was moved.118 Although this did not happen, protesters did bring ninety-six smaller wooden crosses on the evening after the removal, holding them in their hands during their demonstration.119 Ersatz crosses of various sizes also temporarily

Fig. 33. Assemblage of symbols around the Smolensk cross, shortly before its removal, September 10, 2010. Photo: Adam Chełstowski, Forum. 115

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Kamila Baranowska, “Zadowoleni z decyzji prezydenta,” Rzeczpospolita, September 17, 2010, A4; Łuczkiewicz, Tu obywatele!, 35. Edyta Gietka, “Znam swoją strategiczność,” Polityka, August 14, 2010, 16. For details of the strategy of multiplication used at Auschwitz, see Zubrzycki, The Crosses of Auschwitz, 144–157. Jacek Fedorowicz, “Cela jako cel,” Gazeta Wyborcza, August 4, 2010, 10. Bogusław Rąpała, “Z miłości do Boga i Ojczyzny,” Nasz Dziennik, September 22, 2010, 12–14.

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appeared at the site on multiple occasions, most notably during the monthly Smolensk memorial rallies or miesięcznice held in front of the Presidential Palace until 2018. This use of symbols indicates a “symbolic thickening”120 at work during the Smolensk cross defense. The close material proximity – bordering on amalgamation – of different national and religious symbols literally interwoven throughout the protest arena suggests a radical narrowing of the semantic content of these symbols. Historically multivalent emblems like the cross were reduced to exclusionary signifiers of a very specific set of demands, relating on the one hand to the investigation and commemoration of the plane catastrophe, and on the other to the political project of moral renewal and retribution advanced by the PiS party. This “symbolic thickening” also had political consequences, in that it created “discursive opportunities for populist actors,” paving the way for two consecutive electoral victories for the PiS party in the parliamentary elections of 2015 and 2019.121 The aggregation of symbols around the Smolensk cross also demonstrates how dynamic, selective, and accumulative a “national sensorium” can be. While the “Smolensk religion” recycled many established symbols of national dissent, it also spawned new symbolic elements, including the plane, the red and white checkerboard (the emblem of the Polish Air Force), and the birch (the type of tree that the presidential plane had collided with at Smolensk).122 New monuments and works of art showcasing these symbols, including in subversive ways, suggest that they may become a lasting addition to the Polish “national sensorium.”123

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Kotwas and Kubik, “Symbolic Thickening of Public Culture.” Ibid., 445. Żukowski, “Kryteria prawdziwości i poetyka powtórzenia,” 391–392. The birch motif circulated in the form of a 20 złoty coin (issued in 2011) and birch crosses, displayed for example by the Smolensk cross defenders, as well as in one of the most prominent artworks related to the Smolensk catastrophe, Paweł Althamer’s Prezydent (2018), which was carved from a birch trunk and displayed in front of the Presidential Palace, at the site of the cross defense. The symbol of the plane appeared in a number of Smolensk memorials, for example in Kętrzyn, or in Kałków, where a concrete replica of the presidential plane was installed outside the “Golgotha of the Polish Nation” (a site of cult practice since 1991). The motif of the plane (in the form of black granite plane stairs) also appears in the central Smolensk memorial erected in Warsaw in 2018. It likewise became visual shorthand for the Smolensk catastrophe in political cartoons and art. For political cartoons, see, for example, the title page of Newsweek, May 4, 2011; Janusz Mrozowski, untitled, NIE, June 03, 2010, 4; “Oto słowo czarne,” NIE, October 14, 2010, 8. Artworks exploring the motif of the Smolensk plane include Jacek Adamas’ Smoleńsk Puzzle (2012), Zbigniew Dowgiałło’s Smoleńsk (2011), and Stanisław Koziełło-Wolski’s Hołd Smoleński (2011). For an overview of artistic engagement with the Smolensk catastrophe, see Łukasz Najder, “Stara waśń,” Polityka, March 31, 2020, 76.

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If “symbolic thickening” around the Smolensk cross defense rendered the significance of the recycled national symbols more specific and exclusionary, it is necessary to investigate whom these symbolic constellations excluded. Given that the designation of Others delineates the boundaries of an in-group and defines its core values, examination of how Smolensk cross defenders identified their opponents can tell us something about the shared outlooks and anxieties that provided the social glue for the “Smolensk folk.”

The “Pure Nation” and Its Threatening Others A defense of the cross is by definition a polarizing format, as it automatically entails an adversary who threatens the values the cross represents in a given moment. In 2010, the protesters defined the cross as a symbol of “Polishness.”124 This “Polishness,” however, was further qualified. A number of cross defenders emphasized the Smolensk cross as “a symbol of our identity, of our Polishness.”125 They thus stressed that the confrontation concerned a group identity and routinely reserved the label of “the Poles” for themselves alone. During the first attempt at removing the cross, the group of defenders, encircled by the police, repeatedly chanted “come with us, if you’re Poles” to mobilize support from onlookers.126 They also insisted that “the cross should stay where Poles placed it”127 and addressed unsympathetic passersby with cries of “You are not Polish!”128 Right-wing pundits likewise framed the conflict that unfolded in the aftermath of the Smolensk plane crash in terms of a “civil war”129 between “actual” Poles and “post-Poles.”130 In reality, however, the category of the cross’s adversaries (and by extension Poland’s enemies) was a far more capacious one. The ultraconservative Catholic daily Nasz Dziennik identified them as “Marxists, post-Marxists, secret agents, ethnic and religious minorities, media under the influence of foreign powers, the government, PO [Civic Platform], SLD [the Social Democratic Party] [. . .] and atheists.”131 While 124

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In an interview for the ultraconservative Catholic broadcaster Radio Maryja, Bishop Edward Frankowski said that removing the cross from the square in front of the Presidential Palace would constitute “an attack on Polishness.” Cited in Katarzyna Wiśniewska, “Wojny o krzyż nie będzie,” Gazeta Wyborcza, July 22, 2010, 2. See two cross defenders cited in Stankiewicz (dir.), Krzyż, at 43:20 and 38:20. In the original: “Chodźcie z nami, chodźcie z nami / jeśli jesteście Polakami,” in Stankiewicz (dir.), Krzyż, at 26:00. Kazimierz Świtoń, TVN Fakty, August 3, 2010, cited in Krajowa Rada Radiofonii i Telewizji, Raport z monitoringu, 38. Michal Brożonowicz (dir.), Mam prawo tu stać, Michał Brożonowicz, 2012, DVD, at 11:30. Bazak, “Żyjemy w cieniu niewypowiedzianej wojny,” 13. Chodakiewicz, “Krzyż i harcerz,” 33. Czesław Bartnik, “Jak to Kościół prześladuje Polaków . . .,” Nasz Dziennik, July 17–18, 2010, 20.

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this roster followed the classic populist pattern of concentrating on very specific groups of “power holders,” including the ruling liberal party (PO) and the allegedly still all-powerful post-Communist elites,132 some categories, such as “provocateurs,”133 “postmodernists,”134 and men “in bloodstained ties”135 were much more fuzzy. Even some members of the Church fell under the category of the ominous “new Left.”136 In fact, the participants in a religious procession that was to accompany the cross to a nearby church on August 3, 2010, were met by protesters with cries of “Down with Communists!”137 The traditional Others of Polish nationalism – the Jews – also occupied a very prominent space in the narratives of the cross defenders. Kazimierz Świtoń, leader of the Auschwitz cross defense, making an appearance at the Smolensk cross in the capacity of a consultant, argued that Poles needed to resist being forced into the position of “Jewish slaves.”138 Another anonymous protester suggested that Jews were behind the Smolensk “assassination,” because it took place on a Saturday.139 In a similar vein, one cross defender appearing on a nationwide news channel insisted that “it’s the Jews [. . .] who want to take the cross away from us,”140 while others claimed that President Komorowski wanted to remove the cross only to please Jews.141 Some cross defenders also publicly maintained that Prime Minister Donald Tusk was Jewish,142 that “Jews, Germans, and 132

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Tadeusz Rydzyk in an interview with Małgorzata Rutkowska, “Nowa lewica walczy z krzyżem,” Nasz Dziennik, July 17–18, 2010, 3; Czesław Bartnik, “Nienawidzący Boga,” Nasz Dziennik, August 14–15, 2010, 11–12; Joanna Burzyńska, cited in Gietka, “Znam swoją strategiczność,” 16. See also banners (e.g. “POgarda dla Krzyża”) and statements made by cross defenders as captured in Stankiewicz (dir.), Krzyż and in Żmijewski’s Katastrofa, in particular an anonymous cross defender speaking of “Communist hordes” threatening Poland. In the original: “hordy ubeckie,” relating to the Stalinist-era political police, Urząd Bezpieczeństwa (UB), Artur Żmijewski (dir.), Katastrofa, 29 Bienale, 2010, DVD, at 52:28. Joanna Burzyńska, cited in Gietka, “Znam swoją strategiczność.” Bartnik, “Nienawidzący Boga,” 11. Joanna Mądroszkiewicz, “***,” in Antologia smoleńska: 96 wierszy, edited by Agnieszka Battelli, Hanna Dobrowolska, Alicja Jach-Lejkert, and Natalia Tarczyńska (Łódź: Stowarzyszenie Solidarni 2010, 2015), 74. Wojciech Burszta suggested that one of the symbolic Others of the Smolensk communitas was the businessman. See Burszta, “Powrót ideologii,” 33. Rydzyk, in Rydzyk and Rutkowska, “Nowa lewica walczy z krzyżem.” Leszczyński, “Bitwę pod krzyżem przegrali wszyscy,” 1. Kazimierz Świtoń, cited in Gietka, “Krzyż, czyli My i Oni,” 24. Anonymous cross defender, cited in Gietka, “Krzyż, czyli My i Oni,” 23. Fakty TVN, August 10, 2010, cited in Krajowa Rada Radiofonii i Telewizji, Raport z monitoringu, 40. Anonymous cross defender, cited in Gietka, “Krzyż, czyli My i Oni,” 23. Cited in Wiśniewska, Szpala and Szymanik, “Krzyż do Świętej Anny.”

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Russians rule Poland,”143 and that pro-secularist protests in Krakowskie Przedmieście were being sponsored by Israel.144 Additionally, there were several more veiled references to a Jewish plot against Poland. A number of cross defenders used the phrases “religious and ethnic minorities”145 and “masons”146 to define the ominous forces threatening Poland from within. The 2016 feature film Smoleńsk by Antoni Krause, a major Polish production promulgating the assassination thesis, likewise insinuated that Jews might have been involved in the plot to kill the president by casting an actor with a dark complexion in the role of an ominous diplomat.147 References to Jews, Israel, and even the Holocaust also regularly featured in offhand comments from the cross defenders, suggesting that Jews constituted a steady reference point for the group. One defender, involved in an exchange with a counterdemonstrator, admonished him thus: “Read the constitution of Israel, young man, and then you’ll see what a religious state means!”148 Documentarist Ewa Stankiewicz, while interviewing Dominik Taras, the organizer of the largest pro-secularist demonstration at the site of the Smolensk cross in 2010, struck a similar chord. Putting Taras on the spot regarding the contents of one of the pro-secularists’ banners, she asked: Ewa Stankiewicz: “Is it OK to say: ‘Mohair hats149 to the stake!’?” Dominik Taras: “People are allowed to say whatever they wish.” Ewa Stankiewicz: “And is it OK to say: ‘Jews to the gas!’?”150 143

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Wojciech Czuchnowski, Magdalena Dubrowska, Grzegorz Szymanik, and Katarzyna Wiśniewska, “Krzyż gotowy do przeniesienia,” Gazeta Wyborcza, August 16, 2010, 4. See also Szymanik, “My, fanatycy. A co!”; Czuchnowski and Szacki, “Jest tablica i krzyż,” 4. Dominik Taras, interview with the author, Warsaw, February 15, 2020. Anonymous cross defender, cited in Żmijewski (dir.), Katastrofa, at 43:19; Bartnik, “Nienawidzący Boga,” 11. Joanna Burzyńska, cited in Gietka, “Znam swoją strategiczność.” Żukowski, “Kryteria prawdziwości i poetyka powtórzenia,” 394. Stankiewicz (dir.), Krzyż, at 1:34:35. The Polish word moher (plural mohery, literally mohairs) is a disparaging term used for Smolensk cross defenders and, more broadly, adherents of the movement around the Catholic radio station Radio Maryja. The name derives from the mohair berets popular among elderly women in Poland, who constitute the core demographic of Radio Maryja. Stankiewicz (dir.), Krzyż, at 1:15:13. It is also remarkable that the topos of the Holocaust appears in Smolensk poetry with some regularity, with titles such as “Ostatni Transport” (“The Last Transport”) and “Zagłada znów spadła nagle” (“The Annihilation Came Unexpectedly, Again”), which in the Polish language unequivocally connote the Shoah. See Maria Dorota Pieńkowska, “Ostatni transport,” in Antologia smoleńska: 96 wierszy, edited by Agnieszka Battelli, Hanna Dobrowolska, Alicja Jach-Lejkert, and Natalia Tarczyńska (Łódź: Stowarzyszenie Solidarni 2010, 2015), 96; Daniela Ewa Zajączkowska, “Zagłada znów spadła nagle,” in Antologia smoleńska: 96 wierszy, edited by Agnieszka Battelli, Hanna Dobrowolska, Alicja Jach-Lejkert, and Natalia Tarczyńska (Łódź: Stowarzyszenie Solidarni 2010, 2015), 134.

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It might seem remarkable that a group professing antisemitic conspiracy theories should attempt to disarm liberal opponents by referencing Jews. If we consider, however, that their set of beliefs assumed pro-secularist groups to have an affinity with Jews, or to be Jewish themselves, the rhetorical strategy appears more congruent. Another illustrative example of this discursive device is an opinion piece published by the right-wing daily Gazeta Polska, which appeared at the height of the Smolensk cross controversy and referenced the story of Michał Landy – the Jewish boy shot while carrying a cross during an anti-tsarist demonstration in 1861. Eulogizing Landy as a patriot, the author attacked pro-secularist opponents of the Smolensk cross for reducing the motives of the defenders (implicitly equated with those of Landy) to religious militancy. Was the Jewish schoolboy Landy carrying the cross out of religious conviction? Of course not. He was driven by patriotism and the will to restore Poland’s independence [. . .]. Yet [Gazeta Wyborcza] would probably have written back then that “it was a rare example of religious fanaticism and that Landy the Talib fully deserved his fate because the place of the cross is in a church and not at demonstrations, which should take place only in defense of sodomites and lesbians.”151

Landy might appear an unlikely choice of prototype for the Smolensk cross defenders, but is more apt as a vehicle to embarrass liberal critics “exposed” by them as crypto-Jewish.152 Other, similar statements made by the Smolensk cross defenders emphasizing Jewish support for their cause demonstrate the same logic. Thus filmmaker Ewa Stankiewicz insisted that she encountered under the Smolensk cross “Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, [. . .] all united by their deep patriotism,”153 while another supporter reminisced that “Polish Jews and Muslims, all [. . .] formidable Poles”154 were represented next to the Smolensk cross during the time of national mourning. The figure of the homosexual, as we have already seen, likewise appeared in the coalition of anti-Polish forces. “Let’s wait till they murder us all,” sarcastically warned one cross defender. “[L]et us not defend the cross, let us not defend the Church, let us not defend Poland, but let’s support scoundrels, 151

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Józef Darski, “Krzyż – symbol religijny czy narodowy,” Gazeta Polska, August 27, 2010, www.salon24.pl/u/autorzygazetypolskiej/222719,krzyz-symbol-religijny-czy-narodowy (accessed April 10, 2020). Right-wing media in Poland have long insisted that Gazeta Wyborcza is a Jewish media organ. See “I wszystko jasne! Engelking o Wyborczej: ‘Gazeta Żydowska,’” W prawo, https://wprawo.pl/i-wszystko-jasne-engelking-o-wyborczej-gazeta-zydowska-wideo (accessed April 22, 2020); “Nazwała ‘Wyborczą’ ‘Gazetą Żydowską.’ Wszystko się nagrało,” Do Rzeczy, https://dorzeczy.pl/kraj/102737/Nazwala-Wyborcza-GazetaZydowska-Wszystko-sie-nagralo.html (accessed April 22, 2020). Ewa Stankiewicz, cited in Gliński, . . . pozostał tylko bęben i bęben gra nam, 35. Bartnik, “Nienawidzący Boga,” 11.

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thieves, bribers, lesbians, gays, Moscow, and Berlin!”155 Joanna Burzyńska, one of the most iconic cross defenders, who gained celebrity status after binding herself to the cross, likewise spoke to the press about “buses full of provocateurs” including “Satanists, masons, and homosexuals” arriving at the site of the cross defense to “rip the crosses off our rosaries.”156 Furthermore, just after the president had announced his intention to move the cross and days before a EuroPride parade was to take place in Warsaw, a reporter from the liberal daily Gazeta Wyborcza recorded the following statement made by a cross defender: Those gays and lesbians oppose the holy sign because it disturbs them in copulating on these moving floats. We won’t let it happen! This is Poland, not Israel!157

The equation of homosexuality with Jewishness has been present in Polish public discourse for at least a decade.158 The convergence of antisemitic and homophobic narratives among defenders of the cross attests to a process whereby sexual minorities in Poland symbolically take the place of Poland’s former principal Other, the Jews, as a target for the Polish extreme right. At the same time, antisemitic statements made by Warsaw cross defenders in 2010 might have been intended to echo the 1998 cross war at Auschwitz, where it was Jews who, in the eyes of Polish protesters, were responsible for obstructing the proper commemoration of another “national” trauma.159 A common denominator of these disparate categories of Others was their imagined alliance with evil forces. In this narrative, the Devil himself becomes an actor both in the Smolensk catastrophe, which some believed to be a “sentence signed by Lucifer,”160 and during the Smolensk cross controversy itself. While some cross defenders expressed their belief in the metaphysical presence of “something terribly evil” or of Satan himself at the 155 156

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Żmijewski (dir.), Katastrofa, at 50:09. Joanna Burzyńska, cited in Gietka, “Znam swoją strategiczność.” For more comments on homosexuals allegedly provoking the cross defenders, see Paweł Tunia, “Rozróba pod krzyżem,” Nasz Dziennik, August 11, 2010, 3; Wojciech Boberski, “Anty-Solidarni 2010,” Nasz Dziennik, July 22, 2010, 6. Adam Leszczyński, “Jak ruszyć krzyż?,” Gazeta Wyborcza, July 17–18, 2010, 10. Agnieszka Graff, “Gej czyli Żyd . . . i co dalej?,” in Rykoszetem: Rzecz o płci, seksualności i narodzie (Warsaw: WAB, 2008), 110–142. In this case, the defenders of a cross planted in the immediate vicinity of the death camp Auschwitz I in 1988 wished to frame the place primarily as a site of suffering experienced by ethnically Polish political prisoners, for whom KL Auschwitz had initially been created in 1940. In reality, however, the number of ethnically Polish victims of Auschwitz is estimated at 70,000–75,000, while the number of Jewish victims, comprising 90 percent of all deaths in the camp, is estimated to have been at least a million. See Zubrzycki, The Crosses of Auschwitz, 117. Jadwiga Solińska, “Wyrok,” in 96 krzyży: Pamięci ofiar katastrofy smoleńskiej (Lublin: Liber, 2012), 10.

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site,161 others classified pro-secularist counterprotesters as his direct envoys and “satanists.”162 The counterdemonstration in favor of the removal of the cross, which took place on August 9, served them as particularly vivid evidence that demonic forces had materialized in Warsaw. “Little devils, provocateurs, and secret agents were let off their leash,”163 commented a Catholic preacher sympathetic to the cross defenders, while right-wing pundits from Tygodnik Solidarność opined that “the Devil himself has put together this counterevent of Cheka agents and old anticlericals.”164 Some protesters, annoyed by the fact that the Polish Episcopate eventually endorsed the idea of moving the Smolensk cross to a church, went as far as to claim that “there are Satanists among [the] bishops,” too.165 This “infernalization” of the Other illustrates well how the we–they opposition constructed by the Smolensk communitas slid into the metaphysical, rendering any dialogue between the two sides virtually impossible.166 Given that the Other came to represent not only undesirable political agendas, values, and identities, but also an eschatological threat, any compromise with such an adversary was by definition viewed as morally wrong. In aligning pro-secularist protesters and even moderate church officials with the Devil, the cross defenders had established the “moral register” of the conflict, and yet they went still further by stigmatizing and dehumanizing their opponents in ways that carried the greatest possible emotional charge. They did not just label liberal and pro-secularist Poles as “barbarians,”167 “scum,”168 proponents of a “civilization of death,”169 and “rats,”170 but also compared them to the Cheka,171 Gestapo,172 Communist 161 162

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Anita Czerwińska, cited in Lichocka, Przebudzenie, 18. Bartnik, “Nienawidzący Boga,” 11; Tunia, “Rozróba pod krzyżem,” 11; Marek Głowacki, cited in Lichocka, Przebudzenie, 81; Bogusław Rąpała, “Wojna światów u stóp krzyża,” Nasz Dziennik, August 19, 2010, 13; anonymous cross defender, cited in Żmijewski (dir.), Katastrofa, at 43:14. Gliński, . . . pozostał tylko bęben i bęben gra nam, 34. Wojciech Warecki and Marek Warecki, “Wojna o krzyż: Socjotechnika ponad wartości,” Tygodnik Solidarność, August 20, 2010, 29. Kazimierz Świtoń, TVN 24 Polska i Świat, August 4, 2010, cited in Krajowa Rada Radiofonii i Telewizji, Raport z monitoringu, 43. I borrow the term “infernalization” from Velikonja, “In Hoc Signo Vinces,” 32. Marek Głowacki, cited in Lichocka, Przebudzenie, 76. Marcin Wolski, “Pasja,” in Antologia smoleńska: 96 wierszy, edited by Agnieszka Battelli, Hanna Dobrowolska, Alicja Jach-Lejkert, and Natalia Tarczyńska (Łódź: Stowarzyszenie Solidarni 2010, 2015), 125. Stanisław Małkowski, cited in Tunia, “Rozróba pod krzyżem.” Nowakowski, “W nihilistycznym transie,” 19. Warecki and Warecki, “Wojna o krzyż.” Cries of cross defenders recorded during the attempt to transfer the Smolensk cross to St. Anne’s Church on August 3. TVP Wiadomości, August 3, 2010, cited in Krajowa Rada Radiofonii i Telewizji, Raport z monitoringu, 20.

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riot police,173 and even collaborators and extortionists who had handed Jews over to the Nazi authorities during World War II.174 Such parallels drawn between the opponents of the Smolensk cross and Poland’s historical evildoers point to a mechanism of radical othering that expels the subjects of such allegories beyond the perimeter both of the nation and of humanity. In this way the Smolensk cross became a sign of resistance against a supposed internal threat to the Polish nation, accompanied by a narrative in which principally “un-Polish” or “post-Polish” Poles endangered values that the Smolensk community held dear. External Others still played a prominent role in this essentially intragroup conflict, but rather than functioning as actors in their own right they became mere canvases onto which anxieties originating within the community could be projected. As might be expected, Russians occupied an important place in the Smolensk discourse. Subscribers to the Smolensk myth have indefatigably championed the hypothesis that Russians assassinated President Kaczyński, despite lacking any evidence.175 Interestingly, however, the “Eastern threat” as featured in right-wing media has often been juxtaposed with another, equally or perhaps even more imminent one coming from the West. “Neither Brussels nor Moscow shall restrict our freedom,” declared one of the Smolensk poets,176 while the chaplain of the cross defenders, Stanisław Małkowski, spoke of “Eastern, Western, and domestic forces” aligned in a “criminal coalition against Poland.”177 The European Union featured in this constellation alongside NATO as threatening allies of Russia. One Smolensk bard articulated a similar conviction in cutting verse: “NATO does not pursue the truth / and Europe devoid of the Cross / will answer with a humiliating silence / paid for with gas.”178 In this constellation of forces, external Others were relevant inasmuch as they performed a symbolic function in the central drama of what literary scholar Zygmunt Ziątek termed “a culture war between Polish identity and 173 174 175

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Nowakowski, “W nihilistycznym transie,” 19. Ibid. The Polish term used was szmalcownicy. Wojciech Cejrowski, cited in Adam Wielomski, “Wojciech Cejrowski wstąpił do sekty?,” in Antologia zbrodni smoleńskiej, edited by Klub Zachowawczo-Monarchistyczny (Warsaw: Klub Zachowawczo-Monarchistyczny, 2011), 110. Kazimierz Józef Węgrzyn, “Krzyż jest własnością narodu Panie Prezydencie,” in Antologia smoleńska: 96 wierszy, edited by Agnieszka Battelli, Hanna Dobrowolska, Alicja Jach-Lejkert, and Natalia Tarczyńska (Łódź: Stowarzyszenie Solidarni 2010, 2015), 117. Stanisław Małkowski, “Przegrać, aby mocą prawdy zwyciężyć,” in Antologia smoleńska: 96 wierszy, edited by Agnieszka Battelli, Hanna Dobrowolska, Alicja Jach-Lejkert, and Natalia Tarczyńska (Łódź: Stowarzyszenie Solidarni 2010, 2015), 135. Mieczysław Marczak, “Ciąg dalszy,” in Pamiętamy . . .: Bóg, Honor, Ojczyzna: Antologia wierszy poświęconych Katastrofie Smoleńskiej 10.04.2010 r., edited by Janusz D. Telejko (Bielany Wrocławskie: Wydawnictwo Wektory, 2011), 70.

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modernity.”179 While for one side of this conflict “Europe” or “the West” was cast in the role of ultimate arbiter and model for a “civilized” society, for the other it represented a hotbed of threatening ideologies, the demise of values, and a nihilist void. The Smolensk cross controversy gave expression to both of these perspectives on Europe, offering a stage for the two outlooks to clash. And so, for liberal critics the Smolensk cross came to symbolize Poland’s failure to achieve the standards of a modern democracy, measured in particular by the successful separation between church and state.180 What is more, as philosopher Magdalena Środa put it, the Smolensk cross embodied the “quintessence of irrationality.”181 And, as a number of public figures opined, the controversy in Krakowskie Przedmieście was “a disgrace in the eyes of Europe”182 and “an embarrassment before the world.”183 Although the other side of the conflict conceptualized the presence of the cross as an exceptional achievement, proof of the vitality of Polish national traditions, and a sign of resistance against moral corruption, the demonized West remained their principal reference point all the same. The right-wing narrative thus pictured Poland as confronted with “an anti-Christian cyclone” sweeping across Europe and “wiping out its holiest traditions.”184 Poland’s membership of the European Union featured in this story as another period of enslavement, bemoaned by one Smolensk poet in the following words: Caress us, oh Lord Jesus, the wheel of history turns, And breaks our backs, again, Only you can save us, only you protect us, from the United Europe jail!185

A number of right-wing commentators spelled out what they saw as the specific threats looming over Poland and sure to materialize should the Smolensk cross 179

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Ziątek, Sobolewska, Szeja, and Nadana-Sokołowska, “Warianty powieści smoleńskich,” 401. Żakowski, “Czas reformacji,” 16. Magdalena Środa, “Co sprawa krzyża powiedziała nam o polskim Kościele?,” Znak December (2010): 84. Stanisław Żelichowski, cited in TVP Info Dziennik, August 3, 2010, cited in Krajowa Rada Radiofonii i Telewizji, Raport z monitoringu, 29. Jerzy Wenderlich, cited in Polsat Wydarzenia, August 3, 2010, cited in Krajowa Rada Radiofonii i Telewizji, Raport z monitoringu, 35. Elżbieta Morawiec, “Komorowski otworzył puszkę Pandory,” Nasz Dziennik, September 18–19, 2010, 15. Kazimierz Józef Węgrzyn, “Do ołtarza ojczyzny przychodzimy Jezu,” in Antologia smoleńska: 96 wierszy, edited by Agnieszka Battelli, Hanna Dobrowolska, Alicja JachLejkert, and Natalia Tarczyńska (Łódź: Stowarzyszenie Solidarni 2010, 2015), 116. In the Polish original: “Przytul nas Panie Jezu . . . Historia się toczy . . . / I przygina nasze karki bezlitosną stopą / Tylko Ty nas ocalisz i pomożesz przetrwać / W więzieniu które zwie się – Wspólną Europą!” Translation into English by Klementyna Chrzanowska and Agata Masłowska.

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defense fail. “Deprecation of the cross defenders and a complete lack of reaction to the public profanation [of the cross],” warned conservative daily Rzeczpospolita, “may lead to a situation in which Polish religiosity will soon resemble that of Western Europe.”186 Alongside secularization, the advent of “full sexual freedom” loomed as another stage in the hostile advance of the “atheist–liberal ideology” bent on “destroying Poland as the last bastion of Catholicism in Europe.”187 The “menace arriving from Europe,” which in the view of another commentator consisted in the “sacralization of the earthly delights,” was indeed, a many-headed monster, poisoning the “blinded youth” with the promise of “money, golf, drinks, girls, and the Bahamas.”188 The Polish youth, tantalized by these “earthly delights,” were, however, by no means cast in the role of innocent victims. This manipulated generation, who, as another right-wing pundit remarked, considered themselves to be “enlightened Europeans,” were in fact mere “savages.”189 They were “ashamed of Poland and Polishness” and “f[ou]ght against the cross to ennoble themselves as ‘modern people’ and ‘Europeans.’”190 Their future, however, was bleak. As a columnist from the Catholic daily Nasz Dziennik prognosticated, commenting on pro-secularist protests held in front of the Presidential Palace: “[G]irls from Krakowskie Przedmieście, sporting piercings in their bellybuttons [. . .], will eventually end up where they aspire to . . . in the Muslim harems of the ‘new Europe.’”191 This vision of menacing Europe identifies an external Other, but is in reality concerned entirely with domestic tensions. What we see here is a classic feature of national populism in its Eastern European variety, which, as Rogers Brubaker observes, externalizes liberalism as “non-national” and a “yoke of [. . .] foreign rule.”192 This bipolar frame is, however, additionally complicated by the presence of a “fifth column” acting from within and allied with the “antinational” Western forces. The domestic enemy is defined in significant sociological detail: they are “the young, educated city dwellers,” who, “revealing themselves from beneath the cloak of ‘civil society’ as a savage mob [. . .] desecrate and spit on the cross.”193 While a fear of modernity, defined by secularization, sexual emancipation, and the advancement of LGBT rights appears as a strong undercurrent of the Smolensk narrative, the fantasy of what that modernity entails echoes sexist visions of capitalist prosperity 186 187 188 189 190 191 192

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Tomasz Sakiewicz, “Syndrom Antygony,” Rzeczpospolita, August 10, 2010, A12. Bartnik, “Nienawidzący Boga,” 11. Nowakowski, “W nihilistycznym transie,” 19. Morawiec, “Komorowski otworzył puszkę Pandory.” Darski, “Krzyż – symbol religijny czy narodowy.” Morawiec, “Komorowski otworzył puszkę Pandory.” Rogers Brubaker, “Between Nationalism and Civilizationism: The European Populist Movement in Comparative Perspective,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 40, 8 (2017): 1191–1226, here 1208. Bazak, “Żyjemy w cieniu niewypowiedzianej wojny,” 13.

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originating in the early transformation period. “Money, golf, drinks, girls, and the Bahamas” is a telling inventory of the riches of the “West” straight out of the Polish imaginary of the early 1990s, fueled by the illustrated press, TV series, and commercials. A reference to these unattainable “earthly delights” of a free market economy reveals a deeper trauma of economic exclusion in the aftermath of the systemic transformation of 1989. Disillusionment with the economic promise of the 1990s converges in this right-wing populist vision of the world with more contemporary anxieties related to Muslim migration, feminism, and changing sexual morals.194 Thus the pro-secularist and proEuropean youth becomes a locus of projection for the unfulfilled desires of a more disadvantaged demographic. Young “aspiring Europeans”195 become a threat in that they embody the social and spatial mobility, political participation, and sexual emancipation that remained a mirage for the so-called “transformation losers” of the 1990s. At the same time, if we consider the findings of sociodemographic studies, it becomes clear that the generational divide alone does not constitute the main axis of the civilizational conflict revealed by the Smolensk catastrophe. For one thing, support for EU membership reached 85 percent of Polish society in 2009, and although it was lowest in the age group above sixty-five, it still amounted to 71 percent.196 Secondly, until 2020, young Poles were on the whole less radical in their political views than the Polish mean, and they were consistently more right-wing in their orientation than left-wing, which changed only in response to the radical changes in legislation introduced by PiS (including the near total abortion ban passed in 2021).197 To make matters more complicated, as of 2009, 85 percent of Poles who declared their political views to be right-wing expressed support for Poland’s EU membership too.198 Statistics show that social background, level of education, income, and degree of religiosity, much more than age or even political orientation, are the principal determinants of EU support among Poles.199 194

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For more on the right-wing populists’ preoccupation with feminism, see Agnieszka Graff and Elżbieta Korolczuk, Anti-gender Politics in the Populist Movement (New York: Routledge, 2022). Darski, “Krzyż – symbol religijny czy narodowy.” Beata Rogulska, Komunikat z badań: Bilans pięciu lat członkostwa Polski w Unii Europejskiej (Warsaw: CBOS, 2009), 19. Between 2002 and 2020, young Polish adults (eighteen to twenty-four years old) declared more support for right-wing political views, but 2020 saw a sharp rise of leftist views in this age group (from 17 to 30 percent). Antoni Głowacki, Komunikat z badań: Czy młodzi Polacy są prawicowi? (Warsaw: CBOS, 2017), 2; Jonathan Scovil, Komunikat z badań: Zainteresowanie polityką i poglądy polityczne młodych Polaków na tle ogółu badanych (Warsaw: CBOS, 2021), 6–7. Rogulska, Bilans pięciu lat członkostwa Polski w Unii Europejskiej, 19. According to a poll from 2009, the lowest levels of support for Poland’s EU membership were recorded among respondents living in villages (57 percent), with only primary

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Considering the extent and intensity of the othering performed by the Smolensk communitas, the Smolensk cross emerges as a highly exclusionary symbol. Signifying a vision of the nation that not only ostracized liberals, leftists, sexual minorities, Jews, moderate Catholics, and the pro-European youth, but defined them as evil forces threatening the survival of the national community, the Smolensk cross formed part of a very “thick” type of symbolic system.200 Its mobilizing force was thus restricted to a demographic that accepted the totality of the conspiracy theories, political animosities, and ethnic prejudices conveyed by the discourses around the cross defense. As polls from 2010 demonstrated, the agenda of the Smolensk cross defenders was capable of mobilizing only a small minority of Poles.201 What is more, a closer look at the performative and discursive strategies used by the cross defenders and their supporters reveals that their specific assemblage of symbols and the way they defined the boundary between their in-group and the Others were never aimed at wide-scale mobilization. The question that emerges at this point is therefore as follows: why was the Smolensk cross endowed with such an intensely exclusionary message in an antistructural setting where mobilizing the largest possible demographic would typically have been desirable? Indeed, we have seen that from the nineteenth century onward the cross was repeatedly assigned a more open, inclusive, and universal meaning at moments of national upheaval and dissent. During the January Uprising it stood for interethnic mobilization against tsarist rule, whereas from 1956 it began to establish itself as a universal symbol of anti-Communist protest. The symbol of the cross probably reached the apex of its popular appeal in the decade of Solidarity, when an impressive breadth of political fractions and ethnic groups accepted it as a unifying emblem of the anti-authoritarian stance. The Smolensk cross defense, in contrast, was the first antistructural protest to deploy the symbol of the cross in a radically exclusionary fashion. And even though the Smolensk community repeatedly emphasized that even non-Catholic and atheist Poles “defend[ed] the cross as a symbol of truth [and] combat for the Fatherland,”202 their cross was never meant to mobilize all Poles. Instead it stood guard over a very narrow definition of Polishness and served as the “tribal totem”203 of a closely knit

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school education (49 percent), living in households with a per capita monthly income below 500 złoty (€110), and who attended church several times a week (52 percent). Rogulska, Bilans pięciu lat członkostwa Polski w Unii Europejskiej, 20. See Kotwas and Kubik, “Symbolic Thickening of Public Culture,” 443. Just 13 percent of Poles backed leaving the cross in front of the Presidential Palace, with over three-quarters of respondents welcoming its removal to a church. See Pankowski, “Opinie o wydarzeniach przed Pałacem Prezydenckim,” 90. Darski, “Krzyż – symbol religijny czy narodowy.” See also Ewa Stankiewicz, cited in Gliński, . . . pozostał tylko bęben i bęben gra nam, 35; Bartnik, “Nienawidzący Boga,” 11. Mikołejko, Między zbawieniem a Smoleńskiem, 75–76.

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community that quickly began to coalesce and institutionalize itself through cyclical rituals (miesięcznice), formal networks, associations, and its own media.204 A closer look at their narratives reveals that the protest served in large part to express a deep-seated fear of modernity and resentment born of a sense of social and economic exclusion in the aftermath of systemic transformation. One right-wing pundit sympathetic to the cross defenders even suggested that the cross defense “was to help regain their own and the nation’s dignity.”205 Yet the dignity of those who felt deeply dissatisfied with Poland’s post-Communist transformation and displayed high levels of distrust both towards democratically elected state officials and towards European institutions that Poland had co-created could be restored only by means of a major discursive shift. First of all, the mainstream story of Poland’s post-1989 success had to be translated into a story of failure, so that the misery of “transformation losers” could be given a voice and the authenticity of their experience be acknowledged. Secondly, the political elites who had been the architects of the post-1989 “Third Republic” as well as social groups who had benefited from it had to be expelled beyond the perimeter of the “pure” nation.206 Political scientists had seen this kind of post-transformation backlash coming for at least a decade. While disenchantment with the social costs of transformation had existed since the 1990s, the 2000s marked the beginning of a “transition fatigue” in Central and Eastern Europe which gave rise to radical populism.207 In this part of Europe, this meant a rejection of liberal politics as well as of the elites that introduced the reforms.208 The Smolensk cross defenders thus built on the central premise of populism: that society is divided into two antagonistic groups, “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite.”209 In this way, the populist ideology provided a mechanism for stigmatizing liberals as responsible both for the Smolensk crash and for the effects of systemic transformation. By the same token, it offered a “political journey of redemption” that permitted the marginalized and excluded to reposition

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As of 2022, the association Solidarni 2010, which grew out of the Smolensk cross defense, ran an Internet portal, a publishing house, and an “Academy of Polishness” whose activities included a cycle of public lectures. See http://solidarni2010.pl (accessed July 31, 2022). Darski, “Krzyż – symbol religijny czy narodowy.” Emphasis mine. Cas Mudde, “Populism: An Ideational Approach,” in The Oxford Handbook of Populism, edited by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) (e-book version), 50. Ben Stanley, “Populism in Central and Eastern Europe,” in The Oxford Handbook of Populism, edited by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 191–215, here 199. Stanley, “Populism in Central and Eastern Europe,” 191. Mudde, “Populism: An Ideational Approach,” 50–51.

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themselves as morally superior to those they saw as responsible for their exclusion.210 The category of “the pure people,” constructed in opposition to morally corrupt Others, is based on an idealized vision of the nation, which is typically built on the principal features of the targeted community’s self-identity.211 In other words, the populist “pure people” cannot be sufficiently defined by their moral goodness alone. There also have to be culturally specific elements, both recognizable and appealing, capable of filling the category with content. In the case of the “Smolensk folk,”212 the two defining features of the group’s selfidentification were Catholicism and messianic nationalism. While the former provided the most readily accessible idiom through which to verbalize complex ideas, the latter offered a perfect vehicle for self-idealization as a people chosen by God.213 The convergence of the two, however, gave the ideology of the Smolensk cross defense the character of religious populism.

A People “on the Side of Christ” Religious populism, which shares the basic premise of populism but “reproduces it in a specific religious key,” is typically a two-dimensional phenomenon that entails either a “politicization of religion” or a “sacralization of politics.”214 While the former is enacted by a group proclaiming to be following the will of God, with whom that group believes to have “a privileged relationship,”215 the latter provides a frame in which “the people” becomes consecrated and its opponents need to be combated as the personification of evil.216 Such sacralization of populist politics casts its agenda as a “transcendental cause” and its methods as a “tool for total change” capable of fundamentally transforming society.217 The discourses around the Smolensk cross defense clearly revealed

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Francisco Panizza, cited in José Pedro Zúquete, “Populism and Religion,” in The Oxford Handbook of Populism, edited by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 581–606, here 590. Mudde, “Populism: An Ideational Approach,” 54. In Polish, lud smoleński was a term coined in the aftermath of the Smolensk catastrophe to denote a group of people, among them the Smolensk cross defenders, who believed in the assassination conspiracy and were characterized by their attachment to “folk Catholicism.” See Agnieszka Kublik and Radosław Markowski, “Lud antysmoleński,” Gazeta Wyborcza, April 12, 2012, https://wyborcza.pl/1,75398,11527854,Lud_antysmolenski.html (accessed May 4, 2020). Mikołejko, Między zbawieniem a Smoleńskiem, 154. Zúquete, “Populism and Religion,” 581. Ibid., 581–582. Ibid., 590. Ibid., 588–589.

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both a politicization of religion and a sacralization of politics – a combination typically indicative of a radical variety of religious populism.218 The Smolensk community not only imagined itself to be fulfilling a mission sanctioned by God, but assumed God to be on its side. One of the ways in which the cross defenders sustained this claim was by referencing a passage from the sermon delivered by John Paul II during his 1997 pilgrimage to Poland. Acknowledging that the cross had returned to schools and public institutions across Poland, and expressing his wish that it would remain there, the pope also delivered this more abstract exhortation: “Defend the cross, do not let the name of God be defiled in your hearts in social or familial life.”219 In writing the pope’s truncated credo “Defend the cross!” on their banners, the protesters in front of the Presidential Palace tried to present their actions as compatible with Catholic doctrine, despite the fact that the Church officials had condemned their picket as “having nothing to do with the righteous Catholic conscience.”220 In the Smolensk narrative, however, God was unquestionably on the side of the cross defenders – a conviction seemingly only fortified by their ultimate defeat. “You took the cross, but Christ remained,” insisted one Smolensk poet, admonishing President Komorowski and adding that “[Christ] is with the nation that is courageous and righteous.”221 In another poem of the same genre, the lyrical subject dramatically asks “Who wants to be on the side of Christ?,” suggesting that the administration that transferred the cross away from Krakowskie Przedmieście had chosen Barabbas over Jesus.222 The privileged relationship of the Smolensk communitas to God was also expressed in the visual medium. Protesters not only displayed multiple images of Christ directly on their banners, but also symbolically deified the late President Kaczyński. In a series of graphics illustrating the “Golgotha of the East – The Way of the Cross of Poles on Inhuman Soil,” published in 2011, the sixteenth station of the cross pictured Lech Kaczyński right next to Jesus bearing the cross.223 The figure of the martyred leader who sacrifices himself 218 219

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Ibid., 593–594. Jan Paweł II, “Homilia w czasie Mszy św. Beatyfikacyjnej matki Bernardyny Marii Jabłońskiej i matki Marii Karłowskiej, Zakopane, 6 czerwca 1997,” in Krzyż Zbawiciela (Kraków: Wydawnictwo M, 2010), 150. Józef Kowalczyk, cited in “Prymas Kowalczyk: Zaprzestać sporu ws. krzyża,” Polskie Radio 24.pl, https://polskieradio24.pl/5/3/Artykul/256466,Prymas-Kowalczykzaprzestac-sporu-ws-krzyza (accessed April 30, 2020). Barbara Lipińska-Postawa, “10 kwietnia 2010,” in Antologia smoleńska: 96 wierszy, edited by Agnieszka Battelli, Hanna Dobrowolska, Alicja Jach-Lejkert, and Natalia Tarczyńska (Łódź: Stowarzyszenie Solidarni 2010, 2015), 70. Barbara Lipińska-Postawa, “Krzyż na Krakowskim Przedmieściu,” in Antologia smoleńska: 96 wierszy, edited by Agnieszka Battelli, Hanna Dobrowolska, Alicja JachLejkert, and Natalia Tarczyńska (Łódź: Stowarzyszenie Solidarni 2010, 2015), 71. Jan Dubaj, “In memoriam profesora Lecha Kaczyńskiego Prezydenta Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej,” in Pamięci polskiej Golgoty wschodu: 70. rocznica Katyń 1940–2010: Wielka

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for the cause, almost perfectly personified by the president “fallen” in the service of the fatherland, constitutes yet another characteristic attribute of religious populism.224 Framing the death of the Smolensk plane crash victims as martyrdom served to establish the chosen nature of the Polish nation in general, and the cross defenders in particular, as the most devoted custodians of the “martyrs’” memory. The Smolensk communitas not only positioned itself as fulfilling the will of God, but also, as the movement was solidifying and verbalizing its support for Jarosław Kaczyński’s PiS party with increasing openness, as articulating the promise of a new kind of politics and a moral revolution. As one right-wing pundit put it, the cross defenders “str[o]ve to defeat evil that [was] happening in Poland” and hoped that “the cross would combat the post-communist [bezpieczniacko-agenturalny] establishment and give the nation its dignity back.”225 This “transcendental cause” found its full articulation in the PiS party’s successful electoral campaign of 2015, which ran under the motto of “The Good Change.” Despite the fact that religious populism invokes God and eschatology in such an intensive way, its relation to religion is often very tenuous.226 Populism politicizes religion more as a “civilizational identity” or a symbol of belonging than as a system of belief to be obeyed.227 This “culturalization of religion,”228 which is characteristic of right-wing populism in the more secular Western Europe, was also at work during the Smolensk cross affair. In fact, both the Polish Episcopate and the moderate Catholic press shared the opinion that the Smolensk cross defense had “little to do with Catholicism”229 and was even inflicting “harm on the cross.”230 As the Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny put it at the height of the controversy, the cross in front of the Presidential Palace was “not a symbol of Salvation, but of dissent against the results of democratic elections.”231 And although the Episcopate was at first reluctant to take a stance in the dispute, its final

224 225 226 227 228 229

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tragedia polskiego narodu, edited by Jan Dubaj and Małgorzata Kotwica (Kielce: Koło Nr 1 ŚZŻAK, 2011), 78. Zúquete, “Populism and Religion,” 595–596. Darski, “Krzyż – symbol religijny czy narodowy.” Zúquete, “Populism and Religion,” 586. Brubaker, “Between Nationalism and Civilizationism,” 1194, 1199. Ibid., 1200. Andrzej Zoll, cited in Adam Boniecki, Piotr Mucharski, Aleksander Kwaśniewski, Tadeusz Pieronek, and Andrzej Zoll, “Polityka milczenia,” Tygodnik Powszechny, August 15, 2010, 7–9, here 8. See also the homily of the Primate of Poland, Józef Kowalczyk, cited in “Prymas Kowalczyk: Zaprzestać sporu ws. krzyża.” In the original: “to nie walka o krzyż, ale krzyżem przeciwko krzyżowi,” Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek in TVN Fakty, August 3, 2010, cited in Krajowa Rada Radiofonii i Telewizji, Raport z monitoringu, 39. Jerzy Sosnowski, “Kwadratura krzyża,” Tygodnik Powszechny, August 15, 2010, 3.

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statement and the disciplinary measures taken against the “chaplain” of the cross defense, Stanisław Małkowski, sent a clear message.232 By September 2010, two-thirds of Poles were likewise of the opinion that the cross defenders were defying the Catholic Church and “resembled a sect.”233 Even the Smolensk community itself was well aware of the schismatic character of its actions. The paradox of their situation was most evident at the central moment of the cross affair, as its defenders faced down a delegation of clergymen intending to carry the cross into a church. “We are asking you to leave this cross alone! We are Catholics!,” proclaimed a cross defender through a megaphone to the approaching priests. “We want this to be a symbol of those who were killed near Katyn. We want no trouble with the Church!,” he pleaded.234 By both asserting a Catholic identity and defying the authority of the Church, the cross defenders positioned themselves as the healthy core of a Catholic community otherwise led, in their imagination, by corrupt and treacherous leaders. This message came across particularly starkly as the group started throwing small coins at the approaching clergymen – in reference to the thirty pieces of silver that Judas received for betraying Jesus.235 The defenders’ statements to the media likewise left no doubt about their response to the lack of support from Church officials. “I don’t care about the archbishop, the Church is us!,”236 stated one protester, while another was recorded saying he did not feel bad about insulting the priests who arrived to collect the cross because “eighty percent of priests are agents and collaborators of the communist secret police [agenci i ubecy].”237 This discursive strategy of ejecting Church officials from the “pure” Catholic community followed the basic populist blueprint. The “Smolensk folk” positioned themselves as the rightful depositaries of Catholic symbols and the custodians of John Paul II’s legacy (“Defend the cross!”) against the Catholic elite (the Episcopate and the moderate Catholic intelligentsia) who had allegedly betrayed the community’s true ideals. At the same time, the group was unabashedly blunt in disregarding Christian values such as the love of 232

233 234 235

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Konferencja Episkopatu Polski, “Oświadczenie Prezydium Konferencji Episkopatu Polski i Arcybiskupa Metropolity Warszawskiego ws. krzyża,” Katolicka Agencja Informacyjna, August 12, 2010, https://ekai.pl/dokumenty/oswiadczenie-prezydiumkonferencji-episkopatu-polski-i-arcybiskupa-metropolity-warszawskiego-ws-krzyza (accessed April 30, 2020). See also Kosiński, Teatra polskie: Historie, 255. Pankowski, “Opinie o wydarzeniach przed Pałacem Prezydenckim,” 9. Stankiewicz (dir.), Krzyż, at 26:00. Matthew 26:15. For a description of this confrontation, see Piotr Machajski and Iwona Szpala, “Zwycięski rokosz,” Gazeta Wyborcza, August 4, 2010, 3. Anonymous cross defender, in TVN 24 Polska i świat, August 12, 2010, cited in Krajowa Rada Radiofonii i Telewizji, Raport z monitoringu, 45. See also Joanna Burzyńska, cited in Wojciech Szacki and Wojciech Czuchnowski, “Tablica na krzyż,” Gazeta Wyborcza, August 13, 2010, 4. Anonymous cross defender, cited in Szymanik, “My, fanatycy. A co!”

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one’s neighbor, obedience towards ecclesiastical superiors, and the principle of “[rendering] unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.”238 A number of Polish analysts have already noted that the symbol of the cross in Krakowskie Przedmieście was an object of “national idolatry” rather than an expression of Christian content.239 To the philosopher of religion Zbigniew Mikołejko, the cross defense demonstrated that Poland’s “political Catholicism” was in fact very secular and “not aimed at bringing people back to church, but rather at leading them out [. . .] into the streets.”240 The Smolensk cross possessed an “aura of sacredness,” that was not, however, rooted in religion, but rather in pre-Christian “tribal-idolatrous consciousness” that invested it with a status of a taboo.241 While the pre-modern awe of the sacred may have contributed to the spiritual experience of some cross defenders and their spectators alike, the strategies that the Smolensk communitas adopted in instrumentalizing elements of Catholic ritual and rhetoric point to a very modern process. The “culturalization of religion,” or its political use as a marker of identity in exclusionary narratives of clashing civilizations, is actually a fairly contemporary phenomenon linked to advanced secularization.242 While in Western Europe references to Christianity as the basis of European culture often serve right-wing populist anti-Muslim rhetoric and are harnessed in particular to restrict Muslim religious practices in the public space, this Eastern European variety of religious populism uses the very same mechanism to exclude the domestic Other – the liberals. Positioned as posing a “civilizational threat” to Polish national values, the liberal, pro-European, and pro-secularist demographic of “transformation winners” is juxtaposed with a performatively baroque but vacuous invocation of religion that corresponds to what Brubaker terms “secularized Christianity-as-culture.”243 Despite a seemingly different agenda, the Smolensk cross defenders therefore had a lot in common with Western European Islamophobic right-wing populists. They not only exploited the topos of ethnic minorities as threatening to the nation and demonstrated antisemitic prejudice, but also directly echoed anti-Muslim discourses originating in Western Europe – such as the image of the Muslim harem luring Christian women. The protesters’ attachment to the symbolic outer shell of Catholicism and their simultaneous disregard for 238 239

240 241 242 243

Matthew 22:21. Jaskułowski, “W obronie krzyża,” 84; Środa, “Co sprawa krzyża powiedziała nam o polskim Kościele?”; Katarzyna Nadana-Sokołowska, “Debata, której nie było: Kościół katolicki w Polsce,” in Polityka i aborcja, edited by Mirosław Chałubiński (Warsaw: Agencja Scholar, 1994), 467–494, here 472. Mikołejko, Między zbawieniem a Smoleńskiem, 173. Mikołejko, “Polska wojna symboliczna,” 18. See Brubaker, “Between Nationalism and Civilizationism,” 1194, 1200. Ibid., 1199.

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Christian principles and the admonishments of Church patriarchs likewise suggested that they embraced Catholicism not as religion but as a “civilizational identity.”244 Finally, just as in cases involving Western European right-wing populists, the religious agenda was of secondary concern during the Smolensk cross defense. As many right-wing supporters of the picket openly admitted, its religious staffage merely accompanied, albeit sometimes obscuring from view, the truly relevant project of mobilizing support for a future political shift. Writing for Gazeta Polska in 2010, Jerzy Targalski insisted that the cross defense could become a successful social movement able to withstand ongoing laicization only if it transcended the “strictly religious character” which “c[ould] only appeal to a minority” of Poles. “While retaining the cross,” he advised, “it is necessary to invest the movement with a more national and political character.”245 In a similar vein, Jacek Wasilewski and Piotr Gliński, the latter of whom served as minister of culture under the PiS government, stated in 2011 that the cross defense was an attempt at creating an institution that would secure long-term “social change” in the aftermath of the Smolensk catastrophe. In this endeavor, they added, the cross was just an “ostensible [. . .] object of contestation,” while in truth the confrontation in front of the Presidential Palace concerned something else: the creation of “institutions for memorializing the catastrophe and the death of the Polish president as a symbol of the political community.”246 That community, symbolically represented by the cross, was to appear as the morally sound “true people” of Poland, whose only political representation was the PiS party. Owing to this underlying populist logic, the symbol of the cross had a more exclusionary function than was typical of previous Polish antistructural protests. Unlike during the January Uprising or the Solidarity decade, the cross in front of the Presidential Palace was not meant to send a universalist message of national unity in the face of illegitimate power holders. By following populism’s core claim that, as Jan-Werner Müller put it, “only some of the people are really the people,”247 the cross defenders and their supporters on the political scene could exclude different groups of their co-nationals as “un-Polish” and exploit the ensuing division to mobilize their political forces. By ostracizing large parts of Polish society as the alleged servants of metaphysically evil elites, the PiS party not only fashioned its supporters in Krakowskie Przedmieście as the authentic core of the nation, but was able to emerge as its “exclusive moral representation.”248 244 245 246

247 248

Ibid., 1194. Darski, “Krzyż – symbol religijny czy narodowy.” Piotr Gliński and Jacek Wasilewski, “Przedmowa,” in Katastrofa smoleńska: Reakcje społeczne, polityczne i medialne, edited by Piotr Gliński and Jacek Wasilewski (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IFIS PAN, 2011), 11. Müller, What Is Populism?, 22. Ibid., 38.

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The Pro-secularists Owing to its exclusionary narrative, its prominent location, and the extremely intensive media coverage it received, the Smolensk cross defense attracted a good deal of both spontaneous and more organized opposition. The prosecularist opposition activated by the prolonged and controversial display of religious symbols at the seat of the country’s executive power gained momentum during the mass demonstration of August 9, when about 5,000 mostly young people gathered in front of the Presidential Palace, loudly demanding the removal of the cross.249 But there was also a lot of other, organized and ad hoc, protest activity, including pickets, petitions, street performances, and direct verbal encounters with the cross defenders. The August mass demonstration sent shock waves through Polish society because its ferociously iconoclastic use of symbols was something hitherto unseen in Polish protest culture. Yet, while the controversial props – such as a cross made of beer cans and a crucified teddy bear – made headlines in the Polish press250 and led to the prosecution of their creators for offending religious feeling,251 the antistructural motivation of the wider pro-secularist movement articulating itself in Warsaw in 2010 remained largely overlooked. To many commentators, the conflict around the Smolensk cross seemed to play out along party lines. An analyst from the Catholic monthly Więź concluded in 2010 that the cross controversy was a conflict between President Komorowski, Prime Minister Tusk, and Civic Platform on the one hand, and Law and Justice on the other. The “leftist and anticlerical circles,” he argued, should be left out of the equation because they merely 249

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Media estimates of the number of protesters ranged from 5,000 to 7,000. See Agnieszka Drzewiecka, “Zysnarski: Popieram Palikota,” Gazeta Wyborcza Zielona Góra, August 11, 2010, https://classic.wyborcza.pl/archiwumGW/7264268/ZYSNARSKI–POPIERAMPALIKOTA (accessed May 30, 2020); Katarzyna Janowska, “Polacy pod krzyżem,” Przekrój, August 17, 2010, 4. “Krzyż sprofanowany,” Gość Niedzielny, August 6, 2010, www.gosc.pl/doc/605268.Krzyzsprofanowany (accessed May 12, 2010); “Pod Pałacem stanął krzyż z puszek: Efekt wczorajszych słów Palikota?,” Gazeta.pl, August 6, 2010, https://wiadomosci.gazeta.pl/wiado mosci/1,130438,8220725,Pod_Palacem_stanal_krzyz_z_puszek_Lecha__Efekt_wczo rajszych.html (accessed May 21, 2010); “Krzyż z puszek po piwie,” Dziennik Polonijny, August 8, 2010, https://poland.us/strona,25,6076,0,krzyz-z-puszek-po-piwie.html (accessed May 21, 2020). “Prokuratura prowadzi 47 postępowań w związku z krzyżem przed Pałacem,” Gazeta Prawna, October 11, 2010, www.gazetaprawna.pl/wiadomosci/artykuly/457601,prokura tura-prowadzi-47-postepowan-w-zwiazku-z-krzyzem-przed-palacem.html (accessed May 12, 2010); “Kolejna skandaliczna decyzja: Według prokuratury krzyż z puszek po piwie można prezentować na manifestacjach politycznych: Śledztwo umorzone!,” wPolityce, September 15, 2011, https://wpolityce.pl/polityka/118637-kolejna-skandaliczna-decyzjawedlug-prokuratury-krzyz-z-puszek-po-piwie-mozna-prezentowac-na-manifestacjachpolitycznych-sledztwo-umorzone (accessed May 12, 2020).

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“instrumentalized this conflict for their own agenda.”252 A number of other authors likewise neglected the role that pro-secularist protesters played during the cross defense.253 They wrote them off as “grotesque”254 or “equally [as] insane and scandalous” as their opponents.255 Their radical agenda and forms of expression, per critics, placed the pro-secularist “taunters” and “jesters” on the margins of society and rendered their demands “unappealing” to an average Pole.256 The carnivalesque character of pro-secularist protest was thus noted, but never underwent systematic analysis.257 While scholars have largely neglected the pro-secularist actors in the Warsaw cross controversy, both the liberal and the right-wing press devoted a great deal of attention to their protests, grossly overestimating their impact. Left-wing commentators celebrated the August demonstration as “the stone capable of triggering an avalanche of laicization in Poland,”258 a “psychological breakthrough” marking “civilizational protest against the dominance of the Church,”259 and an “awakening of the modern and secular” Poland.260 The opponents of the cross emerged in this narrative as “the best part of Polish society”261 and the avant-garde of secular “revolt.”262 Right-wing observers likewise acknowledged the weight and significance of the group, which they in turn saw as violent, dangerous, and even criminal. Describing the protesters as “confused jackals pulsating in a beastly trance,”263 and “an overexcited mob shaking off the fetters of civilization,”264 they both 252 253

254 255 256 257

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259 260

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Draguła, “Rzecz o narodowości krzyża,” 57. For example, Krzemiński, “Narodowo-katolicka mowa o Polsce”; Krzysztof Jaskułowski, Wspólnota symboliczna: W stronę antropologii nacjonalizmu (Gdańsk: Katedra, 2012). Zubrzycki, “History and the National Sensorium,” 47. Kosiński, Teatra polskie: Historie, 264. Ibid., 265, 267. This gap in the research has already been pointed out by Jaskułowski, Wspólnota symboliczna, 141. See also Kosiński, Teatra polskie: Historie, 260; Łuczewski, “Katastrofa, Mesjasz, Krzyż,” 104; Grzegorz Kapuściński, “Tańce wokół krzyża: Analiza semiostrukturalna zachowań podczas demonstracji pod Pałacem Prezydenckim,” Miscellanea Anthropologica et Sociologica 13 (2012): 122–144. Jarosław Kurski, “Komentarz,” Gazeta Wyborcza, August 13, 2010, 1. See also Adam Leszczyński, “Pod krzyżem: Dwugłos o państwie i Kościele,” Gazeta Wyborcza, August 11, 2010, 16; Rafał Kalukin, “Krzyżowcy w sercu nowoczesności,” Gazeta Wyborcza, August 11, 2010, 15. Urban, “Krzyż – znak rozbawienia,” 1. Adam Leszczyński, “Wyzwolenie pod krzyżem. Od Kościoła,” Gazeta Wyborcza, August 14–15, 2010, 14. Andrzej Żuławski, cited in “Kościół nie wie jak się zachować ws. sporu o krzyż,” Polskie Radio 24, August 10, 2010, https://polskieradio24.pl/5/115/Artykul/255388,Kosciol-niewie-jak-sie-zachowac-ws-sporu-o-krzyz (accessed May 12, 2010). Mirosław Czech, “‘Bóg’, ‘Honor’, ‘Do kościoła,’” 2. Nowakowski, “W nihilistycznym transie,” 18. Łuczewski, “Katastrofa, Mesjasz, Krzyż,” 104.

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demonized the opponents of the cross and ascribed to them more influence than they actually possessed. One clergyman commenting on the prosecularist protests around the Smolensk cross compared them to a “barrel of gunpowder which could explode,”265 while the Catholic daily Nasz Dziennik raised alarm about a “war of the worlds” unfolding in Warsaw.266 At the same time, PiS Member of Parliament Antoni Macierewicz made a criminal complaint, claiming that the organizer of the August demonstration, Dominik Taras, was “a threat to the life [. . .] of numerous people.”267 The confrontation between the Smolensk cross defenders and the prosecularists lead by Dominik Taras, with its symbolically laden street clashes in the center of the country’s capital, illuminated a political fracture in Polish society which would only grow in the years to come. With a highly visible protest group brandishing core national symbols in a way that alienated a large portion of Polish society, those whom their narrative excluded felt all the more inclined to manifest their otherness and publicly enact the plurality of their worldviews. The opposition to the Smolensk cross defense was not instantaneous, nor did it ever solidify into one homogeneous movement. Instead it grew over time, articulating itself in various disparate protest activities. While the anarchist group Wolność Równość Solidarność (Freedom, Equality, Solidarity) was gathering signatures under a petition in favor of the removal of the Smolensk cross, other groups staged spontaneous happenings at the site, trying to reclaim the public space or manifest cultural plurality.268 For instance, pro-secularists staged beach ball tournaments and soap bubble displays in the vicinity of the cross, and graffitied the sidewalk around it with other religious symbols including the Orthodox cross, the crescent moon, and the Star of David.269 There were also protesters in stormtrooper costumes from Star Wars and an Elvis Presley impersonator who appeared at the site.270 Such ad hoc demonstrations, often in the form of flash mobs, became more frequent as the conflict escalated. A more organized protest movement, however, gained momentum after the failed removal of the cross in early August manifested with full force the helplessness of state authorities vis-à-vis the defenders of the cross. 265

266 267

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Maciej Zięba, in TVN 24 Polska i Świat, August 10, 2010, cited in Krajowa Rada Radiofonii i Telewizji, Raport z monitoringu, 44. Rąpała, “Wojna światów u stóp krzyża,” 12. Iwona Szpala, Piotr Machajski, Dariusz Bartoszewicz, and Jacek Hołub, “Krzyż przed Pałacem dzieli jak nigdy,” Gazeta Wyborcza, August 10, 2010, 5. “Anarchiści: Usunąć ten krzyż!,” Wirtualna Polska, https://wiadomosci.wp.pl/anar chisci-usunac-ten-krzyz-6036136225800833a (accessed May 23, 2020). Dominik Taras, interview with the author, Warsaw, February 15, 2020. See also “Gra w GAŁĘ pod Pałacem Prezydenckim,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQudSotmpvc (accessed May 14, 2020). Kuba Kapiszewski, “Sieć czuwa,” Przegląd, September 5, 2010, 14–18.

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While the modus operandi of pro-secularists – with their use of parody, subversive caricature, and the carnivalesque to reverse the existing power relations – caught the eye of scholars, their antistructural agenda and the ways in which they both disavowed the narrow populist definition of the Polish nation and articulated their own alternative visions of national belonging require further analysis.271 One question still awaiting an answer, for example, concerns the antistructural motivation, agenda, and sense of community that pro-secularist demonstrations managed to generate. In Turner’s definition, antistructures are marked by spontaneity, freedom, and a challenge to existing order.272 They are also characterized by creativity; have nonrational, emotional appeal; and point to alternative, more egalitarian modes of coexistence.273 While the creativity, emancipatory potential, and egalitarian spirit of the pro-secularist demonstrations were immediately evident, how exactly did they define the “existing order”? Another question that deserves attention concerns the symbols that prosecularist protesters used to mobilize support. Kotwas and Kubik predict in their model that the more populist narratives exclude certain groups from the national community, the more likely it is that those marginalized will “reimagine themselves by means of different symbolic systems.”274 Zubrzycki proposes another possibility. She identifies two different “registers” that individuals may use to grapple with a “national sensorium”: The first is an experiential and emotional register in which a given national mythology is perceived as sacred [. . .] though potentially threatened and hence in need of ardent defense. The second mode of apprehension of national mythology is profane; it is a register that allows for a certain critical distance in which the nation is an oft-commodified thing to be used playfully or even ironically by national actors, or alienable for uses by cosmopolitan consumers and various other non-nationals.275

The profane register, in other words, offers a critical way to engage with the national symbolic system, playfully recycling rather than fully rejecting it. Confronted with the powerful symbolic clusters used by the cross defenders, pro-secularist opponents had to vocalize their own position vis-à-vis the nation and its core symbols. Examining the ways in which they attempted to construct their own symbolic system can give us some insight not only into the 271

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Kosiński, Teatra polskie: Historie, 258–262; Jaskułowski, Wspólnota symboliczna, 142; Kapuściński, “Tańce wokół krzyża,” 135; Zubrzycki, “History and the National Sensorium,” 46–47. Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1974), 49. Ibid., 47. Kotwas and Kubik, “Symbolic Thickening of Public Culture,” 444. Zubrzycki, “History and the National Sensorium,” 52.

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durability of the Polish “national sensorium,” but also into potential strategies of response to exclusionary populist rhetoric.

The Pro-secularist Revolt At the root of one of the most controversial and spectacular pro-secularist demonstrations in post-1989 Poland – which gathered thousands of people in front of the Presidential Palace on August 9, 2010 – lay the indignation of one individual. A twenty-two-year-old chef, Dominik Taras, had a day off when nationwide news channels were showing a live broadcast of the religious procession that was to transfer the Smolensk cross to a nearby church. Taras had been following the clashes in Krakowskie Przedmieście for weeks and felt angered by the ongoing cross defense “at one of the most representative sites of the capital.” Watching the cross defenders obstructing and verbally abusing the approaching priests and scouts was a turning point for him: I felt hurt by that. These [clergymen and boy scouts] were people who serve the public – you can’t insult them like that by calling them Gestapo men and Communists [gestapowcy i ubecy]! [. . .] And then something in me snapped. My friend and I had the idea of going there, stealing the cross, and taking it to a police station.276

The plan of forcibly relocating the cross as a measure of direct action moved Taras to establish its legal status. This proved a very difficult task as state and municipal authorities he contacted turned out to be very reluctant to address the issue. After failing to obtain a satisfactory answer from either the Polish Scouting Association, which had planted the cross, or the presidential administration, on whose property it was standing, Taras realized that the Smolensk cross was an unauthorized construction. No one wanted to deal with this subject because we live in a deeply Catholic country, where politicians are afraid of the Church [. . .]. I was pointing out the fact that the cross was an element of street furniture, located in a listed area, so how come the municipal conservator was not asked for approval when the cross was installed? Everybody was trying to dodge the question, saying that “it was the symbolism of the hour.” Except this symbolism had been there for half a year.277

Taras’ initial plan to take the cross to the nearest police station and deposit it there as a piece of evidence encountered some logistical hurdles. The challenge of moving a 300-kilogram oak cross through the city center, as well as the prospect of fierce resistance from the cross defenders, eventually led him to abandon the idea. Meanwhile, his call to direct action on 276 277

Dominik Taras, interview with the author, Warsaw, February 15, 2020. Ibid.

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Facebook had hit a nerve and was increasingly gaining in resonance. By a few days after his first post, thousands of people had declared their willingness to participate in his event. The feedback he received at that time from like-minded individuals made Taras realize that, rather than moving the cross, the momentum should be used to voice protest against the acquiescent state authorities. He obtained a public assembly permit and posted on his Facebook account: On August 4 an apolitical social initiative was founded [. . .] which has the goal of counteracting the remarkable passivity of the state. We want to express our protest against the submissiveness of the authorities. The decision to transfer [the cross] had been taken, yet on August 3 it was prevented by a group of people who have created an illegal religious cult site and publicly call for aggression. We want to manifest our concern as to whether the state is still functioning or whether it has already succumbed to terror.278

Two days later, late at night, thousands of people turned up at the Presidential Palace equipped with humorous banners and props, some of them wearing costumes.279 The crowd – separated from the small group of cross defenders by two rows of metal fences and a police cordon – followed its own dynamic, as the demonstration did not have a scripted character. Taras, wielding a simple megaphone, addressed the crowd from a small platform. His speech was improvised, but clearly indicated the antistructural intention of the organizers: “The law is being broken right outside the president’s palace. A group of elderly people is terrorizing a state institution [. . .]. We came here to express our protest against the actions of the state – by which I mean the lack of any action!”280 In an interview he gave the following day to the conservative daily Rzeczpospolita, he stated the following: [The demonstration] was a loud cry addressed to the government, the authorities. We wanted to show how many people oppose what is happening in front of the [Presidential] Palace. The demonstration clearly indicated that something was wrong, that the state authorities condone disrespecting the law.281

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Domik Taras, Facebook post from August 7, 2010. See Gazeta Wyborcza, August 16, 2010, 1, 4, 13, 18. Dominik Taras’ address during the “Akcja Krzyż” demonstration, Warsaw, August 9, 2010, in “Akcja Krzyż pod Pałacem Prezydenckim – do Kościoła – przeciwko obrońcom krzyża 10 kwietnia,” YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKdM4hvDn04 (accessed May 15, 2020). Dominik Taras, cited in Agnieszka Niewińska, “Nie sponsoruje mnie Palikot,” Rzeczpospolita, August 10, 2010, www.rp.pl/wydarzenia/art15057201-nie-sponsorujemnie-palikot (accessed May 15, 2020).

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Jakub Zysnarski, a thirty-two-year-old IT specialist who joined Taras as a coorganizer of the demonstration, described it in retrospect as a “mass civic revolt”: I believe we had a sense of a common objective, a shared sense of defiance, and a common cause in the name of which we took to the streets [. . .]. These people did not gather there by chance, attracted by some “happening.” They came to express their protest against what was going on and their defiance against the fact that the government, the municipal authorities, the president, and the police were all unable to handle a group of fanatics.282

If the anger and frustration of pro-secularist protesters directly targeted the liberal government and the presidential administration, which were, for months, unable to end the cross controversy, the existing order that the demonstrators contested also comprised a more enduring power structure. The lack of proper separation between church and state in post-transformation Poland, poignantly illuminated by the vulnerability of a presidential administration physically beleaguered by religious activists, was the protesters’ true concern. Writing on behalf of the informal organizing committee shortly before the demonstration was to take place, Dominik Taras posted: “We believe the conflict [in front of the Presidential Palace] demonstrates how the church is steering the state.”283 For Zysnarski, the Smolensk cross embodied “the attempt to appropriate public space and impose a fundamentalist religious worldview” being made by a group that, having secured the most central and symbolic stage possible for its cyclical demonstrations, also manifested a sense of superiority and claimed privilege over its opponents.284 Other protesters recorded by journalists expressed the same sentiment in a similar vein. “The place of the cross is in the church and only in the church,” stated one middle-aged man interviewed in Krakowskie Przedmieście. “[W]e cannot turn [Poland] into a European Iran! We are a breath away from having religious police here.”285 Another male participant, in a statement for the TVN24 channel, argued curtly: “They built all these churches, so let them go there to pray! The streets are ours!”286 The demand for public spaces free of religious symbolism went hand in hand with a desire to secure space for secular thought and sensibility in Polish society. A reader of the leftist weekly Przegląd raised this issue in a letter to the editor in late July: As a symbol of the crusades, the Inquisition, the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, and the Kriegsmarine, the cross has for centuries been misused 282 283 284 285 286

Jakub Zysnarski, Zoom interview with the author, June 3, 2020. Dominik Taras, Facebook post August 4, 2010. Jakub Zysnarski, Zoom interview with the author, June 3, 2020. Żmijewski (dir.), Katastrofa, at 47:08. Cited in Urban, “Krzyż – znak rozbawienia.”

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for purposes that have had nothing to do with the ideals of compassion preached by Jesus [. . .] and the insane hysteria initiated by PiS [. . .] is an expression of virulent hatred towards anything that is progressive, rational, and secular.287

The protests in favor of the removal of the Smolensk cross thus allowed pro-secularist Poles to verbalize a plurality of worldviews, but also bring to public attention the fact that not all Poles understood the symbol of the cross in the same way. Voicing their protest against the hegemony of the Catholic Church in post-1989 Poland, the opponents of the Smolensk cross thus formed an antistructural movement which challenged both the power holders of the time and the more permanent symbiosis of church and state. Turning against the narrow right-wing populist vision of the nation and the pervasiveness of religious idiom in public articulations of national belonging, the pro-secularist protesters may have had a clear agenda, but they faced a major challenge – that of choosing which symbolic language to draw on in order to mobilize support and create a sense of group cohesion.

Rites of Reversal Dominik Taras and his manifesto mobilized an exponentially larger amount of protesters than the cross defenders ever did, yet the arsenal of symbols that the Smolensk communitas tapped into was incommensurably vaster, more effective, and better calibrated to produce a strong emotional response. The strong appeal of Romantic tropes and the fact that the right-wing populists had successfully appropriated all the central national symbols left their opponents with a dilemma regarding which symbolic repertoire to use.288 Dominik Taras’ strategy was to provide a counterpoint to the solemn pathos of the Smolensk picket by challenging the cross defenders with parody, subversive humor, and a joyful atmosphere akin to that of an outdoor summer party. His call to action even included an express instruction: “No flags or national symbols!”289 The protesters were instead invited to dress up and bring along props or humorous banners. The carnivalesque thus provided the

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Maciej Kijowski, “Miejsce nie dla krzyża,” Przegląd, July 25, 2010, 10. In his analysis of the electoral victory of PiS in 2015, Jan Kubik points to the liberal camp’s failure in the symbolic domain as one of the reasons for their defeat. See Jan Kubik and Jacek Żakowski, “Prof. Kubik o tym, jak długo PiS będzie rządził i z czym to się dla nas wiąże” Polityka, January 12, 2016, www.polityka.pl/tygodnikpolityka/kraj/ 1646712,1,prof-kubik-o-tym-jak-dlugo-pis-bedzie-rzadzil-i-z-czym-to-sie-dla-naswiaze.read (accessed May 16, 2020). Dominik Taras, Facebook post from August 7, 2010.

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dominant idiom employed by the pro-secularists to verbalize and visualize their dissent. The nighttime demonstration, which was announced over Facebook and scheduled to begin at 11 p.m. (to avoid inconveniencing city traffic), attracted a predominantly young and male demographic. Because of the format of the demonstration, its subversive character, and the late hour, its mood was both defiant and euphoric. Some protesters arrived in colourful costumes including Viking horns, wigs, and football fan hats. The makeshift banners they brought featured both provocative slogans, sometimes containing expletives (“Apologize and f**k off!,” “Don’t fly drunk!,” or just “F**k!”), and humorous or absurdist ones (“Let’s move the palace! It’s blocking out the cross,” “Judeocommunists salute you”). Protesters also installed a mock road sign in Krakowskie Przedmieście, modifying the “Attention Children” icon to say “Attention Cross Defenders.”290 Many banners displayed creative wordplay (“We want noughts, not crosses!” or “Stop krzyżackiej okupacji!” [“Stop the occupation of Teutonic Knights!”]).291 There were also attempts to propose

Fig. 34. “Attention, cross defenders,” August 9, 2010. Photo: Franciszek Mazur, Agencja Wyborcza.pl. 290

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Robert Sankowski, “Popkultura gra z krzyżem na wesoło,” Gazeta Wyborcza, August 16, 2010, 13. A broad selection of banners and slogans is visible in videos shot by participants in the demonstration See, for example, “Akcja Krzyż pod Pałacem Prezydenckim 9.08.2010,” YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB6-BoRKq7Q (accessed May 18, 2010); “Akcja

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a countersymbol to that of the cross in the form of a tall plastic DNA model, several meters high and carried as if in procession.292 The defiant and carnivalesque character of the demonstration articulated itself in different ways. Some banners, including calls for the legalization of marijuana, pushed the boundaries of what was socially accepted, while others expressed defiance simply by intentionally using incorrect spelling.293 The carnivalesque function of the rally became most evident in playful enactments of symbolic violence towards groups perceived as privileged and dominant – in this case the political elites supporting the hegemonic position of the Catholic Church in Poland. Not surprisingly, Jarosław Kaczyński, as head of the PiS party and the spiritual leader of the cross defenders, became the main target of these rebellious gestures. Slogans such as “WC kaczka” (“Toilet duck”) and a ball game played with a stuffed duck were designed to denigrate him personally. At one point in the demonstration, protesters were also heard intoning the football chant “jeszcze jeden” or “one more,” which could be interpreted as a death wish on the late President Kaczyński’s brother.294 A banner reading “Mohair hats to the stake!” was received with particular indignation by the right-wing media as a call to violence.295 Taken together, this subversive content constituted a “rite of reversal” – one of the central features of the carnival. The rite of reversal consists in stripping dominant groups and individuals of their power and privilege, thereby enabling carnival participants to experience a sense of control.296 Although they may leave the political and social order intact, perhaps even strengthening it by providing a safety valve for hostile energies, such “rebellious rituals” supply a powerful impetus for generating group identities.297 For Turner, these spontaneous and creative movements that occupy the liminal space “on the peripheries” of everyday life and allow their members “to don the liberating

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Krzyż – Warszawa, Pałac Prezydencki 9.08.2010 – oddanie atmosfery tak jak było naprawdę,” YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=moxFWET8dtg (accessed May 18, 2010); “Akcja Krzyż Manifestacja 09.08.2010,” YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch? v=B0wCK3AVYco (accessed May 18, 2010). “Akcja Krzyż – DNA!,” YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=io1gnD2mPeQ (accessed May 22, 2020). For example, “Rzydokomuna pozdrawia” (“Judeo-communists salute you”), “Na stos z mocherami” (“Mohair hats to the stake”), and “Zostawcie kżyża mjastu” (“Leave the cross to the city”). See Stankiewicz (dir.), Krzyż, at 1:12:02. The stuffed duck was reportedly torn to pieces in the course of the “game.” For the incident with the stuffed duck, see “Akcja Krzyż – 9 sierpnia 2010 rok,” YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZ8GoKXHuxw, at 13:45. Stankiewicz (dir.), Krzyż, at 1:15:13. David Kertzer, Ritual, Politics and Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 131–132. See Myron J. Aronoff and Jan Kubik, Anthropology and Political Science (New York: Berghahn, 2013), 102.

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masque of liminal masquerade”298 enable the emergence of communitas. The exhibition of irreverence towards power holders – here embodied by a highranking politician associated not only with the cross defense itself but also with long-standing support for the political influence of the Catholic Church in Poland – was at the core of the “rite of reversal” in Krakowskie Przedmieście. It provided a vent allowing the frustration and anger of the emerging antistructure to be released in a playful and controlled manner. Thus, even in the heat of the rebellious enactments, the defiant crowd was, for example, still able to collectively prevent one demonstrator, who had climbed up a lamppost, from setting the stuffed duck on fire – a gesture that, in the perception of the participants, went too far. These self-policing measures, executed via collective chants of “Don’t burn it!” and “Get the idiot down!,” indicated that the rite of reversal was still subject to rules and that there were boundaries even to the seemingly uninhibited theatrical excess.299 While the carnivalesque symbolism was noted with indignation by the rightwing media, it was the symbolic enactments involving religious symbols that caused the most controversy and had legal consequences for some participants in the demonstration.300 The symbol of the cross was represented in a number of ways on August 9. A group of young men carried a cross while re-enacting the flagellation of Jesus; one protester held a cross with a crucified teddy bear in his hand; and a group of “Defenders of St. Andrew’s Cross” in railwaymen costumes brought along a crossbuck sign, arguing that such crosses were in greater need of protection because they were often vandalized and yet they saved lives.301 However, the cross that attracted the most attention and became the icon of the protest was one made of empty cans of Lech beer. Both the recycled material it was constructed from and the crude reference to the late President Kaczyński outraged many observers, causing numerous criminal complaints and giving rise to prosecutorial proceedings lasting almost a year to determine whether the makers of the cross should face charges for offending religious feeling.302 The 298 299

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Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors, 243. At different moments during the demonstration, protesters policed one another with chants of “Stop aggression.” “Akcja Krzyż – 9 sierpnia 2010 rok.” “Krzyż sprofanowany”; Adam Boniecki, “Zakąski Przekąski” Tygodnik Powszechny, August 17, 2010, www.tygodnikpowszechny.pl/zakaski-przekaski-142859 (accessed May 12, 2020); “Kolejna skandaliczna decyzja”; Tunia, “Rozróba pod krzyżem”; Bartnik, “Nienawidzący Boga,” 11–12; Łukasz Adamski, “Wolno robić krzyż z puszek po piwie,” Fronda.pl, September 15, 2011, www.fronda.pl/a/wolno-robic-krzyz-z-pus zek-po-piwie,14501.html (accessed May 22, 2020). For the flagellation scene, see Stankiewicz (dir.), Krzyż, at 1:40:46. For the Defenders of St. Andrew’s Cross, see Dariusz Bartoszewicz, “Do kościoła! Do kościoła!,” Gazeta Wyborcza, August 9, 2010, https://classic.wyborcza.pl/archiwumGW/7263552/Dokosciola–do-kosciola (accessed May 21, 2020). The makers of the cross ultimately faced no charges, which led to many protests in the right-wing media. Piotr Machajski, “Za krzyż z puszek po Lechu pod sąd,” Gazeta

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notorious beer can cross in fact existed in numerous copies, and in the days preceding the nighttime rally it was repeatedly displayed at the site of the Smolensk cross.303 Its creators, organized via a Facebook group called “The Way of the Cross,” made several attempts, including during the demonstration of August 9 itself, to hand their creation over to the cross defenders, chanting “Give us back your old one, here’s a new one for you!”304 In mirroring the contested symbol, cross-themed protest props were intended to break the taboo around the Smolensk cross, ridicule its defenders, and expose the ineptitude of the authorities in tackling the problem. A mock papal blessing performed by a costumed protester from a nearby balcony served the same function.305 Appropriating the symbols of their opponents in the “profane register,”306 pro-secularist protesters did not merely adopt a position of “critical distance” towards these icons; rather, their performative use served to reduce the concept of a cross defense ad absurdum by exposing its idolatrous nature. By means of parody, hyperbole, and absurdist props, prosecularists also contested the status of the cross as a Polish national symbol.

Iconoclasm versus Christian Nationalism The organizers of the pro-secularist rally consciously opted against displaying any national symbols and these were, indeed, virtually absent from the colorful crowd on the night of the demonstration. For Dominik Taras, this choice was dictated by the fact that national symbols had already been misappropriated by right-wing populists and that pro-secularists “did not come to [Krakowskie Przedmieście] as Poles, but rather as citizens longing for normality.”307 Despite the carnivalesque frame, which was to provide an alternative symbolic language, pro-secularists did not, however, fully refrain from referencing the nation. One prominent banner displayed in front of the Presidential Palace read “We are Poles too!”308 At one point, protesters also collectively intoned the national anthem.309 These instances of tapping into the national repertoire might be read as an attempt to reclaim national symbols from the Smolensk cross defenders and assert pluralism within the national body politic. However, the tactic also revealed a crucial dilemma. Confronted with a choice between countering

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Wyborcza, April 9, 2011, http://classic.wyborcza.pl/archiwumGW/7392154/Za-krzyz -z-puszek-po-Lechu-pod-sad (accessed May 22, 2020). Dominik Taras, interview with the author, Warsaw, February 15, 2020. Stankiewicz (dir.), Krzyż, at 52:42. “Akcja Krzyż pod Pałacem Prezydenckim – do Kościoła!” Zubrzycki, “History and the National Sensorium,” 52. Dominik Taras, e-mail communication, May 20, 2020. “Akcja Krzyż pod Pałacem Prezydenckim 9.08.2010.” “Akcja krzyż – 9 sierpnia 2010 rok.”

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the right-wing populist repertoire of symbols with alternatives of, unavoidably, lesser emotional appeal and recapturing national symbols already laden with potentially alienating significations (such as ethnic nationalism), prosecularists were trapped between two bad options. The resulting ambivalence found its articulation in the jarring oscillation of their demonstration’s register between the elated and the solemn. A good example of this, apart from the spontaneous performance of the national anthem, was a moment of silence held for the victims of the Smolensk plane catastrophe.310 Raising their voice in favor of a stricter separation of church and state, young pro-secularists led by Taras followed a multifaceted symbolic strategy that entailed both radical polarization and attempts to reclaim the core elements of the “national sensorium.” In other words, while the opponents of the Smolensk cross experimented with new unifying symbols, they also generated a sense of fundamental difference from their opponents by means of referencing the core symbol of the Smolensk communitas in a radically novel “profane register” that subverted it by means of parody. While this programmatic iconoclasm constituted the defining feature of the new antistructure, the August demonstration also included moments in which participants could genuinely embrace the national gravitas. In this way, the opponents of the Smolensk cross walked a tightrope between rejecting “Christian patriotism” and reconquering national symbols from right-wing populists.311 Pro-secularists’ ambivalent relationship to the category of the nation and the national “culture of rebellion” was further complicated by the fact that the genre of street performances parodying power holders, including by means of absurdist costumes and slogans, already had an established tradition in Poland. The Orange Alternative (Pomarańczowa Alternatywa), a nonconformist movement that operated in Wrocław and a few other major cities in the 1980s, had based its activity on humorous street events which exposed the absurdities of the Communist regime. Reviving this protest strategy, the prosecularist demonstration was thus writing itself into the tradition of antiCommunist dissent too – much like the Smolensk cross defenders themselves.312 The anticlerical edge to the pro-secularist protest was likewise 310

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“Nocny piknik pod krzyżem,” Gazeta Wyborcza, August 9, 2010, https://classic .wyborcza.pl/archiwumGW/7263663/Nocny-piknik-pod-krzyzem (accessed May 22, 2020). The same dilemma articulated itself during protests against the tightening of Poland’s abortion law in 2016, when Polish feminists attempted to claim some of the core national symbols for their own agenda. See Agnieszka Graff, “Claiming the Shipyard, the Cowboy Hat, and the Anchor for Women: Polish Feminism’s Dialogue and Struggle with National Symbolism,” East European Politics and Societies and Cultures, 33, 2 (2019): 472–496. The parallels between the pro-secularist demonstration in Krakowskie Przedmieście and the Orange Alternative were immediately spotted by media reporting on the August 9

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not entirely new in the Polish history of dissent. Political satire and protest interventions with radically anticlerical content resonated widely in the early 1990s. Thus, although right-wing journalists framed the rally as a “profanation [. . .] of hitherto unknown proportions,”313 it would be more accurate to see it as another articulation of an already familiar current that had been present in the Polish political imagination all along. Could this symbolic repertoire of parody, pastiche, and iconoclasm have a lasting appeal, however? And could it inspire a continuing sense of community? On the one hand, the carnivalesque mode is by definition temporary. Furthermore, in the eyes of its participants, the August 9 demonstration was an outburst of pent-up frustration that actually marked the end of the most vehement phase of pro-secularist protests.314 After this peak in public discontent, only small-scale gatherings were held around the Smolensk cross before it was finally removed to the chapel inside the Presidential Palace on September 16. On the other hand, the rebellious spirit of anticlerical parody articulated during the nighttime rite of reversal on Krakowskie Przedmieście continued to inspire Polish popular culture for many months. Numerous memes, music videos, and even online computer games circulated on the Internet, parodying the cross defense genre and denouncing its participants as religious fanatics.315 In August 2010 two popular journalists ran a radio chart show exclusively dedicated to parodistic songs about the cross defense.316 The subject also made its way into the political satire of the time.317 Two of perhaps the most impactful cartoons on this subject were Mirosław Hajnos’ image of a group of people kneeling in prayer in front of the “Crossroads Ahead” traffic sign318 and Andrzej Mleczko’s depiction of the cross defenders as indigenous warriors, their faces painted in the Polish national colors, dancing with tomahawks around a totem-like Latin cross.319

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demonstration. See Manuela Gretkowska, “Szydercy i krzyżowcy,” Wprost, August 16, 2010, 16–19; Katarzyna Janowska, “Polacy pod krzyżem,” Przekrój, August 17, 2010, 4. Rąpała, “Wojna światów u stóp krzyża,” 12. Dominik Taras, interview with the author, Warsaw, February 15, 2020; Jakub Zysnarski, Zoom interview with the author, June 3, 2020. See Mr. Hek, “Gdzie jest krzyż?” YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCJVaMzXB4E (accessed August 20, 2017). See also Kapiszewski, “Sieć czuwa.” “Wojewódzki i Figurski – Gdzie jest Krzyż,” Eska Rock, www.youtube.com/watch? v=Obuvk7K8mE8 (accessed May 18, 2010). See, for example, Anonymous, “Przyszedłem po krzyż. Spieprzaj Żydu!,” NIE, August 12, 2010, 1; Janusz Mrozowski, untitled, NIE, June 3, 2010, 4; Marcin Skoczek, untitled, NIE, July 15, 2010, 11; Anonymous, “Oto słowo czarne,” NIE, October 14, 2010, 8; Wiesław Lipecki, “Na Pałacu musimy na razie postawić krzyżyk,” Przegląd, July 25, 2010, 7; Anonymous, “Krzyż Security,” Przegląd, September 5, 2010, 1. Mirosław Hajnos, untitled, NIE, September 23, 2010, 13. See also Anonymous, “Przyszedłem po krzyż. Spieprzaj, Żydu!,” NIE, August 12, 2010, 1. Andrzej Mleczko, untitled, Polityka, August 14, 2010, 2.

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Other parodic genres included interventions in the public space, such as a mock street sign reading “The Roundabout of the Cross Defenders” anonymously installed along a newly constructed street in Zielona Góra.320 A number of satirical texts were also produced, including a mock “Diary Found at the [Smolensk] Cross.”321 Together with stand-up comedy, offering humorous hyperbole of the cross defense, they provided comic relief.322 Organized via social media, the spontaneous, innovative, inclusive, and egalitarian 2010 demonstration in favor of a secular state had all the features of Turner’s antistructure. It targeted both the center-right Civic Platform, then in power, for their inability to secure a clear division between religion and the state, and, in the same regard, the whole legacy of the post-1989 “Third Republic.” Offering a very open, carnivalesque format and a fully apolitical platform, the nighttime rally attracted a wide spectrum of protesters, including both atheists and believers, Catholics and representatives of ethnic minorities, anarchists and football fans.323 An “open megaphone” principle allowed various protesters to express their – sometimes conflicting – views. Indeed, a number of individuals expressing support for the cross defenders were therefore also able to address the crowd.324 The uncompromising form, scale, and media visibility of this antistructural protest led many commentators, both on the right and on the left, to conclude that the summer of 2010 was a turning point for Polish religiosity. Even if they evaluated it differently, many saw the iconoclasm of August 9 as a harbinger of a more speedy and radical secularization of Polish society.325 As the developments of the intervening decade have shown, however, the 2010 protests in fact 320

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“Rondo Obrońców Krzyża – nazwa nowego zielonogórskiego ronda przy ul. Botanicznej?,” Wiadomości Zielona Góra, https://zielonagora.naszemiasto.pl/rondo-obroncow-krzyzanazwa-nowego-zielonogorskiego-ronda/ar/c4-2572890 (accessed May 18, 2020). Mariusz Urbanek, “Pamiętnik znaleziony pod Krzyżem,” Odra September (2010): 115– 116. For stand-up comedy shows alluding to the cross defence, see Kabaret Limo, “Orzeł Biały,” YouTube, https://youtu.be/VeU2cNhUSqc (accessed May 27, 2020); Aneta Kyzioł, “Kabarety jak berety,” Polityka, August 12, 2014, 23–25. Video footage and press photographs from the demonstration show a few protesters wearing kippahs or otherwise identifying as Jewish (e.g. via self-made T-shirts or placards proclaiming “I am a communist Jewish-mason cyclist” or “Judeo-communists salute you”). See Gretkowska “Szydercy i krzyżowcy,” 19; “Krakowskie Przedmieście 4 miesiące później cz. 1,” Telewizja Trwam, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndUyuas9DT8, at 3:00 (accessed May 30, 2020). One of the speakers over the “open megaphone” was the journalist Dawid Wildstein, a member of the Forum of Polish Jews, who expressed his support for the Smolensk cross defenders as a persecuted minority. “Krakowskie Przedmieście 4 miesiące później cz. 3,” Telewizja Trwam, www.youtube.com/watch? v=EOAWwwR6Zbo, at 1:30 (accessed May 30, 2020). For example, “Krakowskie Przedmieście 4 miesiące później cz. 3,” at 0:24, 1:30, 1:58. Mikołejko, Między zbawieniem a Smoleńskiem, 151; Zbigniew Nosowski “Co sprawa krzyża powiedziała nam o polskim Kościele?,” Znak December (2010): 81–83; Morawiec, “Komorowski otworzył puszkę Pandory.”

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triggered anything but the anticipated “avalanche of laicization in Poland.”326 With the unprecedented rise of right-wing populism and religious nationalism, the Catholic Church has gained even more influence and resources to continue playing a central role in the country’s political life. At the same time, popular expressions of nationalism have increasingly come to rely on religious symbols and Catholic performativity.327 This seemingly paradoxical development is not really surprising if we take into consideration the fact that rebellious rituals, especially those of a carnivalesque type, have the capacity to preserve the political and social order by providing an emergency release valve for social unrest.328 What is more, even if they pushed the boundaries of what many Poles found acceptable in the public use of the nation’s key symbols, the pro-secularist protests in Warsaw were devoid of any true revolutionary intent.329 The protesters from Krakowskie Przedmieście did not intend to hijack the sign of the cross for their own use, nor did they demand its abolishment or permanent removal. Despite its radical iconoclasm, the rally contested not the symbol of the cross per se, but merely its location at the seat of Poland’s executive power. After all, the rallying cry of the carnivalesque crowd in Krakowskie Przedmieście was “To church [with it]!” (“Do kościoła!”) and a number of protesters, who shared their views over the “open megaphone,” emphasized their Catholic beliefs.330 The initiator of the demonstration, Dominik Taras, himself expressed this view. “It is not that I do not want the cross, I just want it to stand somewhere else,” he clarified in a press interview, also admitting that he had gone to confession before the demonstration to hear the opinion of a priest.331 After the cross was finally removed by the presidential administration, he also emphasized that “this cross deserved respect” and expressed disappointment that the removal did not take place in the form of “a beautiful church ceremony with a procession, in the presence of the bishop and the boy scouts.”332 326

327

328 329

330 331

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Kurski, “Komentarz,” 1. See also Leszczyński, “Pod krzyżem,” 16; Kalukin “Krzyżowcy w sercu nowoczesności,” 15. The most prominent examples from the last few years include the yearly March of Independence, which in 2017 ran under the motto “We want God!” (“My chcemy Boga!”). Aronoff and Kubik, Anthropology and Political Science, 102. Sixty-six percent of Poles did not approve of the pro-secularist protests in Krakowskie Przedmieście. For comparison, the rate of disapproval of the Smolensk cross defenders was 72 percent in the same poll. Pankowski, “Opinie o wydarzeniach przed Pałacem Prezydenckim,” 2. “Krakowskie Przedmieście 4 miesiące później cz. 1,” at 5:22; 5:52. Katarzyna Świerczyńska and Grzegorz Łakomski, “Jak Rambo chciał porwać krzyż,” Wprost, August 22, 2010, 14. Dominik Taras, cited in Agata Nowakowska and Dominika Wielowieyska, “Krzyż żąda dostępu do morza,” Gazeta Wyborcza, October 13, 2010, 16.

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The enduring importance of religion to Poles, at least on a declarative level, undoubtedly continues to influence all aspects of Polish political life, including the demands for a more consistent separation of church and state.333 Some observers of the Smolensk cross defense indeed went as far as to interpret the conflict in Krakowskie Przedmieście as a confrontation between “different shades of Catholicism.”334 Certainly, pro-secularist protest culture in Poland both draws on established historical traditions and continues to play a role in ongoing political struggles within the country, contributing to the LGBT movement, the campaign in defense of women’s rights, and, most recently, demonstrations demanding justice for victims of pedophilia within the Catholic Church. At the same time, however, the pro-secularist agenda remains trapped within the symbolic frame determined by the emotional appeal of Christian nationalism’s Romantic heritage. And the debate about the limits to appropriation and creative subversion of these symbols is still a sensitive subject in Polish society.

Conclusions Both the Smolensk cross and its counterpart made of beer cans announced new and daring political projects. While the former became a rallying sign of the right-wing populist shift on the Polish political scene, the latter signaled the advent of new, liberal, and openly anticlerical opposition that has become increasingly vocal in the last decade. In both cases, the cross served as an emotional catalyst in mobilizing against the structure. While the defenders of the cross opposed the ruling party, seeking to delegitimize it as allied with presumed enemies of Poland, pro-secularist protesters used the subverted symbol of the cross to oppose both the government, failing to uphold the principles of a secular state, and the Smolensk cross defenders, who in their eyes threatened the principles of democracy. Adapting the dominant symbols and performative practices of 1980s antiCommunist dissent, the Smolensk cross defenders positioned their protest within the heroic tradition of Polish national upheavals. The “moralization” of their agenda helped them establish the missing link between earlier antistructural protests against foreign or undemocratic rule and their own demonstration. At the same time, the “thick” connection between the movement’s various interlocking symbols and the intensely exclusionary character of their narrative permitted the mobilization of only a fairly limited demographic. 333

334

In a survey from 2020, 91 percent of Poles professed varying degrees of religious commitment; 9 percent declared themselves atheists. Despite the fact that the number of Poles regularly attending church services has been continuously decreasing over the last two decades, self-declarations of religious commitment remain very constant. Marta Bożewicz, Religijność Polaków w ostatnich 20 latach (Warsaw: CBOS, 2020). Michał Olszewski, “Pokorni słudzy,” Tygodnik Powszechny, August 22, 2010, 14.

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This rather atypical feature of the Smolensk antistructure revealed an underlying populist logic. By accentuating the divisions within Polish society and proclaiming themselves defenders of the disenfranchised and marginalized against an all-powerful elite, the Smolensk communitas could view itself as anti-hegemonic, even if the symbolic repertoire it used (the cross and Catholic ritual) had belonged to the established and privileged mainstream since 1989. By disavowing the ruling elite of the Third Republic as foreign-manipulated usurpers, the takeover of their canonized symbolic script could be cast as a rebellious and emancipatory gesture. Although the Smolensk cross defenders mobilized only a minority of Poles, they successfully created “discursive opportunities”335 for right-wing populists and laid the foundations for a movement that was to gain political momentum in the years to come. Immortalized in numerous documentaries, photo albums, media reports, and works of fiction, the dramatic struggle for the cross in front of the Presidential Palace gained iconic status, becoming the founding myth for a political movement that carried Jarosław Kaczyński’s PiS to electoral victories in 2015 and 2019. The new political elite, emerging on the heels of the right-wing populist shift, also continued to refer to the “transcendental cause”336 of the Smolensk cross defenders on their banners. Thus the idea of a moral renewal and a “total change” coupled with a persistent focus on investigating the “true” reasons for the Smolensk plane crash entered the core political agenda of the victorious PiS party. This “sacralization” of PiS politics also helped the party justify radical infringements on liberal democracy and the constitutional order of the state as interventions in the name of a higher good. Very tellingly, too, PiS opened its first term in power with a symbolic gesture that again involved the symbol of the cross. After assuming the office of prime minister in 2015, Beata Szydło exchanged the clock hanging in the Council of Ministers’ assembly hall for a crucifix – a statement that was quickly interpreted as illustrating the kind of change the PiS party would bring to Polish politics.337 The pro-secularist protesters, mobilizing for action under the nonpartisan banner of a secular state, appropriated and subverted the symbol of the cross as a vehicle for rebellious rites of reversal. Their language of the carnivalesque was daring and innovative – a typical feature of newly established cultural systems.338 By humorously subverting symbols belonging to the national canon, pro-secularists exhibited both a critical distance towards them and 335 336 337

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Kotwas and Kubik, “Symbolic Thickening of Public Culture,” 445. Zúquete, “Populism and Religion,” 589. “Zamiast zegara – krzyż. Gdzie? W Sali obrad Rady Ministrów. Beata Kempa: To symbol miłości,” Radio Tok.fm, www.tokfm.pl/Tokfm/7,145400,19324845,zamiast-zegara-krzyz -gdzie-w-sali-obrad-rady-ministrow.html (accessed June 1, 2020); Zbigniew Mikołejko, “Władza bezwstydu,” Polityka, March 23–29, 2016, 16–18 here 17. Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors, 255.

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a critical engagement with them, tapping into their affective potential to gain resonance for their own cause. The subversive crosses could thus communicate disapproval towards the “Smolensk religion” and the hegemonic presence of religious symbols in the public space in a much more impactful way than the DNA installation, which essentially carried the same message. This conversion of religious symbols from the Polish national canon into subversive icons of protest against ostracism, discrimination, and the hegemony of the conservative worldview has become more widespread in recent years, indicating new strategies of response to exclusionary populist rhetoric. The level of controversy and public outrage triggered, for example, by the image of Our Lady of Częstochowa with a rainbow-colored halo circulated in 2019 by protesters demanding transparency in the investigation into pedophilia within the Catholic Church again demonstrated the high emotional efficacy of subverting such symbols.339 Christened “Our Lady of Equality” (“Matka Boska Równościowa”) and framed as a symbol of tolerance, inclusion, and compassion towards the persecuted, the modified icon could only resonate as it did because it belonged to the canon of Polish national symbols. Perhaps the most paradoxical finding of this comparative analysis of the Smolensk cross defense and its opponents is the degree to which “political Catholicism” turned out to be more secular in nature than expected, while the pro-secularist protests demonstrated a Catholic underpinning. Though steeped in religious iconography and performativity, the cross defense revealed a deep chasm between the political instrumentalization of religion as a symbol of belonging and the system of values, beliefs, and principles preached by the Catholic Church. The tensions between the cross defenders and the Catholic hierarchy in particular brought this incompatibility to light. Religious codes were referenced around the Smolensk cross, but in the service of a very secular agenda. This was per se nothing new, as such decontextualization of religious symbols had a long tradition in Poland; the Smolensk cross defense demonstrated, however, the extent to which religious populism intensified that process. At the same time, the carnivalesque counterdemonstration in favor of more separation between church and state highlighted the extent to which Catholic beliefs and symbolic repertories as well as a widespread consensus about the presence of religion in private lives underlay the pro-secularist agenda. While 339

Kacper Sulowski, “Policja weszła do mieszkania Elżbiety Podleśnej o 6 rano. Postawiono jej zarzut obrażania uczuć religijnych,” Gazeta Wyborcza, May 6, 2019, https://warszawa.wyborcza.pl/warszawa/7,54420,24756831,policja-u-aktywistkielzbiety-podlesnej-zarekwirowany-telefon.html (accessed June 1, 2020); Kamil Siałkowski, “Elżbietę Podleśną zatrzymano za Matkę Boską z tęczową aureolą. ‘Powinni tylko wręczyć wezwanie,’” Gazeta Wyborcza, May 13, 2019, https://wars zawa.wyborcza.pl/warszawa/7,54420,24781740,elzbiete-podlesna-zatrzymano-zamatke-boska-z-teczowa-aureola.html (accessed June 1, 2020).

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the rebellious rites enacted around the Smolensk cross contained a visibly iconoclastic component, the secularist demands were still framed within a general recognition that Catholicism had its place within Polish society, even if the boundaries of its presence in the public space needed to be renegotiated. This and the fact that a majority of Poles still declare some level of religious affiliation might suggest that future Polish “wars of symbols,” regardless of the agenda behind them and the degree to which they challenge the Catholic Church, will continue to play out on the familiar turf framed not only by Catholic references but also by a Catholic sensibility.

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u Conclusion

The cross has taken on a life of its own in the Polish political realm. While for a great majority of Poles it still constitutes the most sacred symbol of their faith, denoting Jesus Christ’s sacrifice for humanity and salvation, the intensity with which the symbol has been used in a political context over the centuries has hugely impacted its semantic field. This book has demonstrated how, since the middle of the nineteenth century, the cross constantly featured on banners in struggles with a clearly secular agenda, and became radically decontextualized from its primary religious significance. In Warsaw in 1861 it stood for an alliance of Poles and Jews against the tsarist yoke, whereas in Bobrujsk in 1918 it became a symbol of Polish supremacy over the country’s minorities. In 1960 in Nowa Huta it provided a rallying sign for protest against state socialism, whereas in 1980 in Olsztyn it was employed in a May Day celebration. No other symbol throughout Polish history has been riven by such contradictions. The cross in Poland occupies the unquiet space between religion and politics. This liminal position has had great significance for the symbol’s immense popularity in the world of politics. For one thing, it has frequently provided a safe frame for dissent, allowing different generations of protesters a convenient “exit option.” Switching from protesting to praying, demonstrators under the symbol of the cross always had the flexibility to recoil into the religious mode to avoid repression. Conversely, however, the cross has also provided powerful moral legitimation for actions performed in its shadow, be it protests against oppressive power holders or symbolic gestures of domination by the ruling structure. Yet the liminality of the cross lies not only in the fact that it straddles the realms of the spiritual and the political, but also in its exceptional boundarymaintaining potential. The symbol’s extreme polarizing function derives from its primary meaning as a symbol of the Christian covenant with God. This unavoidably invests any political or military conflict fought under the symbol of the cross with eschatological implications. Opponents of the cross are more than political adversaries – they become morally damned forces of evil. By the

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same token, those brandishing the cross as their emblem benefit from “a transcendental legitimation of their goals.”1 For a century and a half, different generations of Poles have defined what they consider to be the core of their nation with the help of the cross, and the cross has also served Polish state authorities in expressing (ethnic or ideological) hegemony over their subjects. The symbol has repeatedly been raised in the name of the righteous “core of the Polish nation” against the “Other,” providing a banner that both enjoys a strong emotional appeal and is highly polarizing. The cross has thus come to mark a site of confrontation and negotiation of identities, but also, perhaps unexpectedly, a venue of engagement for liminal groups, be they nineteenth-century assimilated Jews manifesting their loyalty to the Polish national cause or women demanding to be heard in the secularizing atmosphere of the early socialist public sphere. The history of the symbol demonstrates both its malleability and its irresistible attraction for insurgents, political activists, and protesters of different colors. The cross has served many agendas, but it always becomes particularly salient in moments of radical change. The cross grants political projects a moral imprimatur, stifles opposition, shocks, intimidates, and grants visibility. Millennia old, and enshrined in tradition, in the political realm it often legitimizes the new and the vulnerable. In the second half of the nineteenth century the cross emerged as a unifying symbol of an unprecedented coalition of forces. During the 1861 wave of antiRussian demonstrations and the ensuing January Uprising, Polish rebels used the cross as a rallying sign to marshal not only Catholic Poles but also Jews and Orthodox Ruthenians expected to join the antistructural upheaval against the repressive tsarist rule. This interethnic alliance professed a set of very progressive goals, including not only national liberation, but also equal rights for Jews and the abolishment of serfdom. The cross thus stood for political ideas that were both new and revolutionary. Yet, even as political actors deployed it as an inclusive symbol in this period, it also marked a fundamental boundary: that between the Orthodox imperial rulers, considered as barbarians devoid of moral principles and therefore unfit to rule, and their multiethnic EastCentral European subjects. As Poland was regaining its independence in the aftermath of World War I, the meaning of the cross was radically different from that of sixty years before. If the revolutionary National Government of 1863 used the cross in its coat of arms, foregrounding the union of Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine against a common foe, the same symbol resonated very differently after the fall of the empires and in the early years of Polish national sovereignty. This time the cross communicated a sense of military dominance and moral superiority over 1

Ulrich Willems, “Religion und soziale Bewegungen – Dimensionen Forschungsfeldes,” Forschungsjournal NSB 17, 4 (2004): 28–41, here 34.

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the (real or presumed) enemies of the new “reborn” state – the atheist Soviets and the ethnic minorities inhabiting Poland’s multiethnic eastern borderlands. The symbol came to legitimize the new and vulnerable political project of a Polish nation-state that not only faced the herculean task of uniting territories that for over a century had belonged to three different empires, but also needed to legitimize and defend its eastern border that arbitrarily cut through the territories of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The new Polish state thus harnessed the cross as a tool of colonization and a powerful border marker. As the cross became shorthand for Polish ethnic nationalism, however, it came to denote a national community that excluded Lithuanians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Jews – all of whom were now to face harsher policies as de facto second-class citizens of the new Polish nation-state. After the Polish state began to take shape in the aftermath of the double occupation and the unprecedented bloodshed World War II wreaked on its territory, the cross emerged again as a symbol of antistructure and a carrier of counterhegemonic sentiments. The political idea that the cross embodied was, again, a daring one. The symbol became a unifying symbol of grassroots resistance against Soviet control. It was harnessed not only to stop secularization measures, but also to delegitimize the Communist power holders as antireligious and hence un-Polish. What is more, the new genre of dissent that emerged in this period, the defense of the cross, also became a tool for women to claim their space in the culture of street protest and voice their own discontent with, among others, the misogyny of the socialist state officials. While the defense of the cross was gaining in popularity and mobilizing a new demographic to join open anti-Communist defiance, the communitas that the cross denoted was not entirely inclusive. Jews, cast as agents of laicization and perpetrators of Stalinist atrocities in Poland, still featured in the shadow of the cross as enemies of the nation. The Solidarity Revolution of 1980 marked a watershed in the history of the cross as a political symbol: the movement’s visual repertoire has left an indelible mark not only on Polish protest culture, but also on Poland’s memorial landscape. The cross served as a source of metaphysical legitimation for the consolidating Solidarity movement and articulated the sacredness of antiCommunist mobilization, understood as a messianic endeavor to liberate Poland from evil. However, despite the fact that it referenced past national upheavals, the cross now clearly denoted change, and not the wish to recreate the ancien régime. As a “privileged signifier” of Solidarity’s postulates, the cross embodied an entirely new political vision, which integrated demands for more participatory democracy with socialist principles. Its tremendous potential to re-code spaces and contents manifested itself most strikingly during Solidarity’s attempts to rebrand May Day, when the cross became part of the hybrid aesthetics that bridged the internationalist with the national and the socialist with the Catholic. The Solidarity Revolution rendered the cross not

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only an extremely capacious symbol, but also a highly inclusive one that, as a default signal of anti-Communism, was employed to mobilize Christians, atheists, and even Jews. Its exclusionary potential remained, however, articulating itself on the right-wing margins of the oppositional discourse, where antisemitic clichés of Jews as enemies of the cross threatening the Polish nation were still very much alive. The “Third Republic,” seeking to define itself vis-à-vis its socialist predecessor, brandished the cross, again, as a symbol of a new order. In the early post-transformation period the symbol denoted an ideological shift which encompassed radical legislative reforms in education, reproductive rights, and church–state relations. It also featured large in the new rituals of public life, which received a manifestly Catholic framing. The cross thus became shorthand for the rising influence of the Church in Poland, and a tool to legitimize the fragile political order of the early post-transformation years, which were marked by economic crises and other anxieties. Those now excluded from the community marked by the cross were not only former party functionaries and supporters of the regime, summarily labeled as “postCommunists,” but also liberals and even officials of the new democratic institutions – like the state ombudsmen who spoke in defense of secular public education. While the symbol’s capacity to solidify new power manifested itself very clearly in the political ritual of the early 1990s, its subversive potential was, likewise, still in place. Pro-secularists, pro-choice activists, and journalists who opposed the pre-eminence of the Catholic worldview in post1989 legislation and public life appropriated the cross in humorous and provocative ways. These militant, satirical, and unforgivingly anticlerical contents tested the boundaries of what was permissible in the public sphere; they provided comic relief and a safety valve for the first wave of posttransformation frustration, but also furnished a blueprint for future, more radical instrumentalizations of the cross. Two decades later, once Poland’s position as the poster child for a successful transition to liberal democracy had been solidified by the country’s accession to NATO (1999) and the European Union (2004), the cross emerged yet again on the barricades of the populist revolution and, in a subverted form, in the hands of its opponents. The wooden cross planted in front of the Presidential Palace in the aftermath of the Smolensk catastrophe became the rallying sign of right-wing populists and their program of “total change.” As they harnessed the symbol to delegitimize the ruling liberals, pro-secularists responded with a carnivalesque and iconoclastic “rite of reversal,” which gained resonance only because it too made use of the symbol of the cross. The Warsaw rally against the Smolensk cross, which ended up being the first such openly anticlerical mass demonstration in Poland, blazed the trail for a new and daring protest aesthetics that appropriated religious symbols in a subversive way.

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Given the complexity and ambivalence encoded in the symbol, two questions come to mind: (1) have its semantic shifts followed an overarching pattern; and (2) how have the accumulated significations of the symbol impacted its users over time? The Turnerian cycle helps us to shed some light on how a single symbol might perform an entirely different function depending on whether it is used to mobilize the public for collective acts of defiance (antistructure) or to help solidify power (structure). These two functions correlate with the two dominant narratives that have surrounded the symbol of the cross in Polish history – that of righteous protest against illegitimate power holders and that of morally grounded supremacy over the country’s Others. While the rubrics of “illegitimate power holders” and “Others” have been filled in different ways over the centuries, these two basic scripts have shown remarkable durability. And this despite the fact that the radical change in ethnic composition of post-1945 Poland redefined the rules of the game in which the cross had first emerged as a symbol of difference from ethnic Others. After World War II the cross continued to signify difference, but in inner-Polish conversations and in a monoethnic environment where an overwhelming majority subscribed, at least nominally, to the same creed. Before 1989, the symbol of the cross helped to maintain the boundary between the nominally atheist Communist authorities and the opposition; after the transformation it has been used to other, for example, liberals, pro-choice activists, and LGBT communities. Another regularity that this cycle of dissent and solidification reveals is the relative openness and inclusivity of the symbol of the cross at the times when it was harnessed to mobilize antistructural protest and its more exclusionary character in periods when it served to consolidate a structure. The story of the Jewish defender of the cross, Michał Landy, and Marek Edelman’s initiative to assemble a floral cross at the Warsaw Ghetto memorial are probably the most striking examples of the inclusive character ascribed to the symbol at certain times. The colonizing symbolic practices of the Second Republic and the ascendency of the cross in post1989 Poland, in contrast, show how any symbol employed to maintain group cohesion is almost by definition exclusionary. An exception to this rule is provided by the Smolensk cross defense, which, though it articulated protest against power holders deemed as illegitimate, employed the cross to stand for a national community defined in very narrow terms. But this particular dynamic relates to the populist logic of the symbolic enterprise in question, which stoked intragroup division in order to give traction to the political ends it served. Although the meaning of the cross has been anything but constant, the symbol has long been canonical in Polish national discourse, and the illusion of continuity in its semantic content has accompanied its entire political history. But how have different generations of Poles made sense of a symbol burdened with such a complex genealogy and beset by contradictions? Geneviè ve Zubrzycki, theorizing on the multilayered nature of the “national sensorium,” argues that symbols are “‘trans-temporal nodes’ – compressing history and condensing layers of

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historical narratives and myths into a single image or object, providing specific interpretive frames to understand the present.”2 This notion of the simultaneity of meanings “condensed” in a symbol echoes Ricœur’s concept of “opacity.”3 But it also suggests a synchronicity in the signification process, as if the mere fact of reusing a symbol implied knowledge of all the different historical interpretations and significations attached to it across time. This static vision of history “compressed” in a symbol does not do justice to the contingency of the articulations of a given symbol and the dynamic nature of political symbols that follow the cycle of contestation and institutionalization. What is more, it fails to answer the question of how collectives make sense of “trans-temporal nodes” that contain mutually exclusive narratives, as in the case at hand. Symbolic rituals clearly do not invoke the full spectrum of “condensed layers” of meaning that accrue around a given national symbol. Each political use of a symbol is selective and involves forgetting. As David Kertzer notes, “[p]olitical rituals erase as much history from our memories as they inscribe on them.”4 The political task at hand in a given situation – the solidification or defiance of power, respectively – requires that only those narratives that validate its message be retrieved. While every political instrumentalization of a symbol solemnly invokes certain key events, personages, and ideological frameworks, it also conveniently pushes others into oblivion. This very mechanism allowed the 2010 Smolensk cross defenders to position their protest both as a continuation of Poland’s national upheavals and as a crusade against, among others, Jewish “enemies of the nation,” while forgetting that nineteenth-century national rebels considered the symbol of the cross an articulation of Polish–Jewish brotherhood. Feeding on the multivocality or “opacity” of symbols, the periodically reconfigured “national sensorium” always refocuses on selected layers of signification.5 A particularly complex political symbol such as the cross will therefore operate less like a sedimentary geological formation, compressing different layers that have accumulated over time, and more like a jukebox: although it stores a wealth of different tunes, it delivers just one at a time, according to the will of the person who presses the button.

The Cross–Jew Dyad The extent to which the story of the Polish cross has been populated by Jews is remarkable. They remain constantly present in the background of Polish figurations of the cross – as subjects, addressees, and symbolic counterpoints. 2

3

4 5

Geneviè ve Zubrzycki, “History and the National Sensorium: Making Sense of Polish Mythology,” Qualitative Sociology 34 (2011): 21–57, here 31. Paul Ricœur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 15. David Kertzer, Ritual, Politics and Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 87. See Ricœur, The Symbolism of Evil, 15.

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In the period in which the symbol of the cross first emerged as an accessory of political protest, it was the figure of the Jewish defender of the cross, Michał Landy, who captured contemporary attention. As a marker of Polish national identity, the cross became the ultimate symbol of Jewish loyalty to the Polish cause and of assimilation. Thus patriotic Polish Jews who were killed in the anti-tsarist demonstrations of 1861 would be commemorated by the Polish majority using the symbol of the cross and were imagined, like Michał Landy, as having completed a “baptism of blood.”6 Relatedly, the Jewish sponsorship of the crucifix for the Bernardine church in Warsaw does not seem to have raised any eyebrows at the time.7 While Catholic Poles read the embrace of the cross on the part of Jews as a natural gesture of political allegiance, this expectation was just a step away from open demands for conversion. There was also a symbolic continuity between the two issues – Polish Jews who converted and were accepted into the nobility were given a coat of arms featuring the symbol of the cross.8 The flip side of the symbol’s role as a touchstone of Polishness was the exclusionary politics of symbols that followed in the period of Poland’s regained statehood. In the aftermath of World War I, as the challenge of consolidating a multiethnic country brought with it new anxieties and the project of visually marking Poland’s borderlands made the cross salient again, Jews were positioned as treacherous foes. Symbols such as the cross towering over the fortress of Bobrujsk were not only tools of othering and humiliation, but also a means of legitimizing violence. Since border crosses helped to frame the armed conflict against the Soviets as a modern crusade, this symbolic policy made the suffering inflicted on “infidels,” including Jews, appear morally justified. And as the symbol of the cross became a marker of Polish hegemony in a multiethnic state, the newly empowered Catholic Church was fueling nationalistically tinted antisemitism with its teachings and publications, while antisemitic discrimination and acts of violence were increasingly taking place under the sign of the cross.9 Just as the symbol came to define the 6

7

8 9

Karol Baliński, Hasło polskie: Poemat (Poznań: Księgarnia Jana Konstantego Żupańskiego, 1862), 9–11. Julian Komar, Warszawskie manifestacje patriotyczne 1860–1861 (Warsaw: PWN, 1970), 91. Jacek Leociak, “‘Strzaskana całość’: Norwid o Żydach,” Teksty Drugie no. 5 (1992): 40. Examples are provided not only by the cross of the First Corps overlooking the site of the pogrom in Bobrujsk, which was later used as the badge of an increasingly racist veterans’ association, but also by interwar Catholic periodicals such as Rycerz Niepokalanej, Mały Dziennik, and Pro Christo, in which antisemitic content was accompanied by Christian religious symbols. For instance, the title page of Rycerz Niepokalanej from March 1936 displayed the image of the crucified Jesus and Jews rejoicing at his death. See Alina Cała, Żyd – Wróg odwieczny? Antysemityzm w Polsce i jego źródła (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Nisza, 2012), 383–414; Ronald Modras, The Catholic Church and Antisemitism: Poland 1933–1939 (London: Routledge, 1994), 144–157; Konrad Sadkowski, “Clerical

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perimeter of the nation, the Jew increasingly became the antinome of a “true” Pole and a “harmful alien who d[id] not belong in the Polish nation.”10 The role of the Jews as negative correlates of the symbol of the cross did not end with the Holocaust. After World War II the figure of the Jew as an enemy of the cross continued to haunt the anti-systemic protests now being aimed at the Communists. In the early socialist period, as resistance to state-sanctioned secularization efforts became an arena in which to oppose the political system, seemingly offhand references to Jews during the first cross defenses revealed a new myth at work. The old misconception that all Jews supported the Bolsheviks morphed into a narrative in which Jews featured as solely responsible for the installation of Communism in Poland. This vision, in the context of which secular schools looked “like synagogues” to Polish pupils and local Jewish power holders were believed to have prevented the construction of a church in Nowa Huta, is evidence that Jews continued to loom large as mythical “enemies of the cross” and omnipotent agents of secularization even in clearly intra-Polish ideological conflicts in which they had no agency whatsoever. This topos of Jews being to blame for the repressive policies of the postwar regime persisted even during the decade of Solidarity, despite the fact that the rediscovery of Jewish heritage and the establishment of a Jewish–non-Jewish dialogue were part of the democratic opposition’s agenda. The image of a Star of David clashing with the Latin cross, as pictured on the cover of a samizdat brochure, might have been an extreme articulation of this sentiment, but it certainly was not the only expression of latent antisemitism lingering within Solidarity’s highly sacralized symbolic register. The planned floral cross that never materialized in the Warsaw Ghetto – which most strikingly embodied the overlap of grassroots Jewish initiatives to commemorate the Holocaust with Solidarity’s commitment to inscribing the Ghetto Uprising into the annals of Polish national upheavals – was, likewise, a highly ambivalent project. While some read it as a unifying symbol of interdenominational antiCommunist mobilization, it was also indicative of a tendency within the antiCommunist opposition to Christianize the Holocaust and appropriate the ethos of the Ghetto Uprising to legitimize current political struggles. Some of these topoi reappeared in the immediate post-transformation period, when the Auschwitz cross controversy revealed with full force what

10

Nationalism and Antisemitism: Catholic Priests, Jews, and Orthodox Christians in the Lublin Region, 1918–1939,” in Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland, edited by Robert Blobaum (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 171–188; Joanna Beata Michlic, Poland’s Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 69–130. Michlic, Poland’s Threatening Other, 78. See also Brian Porter-Szücs, Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity and Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 295–313.

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Stanisław Krajewski has termed the Polish “competition for the glory of suffering.”11 Rewriting their national history after 1989, in the case of Auschwitz Poles were happy to stick to the Communist metanarrative, which had showcased “Poland’s citizens” as the camp’s principal victims, obscuring the fact that an overwhelming majority of those who suffered there were Jews.12 The forest of crosses installed on the perimeter of the camp in 1998 thus provided new symbolic means of reinforcing a message that was by no means novel – that of the primacy of Polish suffering during World War II. Similarly, the crosses on the monument to the victims of Soviet deportations erected in 1995 on the territory of the former Warsaw Ghetto embodied both a will to retell national history by plugging the gaps in official commemoration and the less manifest desire to overwrite a space of great symbolic significance for Jewish suffering.13 But, apart from these grand commemorative gestures, the new symbolic codes whereby the post-1989 Polish state constituted itself in opposition to the socialist period permeated all aspects of daily life. The cross, omnipresent on memorials, in schools, in public institutions, and during state events, functioned as a marker of the new political order. Meanwhile, though Polish society, ridden with posttransformation anxieties, had plenty of new preoccupations, including economic reform, lustration, and the debate on reproductive rights, references to Jews – as an ominous caste ruling Poland14 or agents of moral corruption15 – still featured prominently in the discourse of the early 1990s.16 Two decades later, Poland’s political landscape had changed, but the dyad of the cross and the Jew remained. Right-wing populist discourse, which gained momentum in the aftermath of the 2010 Smolensk catastrophe, reactivated centuries-old antisemitic tropes. The Smolensk cross defenders revived the vision of a Jewish conspiracy against Poland in which Jews were cast, once again, as enemies of the cross. This time they were blamed not only for plotting the removal of the cross from Krakowskie Przedmieście, but also for the alleged assassination of President Kaczyński. While these topoi had a long tradition, there was also a new development that took place in 2010. For the 11 12 13 14

15

16

Stanisław Krajewski, Żydzi, Judaizm, Polska (Warsaw: Vocatio, 1997), 172. See Marek Kucia, Auschwitz jako fakt społeczny (Kraków: Universitas, 2005), 186–196. Elżbieta Janicka, Festung Warschau (Warsaw: Krytyka Polityczna, 2011), 81–84. For example, in the form of popular campaigns “unmasking” Jews among high-ranking politicians and other public figures. See Cała, Żyd – Wróg odwieczny?, 550–558. The figure of Jerzy Urban, a former spokesman for the Council of Ministers and, since 1990, editor in chief of the highly popular and staunchly anticlerical satirical weekly NIE, became a particularly prominent target for antisemitic attacks of this kind. See Jerzy Urban, “A więc proces,” NIE, June 20, 1991, 1. A perspicacious visual commentary on these new Polish anxieties was supplied by a 1991 cartoon entitled “Polish Fears.” Alongside the specter of AIDS, it featured an Orthodoxclad Jew. Anonymous, “Strachy Polskie,” NIE, January 31, 1991, 8.

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first time, the trope of Jews as negative correlates of the cross was also employed subversively. Pro-secularist protesters at Dominik Taras’ nighttime rally playfully adopted Jewish identity as a way to voice their rejection of the chauvinist rhetoric perpetuated by the cross defenders. The figures of “Jews,” “Judeo-communists,” and “Masons” thus served to represent the symbolic antipode to exclusionary religious populism and ethnic nationalism. In appropriating a stigmatized identity, young Poles protesting against the presence of the cross in front of the Presidential Palace converted it into a positive, community-building label denoting openness, celebration of difference, and nonconformism. For pro-secularists, the self-proclaimed Jewish identity served not only to underscore a radical difference from their opponents, but also to express a set of values, defined very much in line with Maurice Blanchot’s dictum that “[t]he Jews incarnate [. . .] the refusal of myths, the abandonment of idols, the recognition of an ethical order that manifests itself in respect for the law.”17 Protesters demanding the enactment of the constitutional separation of church and state and unmasking the Smolensk cross as an idol both transformed the figure of the threatening Other into an empowering identity and reframed the old correlation of the Jew and the cross. Juxtaposed with the vision of Jews who threaten the Polish nation by opposing the cross, these self-proclaimed “Jews” defended Poland’s constitutional order in seeking to protect the secular character of the state and “refusing the myth” embodied by the Smolensk cross. On the one hand, the relation between the cross and the figure of the Jew may seem only natural. After all, the very symbol of the crucifix represents a Jew. The Jews are the main protagonists in the story of Jesus’s crucifixion. And, in a long-standing ecclesiastical tradition, Jews have principally been portrayed as deicides bearing transgenerational guilt for the crucifixion of Christ. All this creates a highly charged and ambivalent link between the figure of the Jew and the cross, reproduced over the ages not only in religious teachings but also in popular culture. The continued presence of the figure of the Jew in the political history of the cross, however, and the longevity of the Jew–cross dyad, in particular after the Holocaust, raises some questions. Since the nineteenth century, the primary semantic content of the symbol of the cross in Poland has been overlaid with new significations, including Polish messianism, ethnic nationalism, and antiCommunism. Yet all of these remained linked to the figure of the Jew. As the cross came to denote a national community, the symbol became a tool of communication with the Jewish minority – subsuming it within or excluding it from the national body and incarnating the (changing) expectations of the Catholic majority. 17

Maurice Blanchot, cited in Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity,” Critical Inquiry 19, 4 (1993): 693–725, here 698.

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What became, however, of the symbol’s function in a political context in which Jews constituted a numerically irrelevant minority? When the symbol of the cross was adopted to exclude other “Others” in post-1945 Poland, why did the specter of the Jew remain compulsively coupled with it? Should we regard this phenomenon as a knee-jerk emanation of “antisemitism without the Jews,” rooted, as Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel has diagnosed, in “Polish Catholicism [. . .] infected with anti-Judaism,”18 or are there other factors at play in its continuing appeal too? While the figure of the Jew as an enemy of the cross derives directly from antisemitic doctrines that continued to be taught at least until the Second Vatican Council and that plague Polish Catholicism to this day, the Jew–cross dyad remains politically productive for other reasons as well. First of all, it is a symbolic constellation with enormous emotional force. Uniting an element from the sphere of the sacred – something that feels familiar and intimate – with another that the Polish Catholic audience has been conditioned to consider as alien, dissonant, and potentially threatening, the Jew–cross dyad has the capacity to cause discomfort, anxiety, and indignation. Activating both religious (Jews as deicides) and political (Jews as Communists fighting religion) templates, it resonates more strongly than other symbolic scripts. Secondly, the dyad is inherently ambivalent in meaning. It affords various readings and evokes a series of potentially incompatible images – of both Michał Landy carrying the cross at the head of the anti-Russian demonstration and the pogrom in the shade of the Bobrujsk cross; of both Marek Edelman envisaging a floral cross in the Warsaw ghetto and the Smolensk cross defenders fabricating a Jewish conspiracy against Poland. This complexity makes the dyad easier to recycle, appropriate, or subvert. Thirdly, the dyad belongs to the most fundamental narrative structures of Polish nationalism. If modern Polish nationalism was founded on the dichotomy between “real” (Catholic, valiant, self-emancipated, heroic, civilized) Poles and (treacherous, alien, threatening, disloyal, backward, Communist) Jews, after the Holocaust it became necessary to find an alternative, radically different Other capable of sustaining the national self-identity. But although nationalist discourses in post-1945 Poland have adopted different Other figures – including the Communist, the post-Communist, the liberal, the EU, the Muslim refugee, and the LGBT community – none of them have proved as resonant as that of “the Jew.” And the Jew, therefore, remains a phantom limb of Polish nationalism, bearing the structural load of the country’s self-image.

18

Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel, “Antysemityzm bez Żydów,” Znak 643 (2008): 77– 85, here 78–79.

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The Future of the Symbol of the Cross The cross continues to resonate in Polish political life. After the 2010 standoff on Krakowskie Przedmieście, a debate on the presence of the cross in the public space flared up again in 2011 when Member of Parliament Janusz Palikot proposed removing the crucifix from the Parliament’s plenary hall.19 While his formal request to the speaker of the lower chamber was denied,20 the initiative brought the issue back into the public eye, provoking vigorous protests from the Polish Episcopate and PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński, who argued that the cross was “a symbol of European culture” and compared Palikot’s demand to an attempt at “liquidating the nation.”21 The debate also

Fig. 35. Jakub Baryła attempting to stop the LGBT march in Płock, 2019. Photo: Szymon Łabiński.

19

20

21

Katarzyna Wiśniewska and Agata Nowakowska, “Krzyż i podatki,” Gazeta Wyborcza, October 16, 2011, https://classic.wyborcza.pl/archiwumGW/7491573/Krzyz-i-podatki (accessed June 28, 2020). After their motion was rejected by the speaker of the Sejm, a group of MPs filed a civil suit against the speaker for infringing on their freedom of conscience and religion. In 2013, they lost the case. See Bogdan Wróblewski and Katarzyna Wiśniewska, “Sam krzyż nikogo nie nawraca,” Gazeta Wyborcza, January 15, 2013, https://classic.wyborcza.pl /archiwumGW/7693634/Sam-krzyz-nikogo-nie-nawraca (accessed June 28, 2020). Jarosław Kaczyński, “Prawo i Sprawiedliwość i krzyż,” Gazeta Wyborcza, October 13, 2011, https://classic.wyborcza.pl/archiwumGW/7490588/Prawo-i-Sprawiedliwosci-krzyz (accessed June 28, 2020).

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revealed that a substantial majority of Poles supported the presence of the cross in the parliament building.22 In 2019 the symbol of the cross made headlines again after the fifteen-yearold Jakub Baryła attempted to block an LGBT march in Płock, holding up a large wooden crucifix against the approaching demonstration. Insisting that he had acted “on the inspiration of the Holy Ghost,”23 Baryła copied a gesture familiar from hagiographic representations of a Catholic military chaplain, Ignacy Skorupka, who was shot dead during the Polish–Soviet war of 1920 and is depicted in popular culture leading Polish soldiers to battle with a crucifix in his raised right hand.24 While the performative intervention had no direct effect, as Baryła was quickly removed from the site by police, “the Boy with the Crucifix” quickly became a celebrity of the right-wing media, and news of his iconic gesture circulated widely both in Poland and abroad.25 Since the refugee crisis of 2015, the symbol of the cross has increasingly been instrumentalized in anti-immigrant discourse across Europe, aimed in particular against Muslim refugees.26 The 2017 Polish initiative “Rosary to the Borders,” which gathered 4,000 Poles at the country’s borders to pray the rosary and thus “save Poland,” communicated a similar message, especially because the event was scheduled on a Catholic holiday established to celebrate the 1571 victory of the Catholic Holy League over the Ottomans at Lepanto.27 In the fall of 2021, as the Polish–Belarusian border turned into a site of another major refugee crisis, the “March of Independence,” an annual demonstration 22

23

24

25

26

27

Wojciech Szacki, “Krzyż jest: I ma zostać,” Gazeta Wyborcza, October 17, 2011, https://classic .wyborcza.pl/archiwumGW/7492202/Krzyz-jest–I-ma-zostac (accessed June 28, 2020). Łukasz Grzegorczyk, “15-latek blokował z krzyżem Marsz Równości w Płocku: Tłumaczy nam, że . . . zrobiłby to jeszcze raz,” natemat.pl, August 28, 2019, https://natemat.pl /282769,dlaczego-jakub-baryla-stal-z-krzyzem-na-marszu-rownosci-w-plocku-wywiad (accessed June 28, 2020). See, for example, Jerzy Kossak’s painting Cud nad Wisłą, Bitwa warszawska from 1930, later reproduced on postcards for Jerzy Hoffman’s feature film Bitwa Warszawska 1920 (2011). “15-latek z krzyżem próbował zablokować Marsz Równości ‘Chciałem przypomnieć gest ks. Skorupki,’” Do Rzeczy, August 11, 2019, https://dorzeczy.pl/kraj/110716/15-latekz-krzyzem-probowal-zablokowac-marsz-rownosci-chcialem-przypomniec-gest-ks-skor upki.html (accessed June 28, 2020); Joachim Rienhardt, “Rechte Judendliche in Polen – Jakubs Kreuzzug gegen Schwule und Lesben,” Stern, www.stern.de/gesellschaft/polen– jakub-baryłas-kreuzzug-gegen-schwule-und-lesben-8947436.html (accessed June 28, 2020); Francesco Lepore, “Jakub Baryła ferma con la croce il Pride di Płock: La foto è virale,” GayNews, August 13, 2019, www.gaynews.it/2019/08/13/polonia-jakub-barylapride-plock-lgbt-simone-pillon (accessed June 28, 2020). Rogers Brubaker, “Between Nationalism and Civilizationism: The European Populist Movement in Comparative Perspective,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 40, 8 (2017): 1191–1226; Florian Höhne and Torsten Meireis, Religion and Neo-nationalism in Europe (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2020). For a more in-depth analysis of this event, see Marta Kotwas and Jan Kubik, “Symbolic Thickening of Public Culture and the Rise of Right-Wing Populism in Poland,” East European Politics and Societies and Cultures 33, 2 (2019): 435–471, here 435–437.

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of far-right organizations in Warsaw, brandished the symbol of the cross again to voice anti-EU sentiments, and to mobilize popular support for the “defence of Polish borders.”28 The motif of the cross also looms large in Polish–Ukrainian tensions. As the influx of Ukrainian economic migrants, and war refugees in the wake of the Russian annexation of the Crimea and the subsequent invasion of the easternmost provinces of Ukraine in 2014, triggered anti-Ukrainian sentiments on the Polish far-right, references to the Volhynian Massacre, an action of ethnic cleansing performed by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA, Ukrayins’ka povstans’ka armiia) against Polish civilians in 1943, began to surface with greater intensity in the public space.29 The logotype of the word “Wołyń” (Volhynia), with the cross replacing the letter “ł,” has been popularized both by the private foundation Wołyń Pamiętamy (We Remember Volhynia), which circulated it on billboards, car stickers, and T-shirts, and by the state-run Institute of National Remembrance, which in 2021 launched a commemorative project adopting the same title and logotype.30 The most prominent use of the motif of the cross in this context 28

29

30

Jakub Chełmiński and Edyta Różańska, “Marsz Niepodległości 2021: 11 listopada pochód narodowców Bąkiewicza idzie przez Warszawę,” Gazeta Wyborcza, November 11, 2021, https://warszawa.wyborcza.pl/warszawa/14,54420,27792293,marsz-niepodleglosci -2021-pochod-narodowcow-jako-swieto.html (accessed December 9, 2021); “Marsz Niepodległości w Warszawie: Idą narodowcy ze wsparciem władzy PiS,” Polityka, November 11, 2021, www.polityka.pl/tygodnikpolityka/kraj/2143022,1,marszniepodleglosci-w-warszawie-ida-narodowcy-ze-wsparciem-wladzy-pis.read (accessed December 9, 2021). The conflict between ethnic Poles and Ukrainians in the Volhynia region claimed the lives of 40,000–60,000 Polish civilians and about 10,000 Ukrainians, killed by Polish self-defense units in retaliation. Some Jews who had survived the Holocaust by bullets on this territory fell victim to the ethnic cleansing performed by Ukrainian nationalists. See Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 170; Timothy Snyder, “The Causes of Ukrainian–Polish Ethnic Cleansing 1943,” Past & Present 179 (2003): 197–234, here 224. On the relation between the memorialization of the Volhynian Massacre and contemporary anti-Ukrainian sentiments in Poland, see Paweł Smoleński, “Prokuratorzy ścigali rocznie średnio trzech hejterów: Jeden ścigał trzydziestu: Maciej Młynarczyk nigdy nie przegrał,” Gazeta Wyborcza, September 3, 2020, https://wyborcza.pl/magazyn/7,124059,26264019,prokuratorzy-scigali-rocznie-srednio -trzech-hejterow-jeden.html (accessed December 13, 2021); Martyna Kośka, “‘Tak się wyrasta na Ukraińca’: Ani swoi, ani obcy w Przemyślu,” WP Ważny Temat, July 15, 2021, https://jedziemywpolske.wp.pl/tak-sie-wyrasta-na-ukrainca-ani-swoi-ani-obcy-w-prze myslu (accessed December 14, 2021); Edyta Gietka, “Błądzący pomnik wołyński,” Polityka, April 2, 2019, www.polityka.pl/tygodnikpolityka/spoleczenstwo/1787816,1, bladzacy-pomnik-wolynski.read (accessed December 14, 2021). “Projekt IPN i Teatru Nie Teraz ‘Wołyń 1943. Pamiętamy,’” https://ipn.gov.pl/pl/aktual nosci/146840,Projekt-IPN-i-Teatru-Nie-Teraz-Wolyn-1943-Pamietamy.html (accessed December 13, 2021).

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was, however, the fourteen-meter-high monument to the victims of the Volhynian Massacre, the inauguration of which on the side of a highway close to the Ukrainian border was planned for 2022.31 The central element of this controversial memorial was a massive Latin cross with a dead infant, impaled on a trident, positioned at its center.32 Although, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the massive wave of solidarity with Ukrainians that swept though Poland in its aftermath, anti-Ukrainian narratives subsided and projects like the Volhynian Cross might have lost their momentum, the specter of the Volhynian Massacre may yet return in a new incarnation in the future. The visual language this discourse mobilizes has a long genealogy, referencing earlier Katyn commemorations, and a strong emotional appeal, but it also relies on an implicit juxtaposition of the Latin cross with its Orthodox counterpart that has been a very common pattern in the past. This juxtaposition did not always have an adversarial intention, as in the imagery of the 1863 rebels mobilizing Ruthenians for anti-tsarist resistance, or during the 2010 pro-secularist demonstrations in Warsaw, when Orthodox crosses were sprayed on the sidewalk in protest against the hegemony of Catholic symbols in public space. In other instances, however, as in the case of the Bobrujsk mound, or in the discussion on the use of religious symbols by Solidarity chapters in the regions with a strong Orthodox minority – the Latin cross was in a clear tension with its Orthodox equivalent. This history, as well as the more recent articulations of anti-Ukrainian sentiment by means of the same shorthand, are powerful reminders that, while the Latin cross has been used to articulate the dominance of ethnic Poles over the (variously defined) Others, the latter category has always included Christians, too. All these attempts at harnessing Christian religious symbols to serve right-wing populist agendas point to a potentially dangerous common ground for contemporary Eastern and Western European populisms, both of which increasingly invoke what Rogers Brubaker terms “identitarian Christianism.”33 Polish rightwing populists and their supporters use the symbol of the cross both where the us–them divide is based on strictly national criteria, like in the context of Polish– Ukrainian tensions, and where symbols of Christianity are supposed to serve as 31

32

33

At the time of writing, in August 2022, the community of Jarocin, in south-east Poland, confirmed the plan to host this contested memorial, which was authored by Andrzej Pityński and sponsored by the Polish Army Veterans Association of America. On July 10, 2022, a foundation stone for the memorial was laid down. Piotr Głuchowski, “Pomnik Ofiar Rzezi Wołyńskiej wyląduje na Podkarpaciu: Nie chciał go nawet Rydzyk,” Gazeta Wyborcza, October 11, 2021, https://wyborcza.pl/duzyformat/ 7,127290,27662989,pomnik-ofiar-rzezi-wolynskiej-wyladuje-na-podkarpaciu-nie-chcial.html (accessed December 9, 2021). Brubaker, “Between Nationalism and Civilizationism,” 1193.

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markers of “a civilizational identity understood in antithetical opposition to Islam.”34 With this symbolic strategy being shared by populists from the more secularized Western and Northern European countries as well as their counterparts in countries such as Poland, the cross is likely to remain one of the most emotionally provocative and divisive symbols on the Polish political scene and beyond.

34

Ibid., 1194.

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APPENDIX

Archives AHM AMHP BKC BN ESC FCDCN

FotoKarta FSO

IPN NAC PAU/PAN

Archiwum Historii Mówionej, Warszawa / Oral History Archive, Warsaw Archiwum Muzeum Historii Polski, Warszawa / Archive of the Museum of Polish History, Warsaw Biblioteka Książąt Czartoryskich w Krakowie / The Princes Czartoryski Library in Kraków Biblioteka Narodowa w Warszawie / The National Library in Warsaw Europejskie Centrum Solidarności, Gdańsk / European Solidarity Center, Gdańsk Fundacja Centrum Dokumentacji Czynu Niepodległościowego, Kraków / Foundation Center for the Documentation of Independence Struggles, Kraków Archiwum Fotografii Ośrodka KARTA, Warszawa / The KARTA Center Foundation Photographic Archive, Warsaw Archiv der Forschungsstelle Osteuropa, Bremen / Archive of the Research Center for East European Studies at the University of Bremen Archiwum Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej / Archive of the Institute of National Remembrance Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe / The National Digital Archives Biblioteka Naukowa Polskiej Akademii Umiejętności i Polskiej Akademii Nauk w Krakowie / Scientific Library of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences and Polish Academy of Science in Kraków

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Filmography 10.04.10. Directed by Anita Gargas. Niezależne Wydawnictwo Polskie, 2011, DVD. 10.04.2010: Bądźmy razem. Directed by Alina Mrowińska. Telewizja Polska, 2011, DVD. Anatomia upadku. Directed by Anita Gargas. Niezależne Wydawnictwo Polskie, 2012, DVD. Death of the President. Directed by Su Rynard. Galaxie Productions, 2013. Katastrofa. Directed by Artur Żmijewski. 29 Bienale, 2010, DVD. Krzyż. Directed by Ewa Stankiewicz. Film Open Group, 2011, DVD. Available at https://gloria.tv/post/tUqAPTeQLFUe6dGtinqTnwnAR (accessed June 4, 2020). Letter from Poland. Directed by Mariusz Pilis. VPRO, 2010, DVD. Mam prawo tu stać. Directed by Michał Brożonowicz. Michał Brożonowicz, 2012, DVD. Mgła. Directed by Joanna Lichocka and Maria Dłużewska. Niezależne Wydawnictwo Polskie, 2010, DVD. Solidarni 2010. Directed by Ewa Stankiewicz and Jan Pospieszalski. Film Open Group, 2010, DVD. Zahodniki. Directed by Yahor Surski. BelSat, 2015, DVD. Żydokomuna. Directed by Anna Zawadzka, 2010. DVD.

Interviews Adamski, Tadeusz. Interview recorded in Warsaw, May 6, 2019.

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Bogucka, Teresa. Interview recorded in Warsaw, May 1, 2019. Ćwikła, Jacek. Interview recorded in Wrocław, March 15, 2019. Krajewski, Stanisław. Interview recorded in Warsaw, October 10, 2019. Łukasiewicz, Małgorzata. Interview recorded in Warsaw, February 16, 2020. Taras, Dominik. Interview recorded in Warsaw, February 15, 2020. Zysnarski, Jakub. Interview recorded via Zoom, June 3, 2020.

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Authored Adamski, Łukasz. “Wolno robić krzyż z puszek po piwie.” Fronda.pl, September 15, 2011. Accessed May 22, 2020, www.fronda.pl/a/wolno-robickrzyz-z-puszek-po-piwie,14501.html. B.D. “Przedmurze na Dnieprze.” NIE, September 1, 1994, 7.

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INDEX

Akcja Krzyż, 286–291 Alternative für Deutschland, 6 American Jewish Committee, 190 Antemurale Christianitatis, 17 anti-abortion legislation, 231–238 anti-Muslim rhetoric, 6, 16–17, 272, 273, 280–281 anti-pornography campaign, 229–231 anti-secularization protests, 127–128, 130–131, 149 anti-secularization turn, 208 antisemitism, 56–57, 95, 100–102, 142, 143, 193, 194, 201, 202, 206, 265–266, 309, 310–311 August Agreements, 148, 153 Auschwitz cross defense, 144–145, 203, 260, 262, 265, 268, 310 Baptism of Poland, anniversary of, 125–126 Battle of Lepanto, 314 Battle of Warsaw, 40, 255 Beyer, Karol, 46 Bierut, Bolesław, 124 Black Madonna, see Our Lady of Częstochowa Bobrujsk cross, 91–98, 103–104 Boy Żeleński, Tadeusz, 69 Bund, the, 196, 203 Catholic Church and Solidarity movement, 164–165 and systemic transformation, 208, 212–213, 214, 305 and the Communist Party, 124 and the January Uprising, 55

Catholicism, political instrumentalization of Ireland, 5 Italy, 5 Latin America, 5 Spain, 5–6 christogram, 13 Confederation of Bar, 17, 18 Constantine the Great, 13 Counter-Reformation, 15 cross at the Legionnaires’ Pass, 86–91 crucifixes in public institutions, 6, 68, 130–131, 149, 205, 221–223, 226–228, 313–314 crucifixion motif of, 8, 18, 37, 201, 235–237 practice of, 238–241, 292 symbol of, 311 crusade practice of, 14, 16–17, 21 symbol of, 69, 97, 103, 105, 288–289 Czartoryski, Adam, 36 decrucification, 127, 128 Dmowski, Roman, 58 Döblin, Alfred, 82 Dowbor-Muśnicki, Józef, 93, 95, 96, 103 Duda, Andrzej, 247 Ecclesia Militans, 106 Edelman, Marek, 189–190, 196, 197–198, 199, 204, 306 Eisenbaum, Antoni, 28, 46

373

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009230933.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

374

index

Endecja, see National Democrats Europe, symbol of, 219–220, 270–272, 273 Fijałkowski, Antoni, 43, 55 floral crosses, 153, 154–156, 186, 203, 205 Frljić, Oliver, 1–2 funeral of the Five Fallen, 28, 38–39, 41 Gdańsk protests of 1970, 150, 153 Gdańsk shipyard strike, 129, 144, 147, 153, 157, 164, 254 Ghetto Heroes Memorial, 193, 194, 196 Glemp, Józef, 213, 241 globus cruciger, 14 Gomułka, Władysław, 127 Gorchakov, Alexander, 35 Grand Duchy of Lithuania, 31, 72, 83, 91, 304 Great Novena, 125–126 Grottger, Artur, 33 Herzen, Alexander, 32 Hobsbawm, Eric, 106 Holocaust, Christianization of, 201–202, 203–204 homophobia, 267–268 Institute of National Remembrance, 315 Jagiełło, Władysław, see Jogaila January Uprising, 20, 29–31, 37, 39, 63, 83 Jaruzelski, Wojciech, 190, 216 Jastrow, Marcus, 41, 42 Jesus, 13, 38, 211 Jewish Combat Organization, 192 Jewish Flying University, 195, 200 Kaczyński, Jarosław, 247, 252, 291, 299, 313 Kaczyński, Lech, 243, 247, 249 deification of, 277–278 Katyn, memorialization of, 146, 205, 254 Kielce Pogrom, 135

Komitet Obrony Robotników, see Workers’ Defense Committee Komorowski, Bronisław, 243, 257, 265 Konfederacja Polski Niepodległej, 201 Korczak, Janusz, 43 Krajowcy, 64, 68, 73 Kramsztyk, Izaak, 41, 42 krzyże kwietne, see floral crosses krzyżomłot, 175, 176, 205 Laclau, Ernesto, 166–167 Landy, Michał, 27, 28, 30, 40, 44, 45–53, 61, 267, 306, 308 Lesser, Aleksander, 41 LGBT community, 306, 312 march in Płock, 313, 314 movement, 298 rights, 272 Liberation Theology, 5 Lord’s Tomb, 156–157 March of Independence in Warsaw, 314 Martial Law, 147, 149, 160, 176, 184–185, 216 Matka Boska Równościowa, see Our Lady of Equality May 3 celebrations, 188–189 May Day, 120, 162–163, 180–189 alternative demonstrations, 182–187 parades, 180–181 Michnik, Adam, 202 Mickiewicz, Adam, 18, 73 miesięcznice smoleńskie, 263 Miętne protest of 1984, 148, 254 minorities, policies towards, 70–71, 75, 78–79, 84, 85–86, 95 Belarusians, 73, 75, 94, 105, 149–150 Christian Orthodox, 70, 74–77, 225–226 Hutsuls, 91 Jews, 105, 194, 308–309 Lithuanians, 70, 73, 104 Ukrainians, 74–75, 104–105, 315–316 miracles, 124–125, 210, 241 Molotov, Viacheslav, 86

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index Monument to the Fallen Shipyard Workers, 177, 205 Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, 191 moralization of politics, 258 Murav’ëv, Mikhail, 39, 82 Narutowicz, Gabriel, 69 national Communism, 127 National Democrats, 58, 64, 68, 97, 103 Norwid, Cyprian Kamil, 49 November Uprising, 18, 40 Nowakowski, Karol, 36, 48 Office of Denominational Affairs, 112 Onyszkiewicz, Janusz, 198 Orange Alternative, see Pomarańczowa Alternatywa Our Lady of Częstochowa, 20, 126, 222, 255, 261, 300 Our Lady of Equality, 300 patriotic via crucis, 157–158, 160, 205 Patriotyczny Ruch Odrodzenia Narodowego, 191 Peronism, 5 Piłsudski, Józef, 64, 73, 75, 78, 84, 90, 103 Pogoń, 31 pogroms, 69, 92, 100 Polak-katolik, 8, 83, 142, 143 Polish “October,” 123 Polish eagle, 31, 98 Polish Messianism, 8, 18, 37–38, 105, 160, 253, 276, 311 Polish United Workers’ Party, 121, 131, 172 Pomarańczowa Alternatywa, 259, 294 Pope John Paul II, 152, 155, 255, 261, 277, 279 Popiełuszko, Jerzy, 151–152, 225, 255, 261 Poznań Crosses, monument of, 173–180, 209 Poznań protests of 1956, 123, 126, 133–134, 150, 175 pro-secularists, 244–245, 282–293 Przemyk, Grzegorz, 151, 156 PZPR, see Polish United Workers’ Party

375

Rabbi Dov Ber Meisels, 41, 56 Relief of Vienna, 16, 17, 50 religious populism, 275–276 religious symbol, definition of, 12–13 Righteous Among the Nations, 190 Rosary to the Borders, 314 Russian invasion of Ukraine, 316 sacred politics, 160–161, 163 Samsel, Roman, 238–241 Second Vatican Council, 312 secularization campaigns, 125, 126–127, 140 Słonimski, Antoni, 57 Smolensk cross, 243–247 Smolensk religion, 260 Sobieski, Jan III, 16, 50 Solidarity movement and Jewish themes, 202–204 and the Communists, 169–172 program of, 165–166 St. Andrew’s Cross, 292 Szydło, Beata, 299 Szyk, Artur, 30 Teutonic Knights, 14–15 Three Crosses of Vilnius, 80–86 Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, 65 Turner, Victor, 10, 11 Tusk, Donald, 243, 265 Tuwim, Julian, 69 Tymiński, Stanisław, 238–239 Ukrainian Insurgent Army, 315 Urban, Jerzy, 211, 212, 215 use of the cross as a poetic trope, 33, 34, 37–38, 49–51, 57, 69, 122, 170, 171, 270, 271 as an artifact of protest, 58, 96, 114, 205, 209, 261–262 in computer games, 295 in demonstrations, 32, 35–36, 131, 152–153, 235, 236, 237 in memorial projects, 39–40, 63, 65–66, 80–91, 146, 148, 173–180, 187–188, 256 in political cartoons, 215–221, 237, 295–296

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376 use of the cross (cont.) in songs, 295 in the military context, 14, 17, 37 in the theatre, 1–2 in visual arts, 33 Virgin Mary, 43 symbol of, 21–22, 37, 124–125, 132, 184, 203 Volhynian Massacre, 315 monument to the victims of, 316 Walentynowicz, Anna, 153, 164 Wałęsa, Lech, 155, 185, 210, 218 Warsaw ghetto fighters, 192–194 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 189, 192 memorialization of, 204 symbol of, 199–200 Warsaw Uprising, 195

index wayside crosses, 15–16, 37, 39, 104, 108, 124 Wielopolski, Aleksander, 27 Wolność Równość Solidarność, 284 Workers’ Defense Committee, 196 World Jewish Congress, 190, 193 Wujek coal mine, 155, 176, 187, 209 Wyszyński, Stefan, 142 Yad Vashem, 190 Żeligowski, Lucjan, 84 Zimand, Roman, 198 Żółkiewski, Stanisław, 50 Związek Bojowników o Wolność i Demokrację, 190 Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, see Jewish Combat Organization

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