At the dawn of the 1960s, the Polish journalist and politician Mieczysław F. Rakowski seemed to be at the height of his career, having established “Polityka” as a weekly magazine of record for the Polish intelligentsia and state socialist technocrats and reformers. Yet, in the thirty years to come, he would even advance to the positions of the last Prime Minister of communist Poland, and the Communist Party’s last leader. A master of self-creation as a party liberal and enfant terrible, Rakowski is an appealing yet difficult protagonist for a scientific biography. Michał Przeperski, historian at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, has accepted the challenge and presents Rakowski’s life story as a multi-layered inquiry into the political history of postwar Poland.

For scholars of state socialism, biographies offer a useful format to overcome the tired patterns of persecution and resistance, using personal stories instead to look at the postwar era in more nuanced ways.1 In his biography of the communist politician Rakowski, Przeperski does exactly that, showing the life and times of his protagonist through the prism of social mobility as well as through conflicts between personal life, social prestige and political power.

As students of postwar Polish history know well, Rakowski kept a detailed diary since 1958 with accounts of political and private life, which was later published in ten substantial volumes.2 In the first step to critically assess this legacy, Przeperski laboriously worked with the original manuscripts of these diaries at the Hoover Institution Archives in order to trace how his protagonist modified these texts before publication. He found that Rakowski removed fragments portraying him or his friends in a negative light, and also added certain passages allegedly testifying to his political wisdom and prophetic abilities (p. 383). While Przeperski builds his story using Rakowski’s daily notes as his main source, he enriches his analysis by incorporating archival sources from Poland and abroad, as well as almost thirty recorded interviews he conducted with people close to Rakowski.

This biography primarily shows a complex and flawed man driven by ambition and a need for acknowledgement, and only secondarily as an actor in particular political settings. Emphasis on Rakowski’s biographical trajectory and personal choices, however, does not obscure the historical context. To the contrary, it allows the reader to understand the political, social and cultural circumstances of the different eras. Mieczysław F. Rakowski was born in 1926 in a land-owning peasant family in Greater Poland. In the first arc of his story, Przeperski shows how his protagonist, after losing his father at the beginning of the Second World War, embraced the communist promise of upward mobility. Przeperski illustrates this with a scene in which Rakowski, serving in uniform as a political officer, elaborates on a propaganda brochure about Poland’s promise of social equality. Rakowski was genuine in his preaching, since what this propaganda praised was in fact his personal experience (p. 28).

At its best Przeperski’s book is a total biography in which political intrigues, intellectual maturing, and personal life are seamlessly interwoven. When the narrative moves to the 1950s and 1960s, we see how Rakowski, after receiving a PhD at the Central Committee’s prestigious Institute of Education of Academic Cadre (Instytut Kształcenia Kadr Naukowych), entered the world of Warsaw’s cultural elite. It is here that the second arc of the book, the interrelation of private and social life, comes to the fore. For Rakowski, socialized in the communist army and party apparatus, an exciting private life allowed, as his biographer writes, “building new frames of references which went beyond the formulas of classics of Marxism-Leninism” (p. 51). While the chapters on the 1950s and 1960s revolve around conflicting loyalties between the world of political power dominated by communist party apparatchiks on the one hand, and the intellectual and cultural elite on the other, the chapter dealing with the 1970s is organized around a vertical axis. We see Rakowski’s position in the party-state rise and fall, depending on the changing atmosphere. Przeperski analyzes this against the backdrop of technocratic and managerial ideas increasingly published in “Polityka”.

Polish-West German relations during the détente era also make up an important aspect of Rakowski’s political biography, since he befriended West German press correspondents in Warsaw and became their main source on the events in the country. The decision-makers acknowledged Rakowski’s skills and often entrusted him with informal negotiations with prominent visitors or sent him abroad. Based on Przeperski’s book, it is difficult to establish any consistent philosophy in Rakowski’s writings and engagements with regard to (West) Germany. He was, as his biographer shows, playing a role in a complicated game of diplomacy, which involved many actors and moving pieces. His public statements were reflective of the current political line, but always called for dialogue and moderation. Since diplomacy is not the main theme of the book, Przeperski is cautious when discussing these issues and does not overemphasize his protagonist’s role. He rather shows that Rakowski’s room for maneuver was very constrained (pp. 97–103, 186–194).

Unfortunately, in the later parts of the book discussing the 1980s, when Rakowski directly participated in political power and turned into one of Solidarity’s most fervent adversaries, the book abandons the ambitious program of interweaving the political and the personal. It takes a turn towards a more traditional political history of events. This is a pity, especially with regard to the last phase of Rakowski’s career, when he was appointed Prime Minister (1988–1989) and finally replaced Wojciech Jaruzelski as First Secretary of the Polish communist party PZPR (1989–1990). The book’s protagonist found himself as a leading actor in the center of a world-historical moment, but this fact is not sufficiently displayed in the book. Since Rakowski’s ideas of technocratic reform of state socialism were extremely vague and Przeperski does not situate them in a broader contexts, the intellectual sources and intentions of the market reforms introduced by the last communist government in Poland are left confusing and unclear. This chapter would have benefited from engagement with the emerging scholarship on the transition to capitalism in different state socialist regimes.3

“Intelligentsia”, the main category Michał Przeperski employs to analyze the social distinctions of the elite circles, is sometimes used as an analytical category, and other times as a normative one. To engage with this work, a comprehensive knowledge of Polish history is needed, since many minor characters are not introduced, and events or terms from the state socialist era are not explained.

Despite these minor drawbacks, Przeperski’s book deservedly received unanimous praise in Poland, which is a rare event in the current polarization of the historical-political sphere. Reviewers, from Rakowski’s friends and colleagues to professional historians, applauded the balanced portrayal of the communist politician, as well as Przeperski’s engaging, literary style.

Notes:
1 See recent biographies of communist leaders by Martin Sabrow, Erich Honecker. Das Leben davor. 1912–1945, München 2016; and Susanne Schattenberg, Leonid Breschnew. Staatsmann und Schauspieler im Schatten Stalins. Eine Biographie, Köln 2017.
2 Mieczysław F. Rakowski, Dzienniki polityczne. Warszawa 1998–2005.
3 Isabella M. Weber, How China Escaped Shock Therapy. The Market Reform Debate, London 2021; Chris Miller, The struggle to save the Soviet economy. Mikhail Gorbachev and the collapse of the USSR, Chapel Hill 2016.