HIS NATION'S SUFFERING HAS HONED A JOURNALIST'S INSIGHTS INTO STRUGGLES FOR FREEDOM
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Ryszard Kapuscinski grew up maneuvering under the occupation of both the Hitlerian and Stalinist variants of despotism, an experience that helped the Polish journalist win a reputation as the world's most insightful, poetic and dogged chronicler of political upheaval. Born in Pinsk, Poland, a city now in Belarus, in 1932, the year when Hitler came to power and Stalin launched his most brutal purges, Kapuscinski (pronounced kapus-CHINTZ-kee) has spent 40 years of his life--including a decade living in Africa--covering struggles against dictatorships and colonial regimes. One reason for his unusually long exposure to discord was that the Polish Press Agency often lacked funds to extricate him from dangerous crises.

Last November, Kapuscinski visited Michigan to present the Copernicus Lecture, an annual series sponsored by the U-M Nicolaus Copernicus Endowment, the Center for Russian and East European Studies (CREES) and the Program in Polish Studies. His was titled "The Russian Puzzle: Why I wrote Imperium." Critics worldwide (the book is available in 30 languages) praised Imperium as a powerful and dramatic portrait of the break-up of the Soviet Union. The author traveled an always demanding and sometimes harrowing 42,000 miles throughout the USSR during the 1989-91 glasnost/perestroika period of its surprising collapse.

Kapuscinski's other books available in English are first-hand accounts of other dynamic shifts of fortune: Another Day of Life (Angola in the 1970s), The Soccer War (Ghana, the Congo and Central America), The Emperor (Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie's rise and fall) and Shah of Shahs (the Iranian dictatorship).

During his week on campus, Kapuscinski met with students, staff and faculty, especially with Director Michael Kennedy and Marysia Ostafin of CREES, and Director David William Cohen and Assoc. Director John B.Godfrey of the International Institute. Michigan Today has excerpted his conversations.

Journalism in open and closed societies.
In a closed society information is power. So in the Soviet Union, the central committee, the army, the police and the editors of Pravda all had their good lines of communication among themselves. But society at large knew nothing. Where information is a weapon, the most important thing is whether it is true or not. The opposition in such a society will attack the official press on the ground that it has published something that is not true.

In the West, information is a business. That is another category of value. The media technological revolution made information big business. This changes the sense of information. In the West, it is a question of attraction, of whether the information is interesting or not interesting, rather than whether it is the truth.

The manipulation of news is a process of selection. In the electronic media the criterion for selection is shortness. A report on Bosnia in 15 seconds. So what do they choose to select from two hours of footage? People at home may blame the correspondent, but that is not the place where information got the negative transformation.

On quality in journalism.
In only one week of training someone can learn how to report surface truths and statements. Anyone can do it, and it's just a matter of luck whether you are successful in that line of work. Journalism is a simple field at this level, and 95 percent of all journalists are working on that level today. The remaining journalists are closer to writers than to journalists--like the columnists in the American news publications. The classic example is Walter Lippmann. These writers are also political philosophers. Here the problem becomes more of your ability.

We are six billion on this planet. Multiply all of our activities. You can see 100 people publish what amounts to the same book. You look at the subject later, and all have disappeared except one. Very little travel literature survives. There may be hundreds of books containing descriptions of the sun rising in Morocco. Many people write because they're unaware that it has already been done. So they're happy writing it again, how the sun looks coming up over Morocco. For doing something serious you need the experience of being there, lots of reading and lots of your own reflection. If you saw things, but they did not awaken any reflections in you, there will be no good writing. Some mountain or storm came to exist for us only because Cezanne painted it.

On writers and readers.
The crisis today is not of writers, it's of readers. Writers are good. It's readers who are bad. It took me 40 years of experience and work to finally be able to write Imperium. A work like that can't be read in an afternoon. It's to be read as you read a poem, and that requires many evenings. The book is a message. Reading is a difficult job. Many people today are reading as if they are channel surfing. Part of the effort of the author is to awaken the readers to their duty.

I wrote The Emperor for the young in Poland who have a defined political and psychological experience and who will understand my metaphoric writing. The text is two texts--the one you read about Ethiopia and the one beneath it. It is a form of secret writing, a text that is like a secret code from prison.

On a broader level, however, The Emperor is not written just for Poles. It is about politics, about how a change in situation changes the nature of people involved in it. Everywhere you have politics similar to the politics in The Emperor. The book was adapted for the stage in England. At the theater, I saw a lady crying at her desk in the office of the theater manager. She had been sacked in a power struggle. I asked, why are you crying? "Why do you ask me that?" she says. "You wrote about this in The Emperor." There is a sense of it in all situations in which you have a hierarchy, a political structure, your boss, things changing in your life. There is a potential for autocracy in most social institutions.

On Russians and Poles.
There is a fundamental difference between the Polish and Russian views of the state. To Poles, the state, any state, is a foreign power. The Russian also feels oppressed by the state, but he feels the state is his. The Russian nationalists are wrongly saying that the Soviet state was not Russian, but rather was imposed by outside enemies. In their culture and religion, the Russians inherit the Byzantine traditions, which is one that sees authority as being divinely imposed. The state is part of God and nature. One canŐt revolt against nature. They don't look on the state as having been made by humans. It's Russian fatalism. Take, for example, their practice of putting dissidents in mental hospitals. There is truth in this, because to revolt against a state that is imposed by God and/or nature, you have to be a little bit crazy.

Today, however, power in Russia is being diffused. People are following local governors. In various provinces, they consider their local leaders as a god. This is the Cossack-like paternalistic order. This is the main change. Yeltsin is not a central god, as past leaders of the country were.

We Poles are more like the uniformed people in a banana republic. We try not to follow the orders of state officials. We are a very anarchistic people. That's unfortunate now when we have our own independent state. Furthermore, we live between two peoples--the Russians and the Germans--with a very powerful, an incredible, sense of the state, of their authority. And we have none. Authority does not matter to a Pole.

His experiences in Africa.
I didn't travel much once I was in place because our Polish Press Agency was very poor. That's why I would stay as much as three years straight without returning home. There were lots of coups to cover, too. But in Poland the experts were sympathetic. They knew it was dangerous work. Still, the authorities in Poland sometimes didn't like my reporting because the official ideology was that everything happening in Africa was progressive and everyone there was our friend. Yet, I could see many negative things on the spot. In Algeria I wrote about the coup against Ben Bella, who had got the Lenin Order for revolutionary greatness a few months earlier. I reported on the economic mess he had created. In African terms, the coup was reasonable. My reports were a scandal, though, and they called me back.

Polish interest in Africa was very high then. What is similar, I think, is we were also a colonized country for 130 years. We lost our independence at the end of the 18th century and regained it in 1918, after World War I. We've also been divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria--three colonial powers. I could say to the Africans, "You were colonized for 70 or 80 years; we were colonized longer than that." Nonetheless, stereotypes and bias ruled the Polish view of Africa, as it did Westerners."

On "the Polish way of seeing things."
I have said that I write from "the Polish way of seeing things," a perspective arising from our view of and relationships with Russia. It is a harrowing history, tragic. Of all of the nations Russia has dominated, we have suffered the most. I'm going to Pinsk soon to visit those who survived in my hometown. They are all of a low level, socially speaking. Stalin killed 100,000 of our intelligentsia purposely--our doctors, scholars, bishops, writers, generals. Then, in 1939, he started to send them to Siberia. He chose our school teachers and professionals and their families. The insanity of the USSR involved the planned murder of millions in Ukraine and Poland. Our suffering was tremendous.

The Germans are officially renouncing Hitlerism. Many discuss it, condemn it and say they don't want to repeat it. The Russians, however, have made no official, formal assessment of the past. They make no mention of the fact that their state policy was based on expansion in both czarists and Bolshevik times. If you ask the Russians whether they think their country poses a danger to others, they say no "because now we are too weak!"

The duty of the US news media.
In the United States, the outside world is only of special, of professional, interest. This is characteristic of all big countries. It's too difficult for the people to overcome the size and complexity of their country, and it's a great responsibility of the news media to help them do so. In American life there are very much divided spheres of influence and knowledge. You have great scholars, great specialists, but there is little connection between their expertise and knowledge and the governing and administration of the country. The general public is a third part, a third actor, and they are going their own way. There is no interconnection between the three.

The Greek polis was a good size for forming connections between all segments of the society--politicians, military, cultural and scholarly experts, students. Some say E-mail can re-establish such connections in a large, complex society, but E-mail does not help much. It gives more information, but does not improve knowledge. As T.S. Eliot wrote, knowledge can be "lost in information."

The world congress of sociologists met in West Germany. I went because sociology is one of my hobbies. They presented 5,000 papers on juvenile delinquency alone. We have studied every aspect of juvenile delinquency, but we have no knowledge about it, we have no direction about what to do about it. I went to a major European art exhibition. There were 6,000 pretty good submissions of art to get into the exhibition that could present only 200. This is a feature of our epoch. Art and literature are to be killed not by the media but by the proliferation of art, the proliferation of literature. That is why there is a culture of surfing.