.. . .. • f is reminiscent of Moscow in the early years of the revolution, 1917 to 192 5. But with .the differences that exist between Leninism and Stalinism. . One flows from the other> but Russia in the Leninist period inspired hopes and upheld id~als · that Stalinist Russia and Stalinist-controlled Poland lack. · Polish Stalinism has none of the dubious virtues of Leninism, and all of the vices of Stalinism at its worst. Another difference is that Moscow did not have then, and does not have now, such a supply of consumers' goods. I have often heard Poles castigated as a people. I find it as impossi~le to indict this nation as a whole as to indict the whole German people, or the Japanese or Italians or Russians. or Spaniards. N6 ~ poopl~ is responsible for the nature of its government, or the a'.tr(?citiescommitted by it, or for the individuals a~ong its nationals who are Fascists or anti-Semites. My ancestor's are all Welsh and English, but I feel a kinship with the Poles. _r:liked Warsaw when I first saw it in 1936.and I like it no~. even though it lies in ruins, the ugliness of which the snow cannot hide. · .The uglibt' area ·in Warsaw, perhaps in all of Europe, is the former ghetto. In the rest of Warsaw there are walls rising above ·the litter of bricks and tortured, twisted steel, and an ~ccasionaf building that is only slightly damaged. But in the ghetto-;-nothing but a pile of bricks ten feet high covering a large. a~ea t~at was. once the most densely populated and busiest part of the ci_ty. Beneath that litter there still lie countless bodies, · now skeletons. Only those near the surface.have been removed .. ·There are no streets, only a few narrow lanes cut through the debris, through which weary horses driven by weary men pull cartloads of bricks for use elsewhere . .~.\_felt in Warsaw, as in Moscow in 1936, the growing gulf between the • bureaucrats and the masses. The managerial revolution has triumphed- in Poland, and while, of course, they are " benevolent " if not humanitarian tyrants and theoretically rule on behalf of the workers and peasants, the people are signally ungrateful. One of the sources is that neither the workers_.nor · tpe former managers have much to say about how factories are r_un. In those cases where the old managers and technical experts 37 'B~lloteca Gino Bianco
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