It might seem that the communist takeover in Poland after WWII has been thoroughly covered by historians, but Alexej Lochmatow shows that in fact it has not—precisely because everything about those years has been shoehorned into an oversimplified narrative of “communist takeover.” Obviously no one would deny that the absorption of Poland into the Soviet sphere of influence cast a long shadow, but the scholarship of the past decade or so has revealed that the there was a great deal more variety, indeterminacy, and space for local agency than we once imagined. Public Knowledge in Cold War Poland is an outstanding contribution to this trend.

Lochmatow’s most important intervention is his recovery of Jerzy Borejsza’s concept of a “gentle revolution” (rewolucja łagodna) to describe the early postwar years, which he convincingly presents not merely as a time of temporary tactical restraint, but as a genuine alternative to the brutality that would follow. Many Polish Marxists, and even Iosif Stalin himself (for a while) believed that the Polish path to socialism might differ from the Soviet model. WWII and the Holocaust had annihilated the prewar bourgeoisie and nobility, and there was genuine, widespread support for a radical new social order. In this context, Borejsza (a long-time communist activist and a prominent editor and publisher after the war) had argued that there was room for more intellectual and cultural openness than had been possible during the intense battle for power that the Bolsheviks faced after 1917. Lochmatow demonstrates that the climate was indeed more pluralistic than one might assume. To be sure, the Polish Worker’s Party was steadily eliminating all political rivals, but Lochmatow does not see an inexorable march towards shutting down debate in the intellectual or cultural spheres. Quite the contrary: he paints a picture of a surprisingly robust efflorescence in a variety of fields.

Andrei Zhdanov’s “two camps” speech of 1947 may have presaged a crackdown, but Lochmatow shows that the change really arrived for Polish academia with the First Congress of Polish Science (1951), where scholars were compelled to recant heterodox views with abject displays of “self-criticism.” Even afterwards there was still space for debate on a range of issues, but the structure of those conversations was different. In an echo of Leninist “democratic centralism,” scholars were expected to weigh different views but then come to a consensus, to which everyone would pledge fealty. The specific content of these views was less important than the demand for unity itself. Lochmatow argues there was no single “Stalinist line.” In fact, periodic 180 degree reversals were commonplace. The main point was not a specific ideological stance, but the performance of conformity.

Lochmatow describes this as a model of “virtue,” a term which constitutes the core of his analysis. Scholars in any system, he points out, are expected to behave according to set models of academic virtue, be it the liberal script of polite debating in the “marketplace of ideas,” or the Stalinist norms of obligatory consensus. In Poland, the attempt to impose Soviet-style virtue-signaling was a total failure. Even in the early 1950s, when the pressure to conform was at its highest, dissenting views on a variety of questions were still sometimes published (albeit with accompanying denunciations). By 1956, the Polish intelligentsia had mostly reclaimed its old norms.

Unfortunately, I fear that the impact of this book will be limited by the scandalous editorial practices of Routledge, which allowed it to appear without any proofreading. The author is not a native speaker of English, and idiomatic and grammatical errors appear on nearly every page. The lack of editorial professionalism makes it difficult to appreciate Lochmatow’s magnificent scholarship, and it will limit the impact that this book could have had. Nonetheless, I will be recommending it to students and colleagues. By recovering the diversity of intellectual life under Stalinism, and by narrowing the time frame in which the most oppressive conformity was enforced, Lochmatow encourages us to take a second look at those seminal postwar years. This is the sort of book that not only informs, but also inspires future scholarship.