Tyranny to Freedom Diary of a Former Stalinist eBook Ludwik Kowalski
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Based on diaries written between 1946 and 2004, in the USSR, Poland, France, and the US, this is the story of one man’s struggle to find his identity. For Polish-born Kowalski, writing this book was a moral obligation to all victims of Stalinism, including his parents. The testimony traces his professional development as a nuclear physicist and his ideological evolution from one extreme to another--from dedicated communist student in Poland to active anti-communist after retirement. Religion, ethnicity and pursuit of happiness are also presented.
Tyranny to Freedom Diary of a Former Stalinist eBook Ludwik Kowalski
Full disclosure: L. Kowalski and I worked at Montclair State University: he in physics, I in classics.This little book is a fascinating melange of autobiography and diary fragments. K. can admit that his memory of events may be faulty, but the documentary evidence of the diaries is an accurate record of his thoughts and feelings as the actual events were unfolding. The earliest memory finds K enrolled in a Moscow kindergarten and elementary school during the thirties. He was so well indoctrinated in the communist world view "to faithfully serve the cause of Lenin and Stalin" that even the unjust arrest and deportation of his father to Siberia (where he perished) could not shake his faith in the righteousness and eventual triumph of world communism.
One of the main themes of the book is the gradual undoing of that blind faith, which survived even the Hungarian Uprising, and the growing realization that the whole system was corrupt and terroristic: "one of the two most destructive ideologies of the twentieth century (113)."
A second theme is the relationship between a scientific education (nuclear physics) and a communist society. After the war and the move back to Poland, K's intellectual career was almost short circuited when the Ministry of Security discovered that his father had been arrested in the Soviet Union and deported as an enemy of the people. K was lucky and survived the investigation. Subsequently he was even permitted to continue his physics studies in Paris under the supervision of the son-in-law of Marie Curie, Frederic Joliot-Curie, himself a Nobel Prize winner. After Joliot-Curie's death K remained in his institute where he earned his doctorate.
The relationship of K to his Jewish family origins constitutes a third theme. A diary entry describes how his mother regretted that the family had not emigrated to Israel. K's reaction is to insist that he was Polish and not Jewish. Yet after his emigration to the United States and his marriage to Linda, he and his wife in 1975 joined a synagogue.
K. is not at all reticent in mentioning his many both serious and transitory sexual affairs (a fourth theme) on his way to a lifelong commitment to his wife Linda. Curiously he believes that his fidelity will be easier due to his previous promiscuity.
I recommend this book to students of modern European history and to those interested in an easy to read account of postwar nuclear physics in Paris.
David Kelly
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Tyranny to Freedom Diary of a Former Stalinist eBook Ludwik Kowalski Reviews
"Tyranny to Freedom Diary of a Former Stalinist," is, as it states, selected diary excerpts, spanning from 1946 to 2008, from Ludwik Kowalski, who was, before his conversion to capitalism, a dedicated Stalinist. Kowalski was born in 1931 in Poland, but spent his childhood, up to age 15, in the Soviet Union. He completed his education in Poland and France - where he noticed people had many more cars than they did behind the Iron Curtain. Nevertheless, he returned to Poland in 1963 with a French doctorate in nuclear physics. He was invited to a scientific conference in the United States the penny dropped, and he became a research associate at Columbia University. He retired from Montclair State University (New Jersey) in 2004, and published HELL ON EARTH Brutality and Violence Under The Stalinist Regime.
There are problems with simply publishing diary excerpts from your younger years, especially if, like the young Ludvik, you do not appear to have been particularly introspective, or questioning. These diaries raise questions to which we are never told the answers they just leave too much out. In fact, the author never even explicates his title what he actually means by "Tyranny to Freedom." Where's the tyranny? Not really illustrated here. The diaries, in fact, remind me of a time, years ago, that my mother mentioned to me that, as a young woman, she'd found the civil war diaries of a young girl in an big old abandoned house across the street (it was still a big old abandoned house across the street in my childhood.) Oh, I said, that must have been very interesting. No, she said, the entries consisted of, "I went to the dry goods store but they still didn't have the blue thread I want."
In Kowalski's case, he mentions four times, only four times, that his father was arrested when, as a boy, he (Ludvik) must have been no more than six or seven years old. Anyone would feel that this must have been a terrible trauma for a young child, but the book expresses no such trauma. In fact, it tells us very little four brief mentions. The author states that his father was arrested possibly because he was a Polish nationalist - while never explaining what the family was doing living in the Soviet Union in that case. Or why they continued living in the Soviet Union after his father's arrest. Or perhaps, he says, his father was arrested as a result of Stalin's cult of personality. Huh? Only much later, and again, extremely briefly, does Kowalski mention that his father died while in exile in a Siberian gulag. Meanwhile, young Kowalski appears to have been perfectly happy to be an unquestioning, naive young communist throughout his childhood, despite his father's sad fate and only later, briefly, does he mention that he was beaten up throughout his childhood because he was Jewish. What we do learn a great deal, too much, about, is the handsome young man and girls, girls, girls.
The author has surely had the opportunity to be a witness to history in the making. He's been in some interesting places at some interesting times he was there for Stalin's death, revelations of the 20th Congress in the USSR, and the Hungarian uprising, and if he had perhaps selected his diary excerpts more critically, then chosen to supplement them with research, this would surely have been a much stronger book. However, tribute must certainly be paid to the author's mother Halina Kowalska, to whom the book is dedicated she somehow managed to keep her little family together in what must have been the most difficult circumstances. Finally, it must be noted most people will not consider choosing to declare yourself an anticommunist in 2004, as the author did, the height of daring.
My expectations in starting the read of an edited journal was that it might be too cryptic, without balance. But to my surprise the writer and author does a wonderful job of interrogating and arguing with himself throughout. This creates a mental conversation that's portrays various points of view, and also the internal mental struggle of discovery (or evolution of thinking). Bravo; hand me another volume of writing from this literate scientist !
Full disclosure L. Kowalski and I worked at Montclair State University he in physics, I in classics.
This little book is a fascinating melange of autobiography and diary fragments. K. can admit that his memory of events may be faulty, but the documentary evidence of the diaries is an accurate record of his thoughts and feelings as the actual events were unfolding. The earliest memory finds K enrolled in a Moscow kindergarten and elementary school during the thirties. He was so well indoctrinated in the communist world view "to faithfully serve the cause of Lenin and Stalin" that even the unjust arrest and deportation of his father to Siberia (where he perished) could not shake his faith in the righteousness and eventual triumph of world communism.
One of the main themes of the book is the gradual undoing of that blind faith, which survived even the Hungarian Uprising, and the growing realization that the whole system was corrupt and terroristic "one of the two most destructive ideologies of the twentieth century (113)."
A second theme is the relationship between a scientific education (nuclear physics) and a communist society. After the war and the move back to Poland, K's intellectual career was almost short circuited when the Ministry of Security discovered that his father had been arrested in the Soviet Union and deported as an enemy of the people. K was lucky and survived the investigation. Subsequently he was even permitted to continue his physics studies in Paris under the supervision of the son-in-law of Marie Curie, Frederic Joliot-Curie, himself a Nobel Prize winner. After Joliot-Curie's death K remained in his institute where he earned his doctorate.
The relationship of K to his Jewish family origins constitutes a third theme. A diary entry describes how his mother regretted that the family had not emigrated to Israel. K's reaction is to insist that he was Polish and not Jewish. Yet after his emigration to the United States and his marriage to Linda, he and his wife in 1975 joined a synagogue.
K. is not at all reticent in mentioning his many both serious and transitory sexual affairs (a fourth theme) on his way to a lifelong commitment to his wife Linda. Curiously he believes that his fidelity will be easier due to his previous promiscuity.
I recommend this book to students of modern European history and to those interested in an easy to read account of postwar nuclear physics in Paris.
David Kelly
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