This Noble Land (29 page)

Once the problem was voiced, even inferentially, the embittered farmers knew that they must state their case strongly so as to attain a good bargaining position, and they spoke with a fury the men from Warsaw had never before seen in rural areas:

FIRST FARMER
: I cannot pay a hundred zlotys for everything you make me buy from your government retail stores and then accept seventy zlotys from you when I deliver my produce to your wholesale centers. Mr. Minister, that isn’t fair.

SECOND FARMER
: I don’t grow wheat and barley. I grow vegetables which people in the city need right now. Our papers show us your city people standing in line hour after hour for my cucumbers, my turnips, my beans and radishes. And I had to leave my vegetables rot in the ground because your system of purchasing and delivering them has broken down. People are starving and my vegetables are rotting. That’s criminal.

THIRD FARMER
: Six of us bought a tractor three years ago. Excellent idea. We shared it, with never a problem. Janko Buk was one of us, he’ll testify. Now gasoline is high, we understand that, what with the Arabs and America messing around and all. We could adjust to that if we got decent prices for what we grow.

FIRST FARMER
: Now wait! Even if you did increase what we, got, we still couldn’t use that tractor. And do you know why, Mr. Minister? Because we can’t get any spare parts.

SECOND FARMER
: So do you know what we’re doing? We’re cannibalizing. We steal parts from everybody else’s tractor, then watch our own with guns all night so they can’t steal from us. Janko will tell you.

THIRD FARMER
: Do you know what I stole last time? One bolt this long. Impossible to buy such a bolt in all of Poland.

FIRST FARMER
: I think you know what’s happening, Mr. Minister. Our farmers aren’t taking our produce to your buying centers. I won’t use names, but some farmers’ pigs are not going on the national market. They butcher at night, then sneak the meat into Krakow. Sell it door-to-door. Some send their wives to Rzeszow, to sell eggs door-to-door.

THIRD FARMER
: My grandfather says it’s back the way it was a hundred years ago. No one accepts zlotys any more. They aren’t worth a damn, and you know it, Mr. Minister. We barter and trade and sell at night.

SECOND FARMER
: We’re growing the stuff. We’re raising the animals. And our families aren’t hungry for something to eat. But the city people will soon begin to starve. And when we can’t get any fertilizer or spare parts, we’ll starve too.

FIRST FARMER
: We’re in great trouble, Mr. Minister. The women in my family need new clothes, new shoes. Unless they can find someone who needs our meat and vegetables, there’s no way my women can get anything.

THIRD FARMER
: Everything seems to be breaking down. Mr. Minister, I think it’s the system that’s breaking down.

ALL THE FARMERS
: Yes! Yes! The whole damned system.

FIRST FARMER
: We believe, all of us believe because we’ve talked about it, if you let us farm in the old way, each man responsible for what he grows and what he sells … If he makes a mistake, he suffers. If he works hard and is bright, he prospers. You let us do that, you let us price our goods in relation to what we have to pay for what we buy, we could feed Poland and half of Russia.

SECOND FARMER
: In the old days we did. Fifty years ago we did. Ten years ago we did. And we can do it again.

The fusillade continued for more than half an hour, a patient, non-hysterical outlining of proof that Polish agriculture had collapsed. During this time Janko Buk saw no reason to insert his own doleful experiences, for in recent months he had begun to think on a somewhat higher level than mere personal grievance, but if he wanted his statements to be effective, it was necessary that a full account of all grievances be on the table, with a recognition by both sides that they were serious, permanent and apparently incurable. He could afford to wait.

Nor did Szymon Bukowski interrupt. He had learned in recent months that it was prudent to allow dissidents to enjoy the new experience of full complaint before the government official tried to contest each small point. He knew that if he tried to give an answer to the spare-parts problem by itself, he would become totally enmeshed in its details, any one of which could be debated on its peculiar merits, and the discussion would achieve nothing but petty animosity. But if the entire animosity was spewed forth in one great mess, then a sensible man could confute it in an orderly way. So he encouraged them to talk.

FIRST FARMER
: Does the government realize that up to forty percent of things grown in this area now filter into the black market?

THIRD FARMER
: Not filter. Rush in like the breaking of a dam. Soon it will be seventy percent. And then what happens to orderly life in the cities? Tell me that.

SECOND FARMER
: What happens to orderly life on the farm? My wife can’t get soap. I can’t get tobacco or matches.

FIRST FARMER
: I keep speaking about the women in my family; I have to live with them. And they cannot get dresses. Or stockings. Or things at the apothecary’s. Damn it, seems to me they can’t get anything they need.

THIRD FARMER
: Do you men in Warsaw, those of you in command … do you realize that your fine plans are falling apart?

Now Bukowski had to speak. Keeping his forefingers to his chin to give the impression that he was thinking deeply, he said: ‘The government of Poland is going through a woeful deficiency from which we haven’t recovered—’ One of the farmers started to interrupt, but Bukowski held up his hand: ‘You spoke. Let me speak. The pricing policy of the oil nations has also damaged us. And for the moment we’re having trouble with the international banks to whom we owe large sums, so that this hurts our spare-parts program. We’re aware of all this and intend to do something about it.’

‘When?’ some of the farmers said.

‘But our nation, as you well know, is undergoing a time of stress—’

‘Poland has been under stress for a thousand years,’ one of the farmers said. ‘But it always managed to feed itself.’

‘Stresses of a harsh new kind,’ Bukowski continued, unflustered by the attacks, which were getting stronger. ‘We’re trying, all across this country, to adjudicate between the claims of the industrial worker and the farmer.’

‘It’s all going to the factory man,’ the farmer complained.

‘For the moment, I grant you, it looks that way. Lech Walesa and his men have won enormous gains—’

‘At our expense.’

‘For the moment, it seems that way.’

‘It doesn’t seem, Mr. Minister,’ the first farmer snapped. ‘It is. You have four women who need clothes and other things for the house, and they can’t get them, it’s not
seems
any longer. It’s
are
. We are in desperate trouble.’

‘Of course you are. That’s why we’re here. But I assure you that the government has plans—’

Unanimously the farmers hooted at this unfortunate word. Ever since the Russians arrived victoriously in 1944, installing a Communist government which a majority of the Polish people appeared to desire, the farmers of the nation had heard of plans. Originally there had been rumors that all farms in Poland were to be converted forcibly into collectives, following the Russian pattern, but the prudent Polish leaders, well aware of the Pole’s hunger for his own bit of land, wisely rejected the collective. Instead, great to-do was made of the fact that ‘each farmer is to have his own plot, and he will help us to redistribute the fields of the big landowners.’ So across most of Poland old patterns, under new ownership, were allowed to prevail, and they were wasteful beyond imagination. Each farmer had his collection of long, narrow strips, usually noncontiguous, in conformance to apportionments first made in the Middle Ages. Between one man’s holding and another’s a wide strip of untilled soil marked the boundaries, thus wasting about eighteen percent of all arable land and making the rational use of tractors difficult.

Of course, in those northern holdings that had been consolidated by the great Prussian Junkers, the Russian collective could be installed, partly for political reasons, partly because there were few intractable Poles on the land to fight it. So some farmers like Janko owned their land, others didn’t, but considering all of Poland, nearly ninety-seven percent of the farmland was individually owned, and this the men in the Kremlin did not like.

This dual system might have worked if there had been a rational plan for providing seeds, fertilizer, machinery and ultimate markets, but Communist planners intervened at every point and a horrendous complication ensued, with decisions being made by well-intentioned men like Szymon Bukowski who did not really know enough about the hard-core problems of farming. Slowly, year by year, just as in the Soviet Union, the food-producing capacity of the land diminished until what had once been known as the breadbasket of Europe, a land of waving wheat fields capable of feeding a hundred million, became a land of deficiency.

It was appalling to a sensible man like Janko Buk to see that the planners in Warsaw seemed invariably to choose precisely those plans of action which were guaranteed to diminish the output of the soil. ‘Don’t they want to feed the people?’ he often asked his wife and his mother. ‘Don’t they want to feed themselves?’ At first he had assumed that the errors stemmed from the fact that the government contained very few experienced farmers; in those days he had supposed that in the manufacturing field the government men, all of whom seemed to have come from that sector, were making sensible decisions, and sometimes he was prone to agree with them: ‘When they get the factories humming and goods appear everywhere, we’ll all be better off. Then we can wrestle with the problems of the farmers. I’m willing to wait.’

But now the outspoken leaders of Solidarity were revealing that conditions in the factories were just as chaotic as on the farms, and this was disgraceful. When Buk could buy no spares for the community tractor and it could be kept operating only by stealing from some other farmer, when consumer goods began to disappear from store shelves, when he or his wife had to stand in long lines to buy even the simplest product, then he began to suspect that everything, and not only the farmer’s life, had begun to collapse.

At last he was ready to speak. Using the concise sentences he had preferred since his reticent childhood, he said with almost painful slowness: ‘Mr. Minister, the evidence is on the table. We all accept it. Government is doing everything for the factory worker, nothing for the farmer.’ This brought assent from the farmers. ‘I wouldn’t object if factory workers got more, so long as they produced more for us.’

‘That would be all right!’ one of the farmers cried.

‘Like if my women could get the things they need,’ the first farmer pressed.

‘But from where we stand,’ Buk said, ‘it looks as if the factory workers are getting more and producing less. And that puts a cruel burden on us. We pay in two ways. We don’t get the money due us, and what money we do get is worthless.’

Buk tried to speak precisely, and he used words which two years previously he had not even heard, for his education was proceeding at a gallop. His tough-minded mother had never had formal schooling, but when the Nazi invasion had closed down all institutions, in those darkest hours of the occupation when the Germans were trying to eradicate all Polish learning, she had valiantly conducted a secret school of her own, determined to keep Polish learning alive, and this, had forced her to educate herself. She knew a lot and saw to it that her daughter-in-law learned something, too. There were lively discussions in the Buk kitchen, and often the two women lectured Janko so severely that in self-defense he had to master the arts of logical thinking and clear presentation. He was a man trained in that great university of rural Poland with its two colleges: the farm soil and the kitchen argument.

‘It seems to me, Mr. Minister,’ he said slowly, ‘that your government offers us farmers no protection whatever. You no longer import improved strains of seed. You don’t print the instruction books you used to. You take our taxes but you refuse to provide spare parts in return. And you use the police and army to prevent us from selling our food in a free market where we would be clever enough to protect ourselves. Maybe what these men say is true. Maybe your whole system is falling apart.’

This persistent charge infuriated Bukowski, for out of a wealth of harsh experience in the bad years of 1939 through 1944 he had concluded intellectually and emotionally that Communism offered Poland infinitely more than any alternative. In the bad years prior to the Great War peasants in this village had kowtowed to the Bukowskis who owned the palace. Children received a pitiful education. People in the city slaved for capitalist owners and participated neither in management nor in profits. The government had been corrupt; it had failed to protect the nation; and it had refused to form an alliance with Soviet Russia, the only country that could protect it. For Szymon Bukowski the arrival of Communism in Poland had signaled the awakening of a bright new day, and he had been proud to be a part of that awakening.

At first he had been merely one student in the new university at Lublin, next a minor member of a Communist study cell, then its leader, and finally a recognized spokesman for the new system. Even when membership in the party had been less than two million Poles out of a total population of more than thirty million, he had faith that this small fragment contained the leadership that would save Poland. This dedicated six percent of the population knew what the slothful ninety-four percent needed, and was prepared to provide it.

It was decades before he became even a minor part of the leadership, but during that time he was perfecting himself as a Communist, mastering the precepts of Marx and Engels, studying the steps whereby Lenin and Trotsky achieved power and the procedures by which Stalin stabilized it. Szymon Bukowski, at age forty, had been a knowing, devoted Communist and the quality of his thinking attracted those less well trained. Finally the high command recognized his ability and promoted him grudgingly from one level to the next, always testing him, until the day he was made dictator for housing, which was reasonable, since he was an architect, and now of agriculture, which was not, because although he had been reared on a farm and was vaguely familiar with the basic problems, he had never managed land of his own or been in control of even the smallest agricultural process, let alone the complex matters of buying seed, finding fertilizer, and then marketing the results.