In Europe

incorruptible. He possessed the enormous willpower that was needed in those days to say no to the Russians. In the end I couldn't work with him any more, yet he was a formidable personality. He actually ended up in prison for a few years.
    ‘I met them all. Erich Honecker was my DDR counterpart in the youth organisation, and fanatical even then. His boss, Walter Ulbricht, was also one of those people who never laughed. He was such a nasty, drab, tale-teller of a bureaucrat! Khrushchev had something clownish about him, a smart rebel of a farm boy. He had never read much, but he had this gleam in his eye. And Stalin, yes, Stalin, I was introduced to him once,during a buffet dinner in Moscow. I was a young, ambitious Polish talent at the time, and we talked about philosophy. He was short and really quite ugly, and he spoke Russian with a horrible Georgian accent. But I'll never forget his eyes: not brown, not blue, not dark, not light; the eyes of a tiger. When we said goodbye, Stalin pointed at me and asked our minister of foreign affairs: ‘That boy, does he belong to us or to Poland?’ The minister said: ‘To Poland.’ After that I was no longer allowed to attend such functions. I had been too brash.
    ‘Stalin, well, how I can put this? I adored the man. When he died I was party overseer of Warsaw. It was in the middle of the night, I was fast asleep. Suddenly the phone rang, it was a colleague from the central committee. All he said was: “Listen, Stalin's dead.” I was crushed. Even when my father died, I wasn't as shattered as I was at that moment.
    ‘Of course I am very well aware that Stalin was a villain, a major criminal. But to say that is to oversimplify matters. He was also a great man. History has given us a number of people like that: Robespierre, Cromwell, Napoleon, all of them villains. But when you mention those names it's not enough just to say that; then you're not speaking the truth. They were also great statesmen. They were criminals, and they were statesmen. People usually don't even want to know that such a combination is possible, I don't know why that is. But of course it's possible. That criminal Stalin, after all, also led us into battle against fascism, and that's a fact.
    ‘The world and history are not as simple as children often imagine. It's as complicated as love. So: I loved a criminal. But if I had known in 1941 what I knew after 1956, I would never have been able to fight that way in the war. The world is complicated, my friend.
    ‘As I said, Khrushchev was a rebel. During the three years after Stalin's death, a lot of things began changing within the party. East Berlin had revolted in June 1953, we had had an uprising in Poznan, party members were going back to Lenin, to Marx, to places where there was room for doubt. The party top brass was fearful. Our party was organised on the basis of discipline and service, not on reflection. The leaders were frightened by that.
    ‘And then came Khrushchev's shock therapy. Despite it all, Stalin was still a person we respected rather deeply. And during Stalin's lifetime, Khrushchev had never uttered a word of criticism, he had been the mostfaithful vassal imaginable. Then, suddenly, there was that emotional speech at the twentieth party congress in which he explained how things really were. The entire pre-war leadership of our party turned out to have been murdered by the Soviets. Khrushchev revealed that Lenin, during the last year of his life, had tried to put a stop to Stalin. He condemned the purges, Stalin's waste of lives during the war and the collectivisation of Soviet agriculture, his paranoia and his break with Tito. Hundreds of thousands of innocent and honest communists had been tortured into making the most bizarre confessions, and Stalin had personally been behind it all. Khrushchev wanted to go back to the roots of communism, to Lenin. He flogged the aggrandisement of a man who had, in reality, never gone anywhere, who hadn't spoken to a farmer or a worker for years, and who knew the country only on the basis of newsreels in which everything had been tidied up. ‘He was a coward,’ Khrushchev shouted. ‘He was panicky! Not once during the entire war did he dare even to come close to the front!’
    ‘Stalin came crashing to earth, and with him our view of the world. Our Stalinist party leader, Boleslaw Bierut, had a heart attack and died a few days later. To be honest, I believe the Soviet Union never completely