Poland: A Novel Part 1

Poland.

A Novel.

James A. Michener.

Explanation.

This book is a novel. The three main families-the Counts Lubonski, the petty n.o.bles Bukowski, the peasants Buk-are fictional, as is the village of Bukowo, its two castles, the manor house and its peasants' cottages. Most of the characters on whom the action of the novel depends are also fictional.

Because of the importance of the subject matter and the strangeness of Polish history to the average reader, the identification of certain historical characters, settings and incidents may prove helpful.

Chapter I: Characters, settings and incidents are fictional.

Chapter II: The Tatars Genghis Khan, Batu Khan and OG.o.dei are historic, as are Henry the Pious, his mother, Queen Hedwig, and his reluctant general Mieszko the Obese. The siege of Krakow and the Battle of Legnica are historic.

Chapter III: The Teutonic Knights Hermann von Salza, Ulrich von Jungingen and Kuno von Lichtenstein are historic, as are Queen Jadwiga from Hungary and King Jagiello and Grand Duke Witold of Lithuania. The Battle of Grunwald is faithfully presented.

Chapter IV: The Swedish king and his ravaging are historic, as are the Polish king Jan Kazimir and his aide Jerzy Lubomirski, and the Transylvanian invader Gyorgy Rakoczy. The sieges of Czestochowa and Zamosc are historic. The Krzyztopor castle existed and was destroyed as depicted and its Ossolinski owners are real, except that the particular members shown here are fictional.

Chapter V: All the princ.i.p.al military leaders on all sides are historic: King Jan Sobieski of Poland, Duke Charles of Lorraine, Prince Waldeck of the Germans, Kara Mustafa of the Turks. Inside Vienna, Rdiger von Starhemberg and Hieronim Lubomirski are historic. Sultan Muhammad IV is depicted accurately, as is the great battle for Vienna.

Chapter VI: Princess Lubomirska and her palace at Lancut are historic, as are the Czartoryskis at Pulawy, the Zamoyskis at Zamosc and the Mniszechs at Dukla. The Granickis and their castle at Radzyn are fictional, as are the particular Mniszechs at the Niedzica castle, which is very real. The Palais Princesse in Warsaw is fictional.

Chapter VII: Emperor Franz Josef and his mistress Katharina Schratt, who appear briefly, are historic; all else is fictional.

Chapter VII: The Polish prime minister Ignacy Paderewski and the Russian general Semyon Budenny are historic, as is the crucial Battle of Zamosc, which is not much stressed in most current histories because it involved a Polish-Russian battle in which the Poles won.

Chapter IX: The three centers of n.a.z.i terror in Lublin-Under the Clock, Zamek Lublin and Majdanek-are historic and are depicted as accurately as data permit, except that the specializations of the various fields at Majdanek varied from time to time. Governor General Hans Frank in Krakow and Oven-Commander Eric Muhsfeldt at Majdanek are historic, but all other characters, Polish or German, are fictional. When I was far into the writing of this chapter, I learned that the rocket experiments at Peenemnde-which I had dealt with in an earlier novel-had been transferred right next door to the imaginary village I had invented for this book. Polygon was very real, as were the expulsions from Zamosc and the Polish retaliation.

Chapter X: Except for the brief appearances of President Reagan and Pope John Paul II, all characters are fictional, as are the settings and incidents.

The People of Poland.

During the major part of this narrative the people of Poland were organized in these clearly defined categories..

n.o.bility.

Magnates: Owners of vast lands and with many prerogatives, they controlled Poland, with no superior power to discipline them. Ostensibly similar to the great barons of England, they were in fact much more powerful, since they refused to grant consistent allegiance to their king. Because of Poland's geographical position, they often allied themselves, individually, to foreign powers. Thus the powerful Radziwills often represented Russian interests; the Leszczynskis, French. They could be either extremely conservative (Lubomirskis, Mniszechs) or surprisingly liberal (Czartoryskis, Zamoyskis). But they were invariably pig-headed and in the end destroyed their fatherland. The various Counts Lubonski are fictional.

King: Originally an inherited t.i.tle, it became an elected one, the magnates and gentry doing the voting and preferring to grant the crown to someone outside Poland rather than to one of their own, lest he become too strong. The t.i.tle was not hereditary, and at the death of any king a riotous election ensued, with foreign powers usually partic.i.p.ating with nominees favorable to their interests. This curious system provided one superb king (Stefan Batory of Hungary); one pitiful failure (a weak-willed French prince who resigned after three months); two imbecilic nonent.i.ties (from Saxony); three reasonably good kings who brought disaster in their wake (the Vasa rulers from Sweden); and occasionally some authentic Polish n.o.bleman who ruled at least as well as the outsiders (Leszczynski, Poniatowski). They also elected one Pole of dynamic power who proved to be a most memorable ruler (Jan Sobieski, hero of Vienna).

Princes, counts: Poland conferred no t.i.tles, but the papacy, the Holy Roman Empire and surrounding countries did, often at a stiff price, so there were princes, dukes and counts, but such t.i.tles conferred no power or standing superior to what the magnate enjoyed. Prince Lubomirski and Count Lubonski had no greater standing than tough old Mniszech of Dukla and were sometimes much poorer in worldly goods.

Minor n.o.bility: Verbally, this category causes trouble. Polish writers use the word gentry, which doesn't sound quite right in English. European writers use petty n.o.bility, but the adjective has unfortunate connotations. The minor n.o.bility were divided into two groups: those owning land controlling the peasants thereon; and the landless factotums who affiliated themselves with one or another of the magnates. These latter resembled the lesser samurai of j.a.pan, men of good lineage without castles or great estates who survived as hangers-on or as mercenaries. Another useful a.n.a.logy is with the caballero of Spain, the man with only a horse, a lance and a proud name. The minor n.o.bility provided five functionaries popular in Polish fiction: voivode (powerful governor of a territory); hetman (field marshal of the armies); castellan (governor of a palace and the territory subordinated to it); palatine (palace functionary); starosta (warden or constable). The category includes men almost rich and powerful enough to be magnates, and all intervening levels down to the roving rascal with no castle, no money, no village, no peasants, one horse and pride unbounded. The Bukowski family represents the middle levels and is fictional.

Clergy.

Cardinal, bishop, abbot, monk, friar: Directly linked to Rome, members of this group owned vast estates and whole villages and towns, with all the peasants included. Militantly defensive, they opposed the Orthodox Catholics of Russia, the Protestants of Sweden and Germany, the Jews of their own country and the pagans of the Baltic lands. Toward the famous Uniates of Poland, created by Rome to suborn the Orthodox, they were ambivalent; just as the good Catholics of Spain found it difficult to accept wholeheartedly Jews who converted, Polish Catholics always suspected the turncoat Uniates. In the earliest years of Polish nationalism, the clergy were often the only people in an area who could read and write, and thus they exerted great political pressure, but quickly the magnates and the better n.o.bility educated themselves, often with great sophistication, and then a balance of power developed.

Townsmen.

Merchants: Polish writers use the noun burgher to designate this category. A growing power throughout this entire narrative, owning their own stores and small factories, they resembled the middle cla.s.s of all Europe.

Craftsmen: Of considerable skill in Poland, they inhabited the towns, were often owners of their shops, and were governed by their guilds.

Jews.

Financiers: Because the Catholic religion commanded its believers not to charge interest, and because Polish knightly tradition forbade its members to engage in business of any kind (an injunction ignored in the case of wheat and lumber), the handling of money became the accepted responsibility of the Jew. Poland was far more liberal in its acceptance of Jews than most of its neighboring countries, so many found refuge there and prospered, but animosities did sometimes flare.

Countrymen.

Small landholder: Although Polish lands were usually held by either the magnates or the crown, clever farmers managed through adroit behavior, or courage in warfare, or service to magnate or king, to sequester small pieces of land on which they made enough profit to acquire other pieces until they became self-sufficient with their own farms, their own horses, their own rude machinery, and in time, h.o.a.rds of zlotys which they used for the betterment of their families. Often the money was used as a dowry when an especially attractive daughter was married to a penniless member of the minor n.o.bility.

Peasant: The vast majority of Poles were peasants, like the vast majority of all people in medieval Europe-and down to modern times in eastern European countries like Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Rumania and Hungary. In other countries they were called serfs, esne, villeins, thralls, va.s.sals, muzhiks. They were not exactly slaves, but they belonged to the land, rarely owned their own homes, had to work stated days for their master, could not remove to another village without permission, had no education and not even a remote hope of bettering themselves. However, as in western Europe although at a much later time, Polish peasants did gain certain freedoms, release from ancient impositions and a measure of land owners.h.i.+p.

Despite this harsh system in which the magnate owned and controlled everything, a kind of rude democracy thrived in Poland, which was always much more liberal than its neighbors. In England only three percent of the population could be cla.s.sified as n.o.bility; in France, only two percent; but in Poland a full twelve percent were so qualified, which is justification for the Polish use of the designation gentry. And in the towns another ten or twelve percent a.s.sociated themselves with the n.o.bility, which meant that many citizens had an interest in the government.

The incredible liberum veto, by which one man in a Seym (parliament) of hundreds could negate and prorogue the entire work of the Seym by merely crying 'I oppose!' was a major cause of Poland's disappearance from the map of Europe, but it was defended as the last refuge upon which a free man (in this case the magnate or his henchman) could rely to defend his freedom. That Poland survived so many fatal reverses was a testimony to its volatile spirit of freedom.

I.

Buk versus Bukowski.

In a small Polish farm community, during the fall planting season of 1981, events occurred which electrified the world, sending reverberations of magnitude to capitals as diverse as Was.h.i.+ngton, Peking and especially Moscow.

This village of Bukowo, 763 souls, stood at the spot where the great river Vistula turns to the north in its stately pa.s.sage from its birthplace in the Carpathian Mountains at the south to its destiny in the Baltic Sea at the north. In the little settlement there was a stone castle erected in A.D. 914 as a guard against marauders from the east, but this had been destroyed in the early years when those marauders arrived in stupefying force. Each subsequent owner of the village had planned at one time or other either to tear down the ruins or rebuild them, but none had done so because the old castle exercised a spell on all who saw it, and there was a legend among the villagers that so long as their ruined tower stood, they would stand. There must have been some truth to this because there had often been great clamor in Bukowo, but like its doomed tower, it still stood.

Nearly thirty-six million Poles, of whom eighteen million were of voting age, were controlled by the Communist party of only three million members. This minority had made a symbolic concession right at the start of the present trouble. They agreed to hold the discussions over farm policy in the very village from which the princ.i.p.al protester came, and this was interpreted by all as a sincere gesture of good will, but as Janko Buk, the leader they were trying to placate, said: 'With the steel strikers giving them so much trouble in Gdansk, they can't afford to have us on their backs, too.'

The Communists had chosen this village for several additional reasons. It lay in the heart of a large agricultural district and was thus representative. It was also well removed from any big city whose practiced agitators might try to influence or even disrupt proceedings. And perhaps most important, it was near the recently renovated Bukowski palace, with its seventy rooms available for meetings of whatever size might be required.

The three names-Buk for the peasant leader of the troubles, Bukowo for his village, and Bukowski for the family which had once owned the palace-obviously stemmed from the same root, the strong word buk signifying beech tree, and this was appropriate because from time past remembering, the vast area east of the river had contained a large forest whose princ.i.p.al trees had been oaks, pines, ash, maples and especially beech, those tall, heavy trees with excellent trunks. Through the centuries foresters had selectively cut these trees, sometimes floating the great trunks all the way to the Baltic for s.h.i.+pment to Hamburg and Antwerp, but all the woodsmen had carefully tended a particularly n.o.ble stand of beech that defined the eastern edge of the village. Like the castle which they resembled, the beeches of Bukowo possessed a special grace.

The great forest of which they formed such a major part had not borne a name until A.D. 888, when the extremely primitive people who lived between it and the river were frightened by a semi-madman who lived amongst them. He claimed that one evening while returning home with a bundle of f.a.ggots collected from under the beech trees, he had been accosted by the devil, who wore about his neck long chains which clinked and clanged, and he convinced them, especially the children, that if they listened closely when the devil was afoot, they could hear the rattling chains.

The dense woods was named the Forest of Szczek in that long-ago year, and everyone agreed that the name was well chosen, for clinking, clanging sounds did often come from this forest, and since in Polish the letter e-if printed with an accent, carries an n sound, the word was p.r.o.nounced shtchenk, which resembles the sound that a chain clinking would make.

The villagers protected the ruins of their good-luck castle and tended the beech trees they loved, but they were proudest of their palace. It had been a.s.sembled in rambling style over many centuries by the poor Bukowskis, who had been little better than peasants themselves although acknowledged as petty n.o.bles, and in grand style by the Bukowskis of 1896, who had stumbled upon a fortune.

The palace stood on a slight rise overlooking the castle ruins and the Vistula beyond and was a place of real magnificence, the equal of the lesser French chteaux along the Loire. Shaped like a two-story capital U, the open part with its two protruding wings facing west, its long major base faced east, overlooking the village and the forest beyond. It had been heavily damaged in the closing days of World War II during the German defeat and the Russian victory, but its many rooms had been rebuilt in the 1950s and now functioned as a museum, a rest home for Communist party VIPs and a meeting place for major convocations. A good chauffeur could drive from Warsaw in something under four hours and from Krakow in less than three, so that when government officials selected Bukowo as the site for this important conference they knew what they were doing. Anyone who had visited the Bukowski palace once wanted to do so again.

A major charm of the setting was the village which perched at the edge of the forest. Even before the rude castle had been built or the forest named, a few hovels had collected here, and in the more than a thousand years which had followed, the number had constantly but slowly increased, with the addition of one or two new cottages every fifty years. Improvements came slowly, for the petty n.o.bles who occupied the more permanent buildings that would evolve into the palace cared little about what happened to their peasants. Over a s.p.a.ce of eight hundred years no cottage in Bukowo had other than a dirt floor. For nine hundred years none had a chimney, none had windows, and some cottages had pa.s.sed a hundred years without acquiring a permanent door.

Yet improvements did slowly filter in, a wooden roof to replace a thatch, a slab of precious gla.s.s for a rude window, so that in time an attractive collection of harmonious, low, modestly colored cottages grouped themselves artistically about the three sides of a trim central rectangle. As with the palace, the open end faced the Vistula, with the backs of the cottages ab.u.t.ting against the grove of beech trees. Peasants who were born and raised in Bukowo preferred it to any other villages they knew, but this was a limited endors.e.m.e.nt because many would have had an opportunity to see only those few that were within a dozen miles. Beyond that perimeter the villagers rarely moved.

That was Bukowo: primeval forest to the east, a splendid grove of beech trees, a snug village, a handsome palace, ancient castle ruins and, dominating everything, the majesty of the Vistula. Here was where the most advanced theories of the contemporary world would do battle.

Sessions would be held in one of the many medium-sized rooms on the upper floor of the palace, and there were six widely recognized clues by which those attending would be able to determine the importance of their meeting. In Communist Poland if guests invited to a formal discussion were of trivial position, only tea was served, in plain cups and from a plain pot. Guests slightly more important saw with gratification that the teacups were placed on a lace doily. Those of medium power sometimes gasped with pleasure when bottles of a delicious black-currant cordial called sok (juice) were to be provided, but one did not wield real power until the fourth level was reached: all the preceding plus a bottle of really good brandy.

If the visitors held truly high office, a plate of cookies would be added, delicious things wafer-thin and decorated with sugared designs, but if the official being honored held a cabinet position, or comparable rank in the army or church, or if he was a cinema star or a leading editor, a sixth mark of honor could be reached. In addition to the five customary degrees-tea to cookies-a final one appeared: actual sandwiches, made of the best bread, with thick b.u.t.ter and tangy cheese, or ham, or spiced chicken. Persons attending a meeting where all this was offered did not require medieval trumpets or modern cannon salutes; they knew they came with honors.

For the meeting of the agricultural consultants, sandwiches were prepared and a chocolate cake.

The Communist representatives reached the palace first, and custodians showed them to their rooms; with so many to choose from, it was easy to get one overlooking the castle to the south and the river to the west. Clerks and research a.s.sistants received rooms looking toward the beech trees, and some deemed these preferable, for the Forest of Szczek was in its own way as beautiful as the river.

The arrival of the cabinet minister occasioned a good deal of merriment, for his name was Szymon Bukowski, and everyone joked: 'It's nice to be in your palace,' and he had fun explaining that the Bukowskis who had owned this showplace were not from his Bukowskis, but nevertheless everyone kept calling it his palace.

He was an important member of the Warsaw government, fifty-seven years old, gray hair close-cropped and clipped far up the sides and back, steel-rimmed gla.s.ses, heavyset, with slightly hunched shoulders, squarish, placid face, dark-complexioned and with deeply recessed eyes. He wore even in summer a dark, conservative suit made of thick wool and a neatly shaped dark tie. He could have been any Communist official, in any Iron Curtain country; actually, he was Poland's Minister of Agriculture, and it was his job to deal with the rural disturbances which threatened the food supply of his country.

He was a logical choice for the task, a devout Communist who had real appreciation for the difficulties under which farmers labored. He had lived in this village of Bukowo until the age of fifteen, watching his father, who supervised a group of farms, and his hard-working mother, who tilled her own garden patch. In those years he himself had often worked on the farms his father superintended, thus acquiring a sense of what the problems of agriculture were.

After the German occupation ended he had studied architecture, gaining his reputation in government circles because of two activities: he helped organize strong Communist movements among his fellow students, and upon graduation he launched into ma.s.sive projects for the rebuilding of war-ravaged Poland. In the latter field he achieved remarkable results, the one most often commented upon being his reconstruction of whole sections of the city of Lublin and the adding of nearly twenty thousand housing units for war refugees who would otherwise have been homeless.

He was not appreciated by all members of the Polish community, however, because he was so stout a Communist that he could find no place in his heart for religion, and whereas many members of the government decried the Catholic church publicly in order to retain their jobs, then wors.h.i.+pped privately to preserve their Polishness, Szymon Bukowski would have nothing to do with the church, public or private. He believed, as Lenin had repeated so often, quoting Marx, that religion was the opium of the people, and he found his own work of building the new Poland so exciting that he required no intruding opiate. He did, however, keep such views to himself, for he felt that if he fought the battles of building and food, he was not required to fight the church as well.

But he was determined to fight this fellow Buk, whose efforts to stir up the rural population were causing so much concern throughout the country. Farmers saw Buk as the man who would lead them out of the despair in which they were trapped; government saw him as an incipient force threatening the fundamentals of the system. When s.h.i.+pyard workers in Gdansk formed a union which they called Solidarity, that could be considered acceptable, if one wished to stretch a point, for it was a movement within the great tradition of European labor movements. Factory workers in all nations had formed unions, even in old Russia, and Communism had devised procedures for absorbing such unions easily into its system, preempting their good ideas, killing off the bad, and always forestalling any runaway tendencies. The needs of factory workers could be accommodated to the needs of mechanical production.

But when farmers started talking about unions that would control the growing and distributing of foodstuffs, upon which the nation depended day by day, a new and dangerous dimension was being introduced, one without precedent and one which could lead to the most deplorable aberrations. This Lech Walesa, the factory worker in Gdansk, was in no way an enemy of the state; he was a logical outgrowth of the state, and although he might need discipline to keep him in line, his dimensions and his capabilities were known. But Janko Buk, who was creating so much disturbance among the farmers, was unknown; there was nothing in the theory of state socialism which prepared the Communist leaders of Poland to accept a man like Buk, and they were greatly disturbed by his actions.

As the leaders of the party warned Szymon Bukowski when he left Warsaw for this confrontation: 'If Lech Walesa causes us to miss the building of one s.h.i.+p, too bad. We can adjust to that and deliver the s.h.i.+p at some later date. But if Janko Buk causes us to lose a substantial portion of even one harvest, this nation will be in profound trouble. You get him straightened out.'

The young man to whom this stricture applied now arrived, accompanied by three farmers from surrounding districts. He was thirty-six years old, stockily built like all men of his family, extremely square of face, with a shock of sandy hair and eyes that smiled easily. He had a slight gap between his two big front teeth, but this was offset by their unusual whiteness, which gave him an appealing expression when he gave a wide smile. Like many farmers, he held his elbows out from his body as if ready for any a.s.sault which might come at him, but he seemed more stubborn than aggressive.

He was Janko Buk, Janko of the Beech Trees, a name familiar in this village for a thousand years. Some men in his line had been plain Jan, a name of solid virtue; others of a livelier disposition had been called by the affectionate diminutive Janko, or Good Old Jan. He was a responsible farmer, supported by a st.u.r.dy country wife and a widowed mother who knew as much about rural life as he.

How had this wonderfully average man with less than a high school education become the spokesman for the farmers of southeastern Poland and by extension, it seemed, all of Poland?

First, he had a strong intelligence capable of seeing that if the industrial unions that comprised Solidarity gained the higher wages to which they were ent.i.tled, the cost of things the farmers needed, like machinery and fertilizer, would have to rise. And then, if government kept the prices of food down to prevent riots in the cities, the farmer would inevitably find himself in a bind: 'Increased prices on everything we buy, same prices for everything we sell. That leads to ruin.' It was really worse than that: 'To cover unexpected expenses in the cities, the government is actually lowering what they pay us. We can't live that way.'

Because of the tradition in his family, generations of speaking out, including a fiery great-grandmother who had been hanged for refusing to obey nonsensical rules promulgated by the German n.a.z.is in 1939, a father who had probably been executed by the Russian Communists in 1944, and above all, a mother who had defended freedom and decency with a courage that few could have equaled, Janko Buk was more willing to speak out on these matters than most of his fellow farmers, and in those gradual steps which lead simple men from the contemplation of a wrong to discovered truth, to a voicing of complaint, to actual resistance, he had found himself almost accidentally at the head of a vast rural protest against the irrational way the Communist system was managing its farmers, and the more he spoke out, the more clearly other farmers recognized the truth of what he was saying.

So when Janko Buk entered the palace, he brought considerable weight behind him, and the representatives of the government had to treat him with respect. When he came into the meeting room he saw in rapid succession the cups for tea, the doilies beneath them, the bottles of currant sok, the brandy, the cookies, and in the middle of the table the plate of delicious-looking sandwiches, and he was a.s.sured that the discussions were to be serious.

He sat opposite Szymon Bukowski and nodded pleasantly. He had never met this high official before but he had heard a great deal about him, and he wondered who should speak first. When Bukowski said nothing, Janko Buk felt no hesitation in plunging right in: 'I've always been told, since you became famous, that is, Mr. Minister, that we're related.'

'That could well be. I came from these parts.'

'My wife thinks that your grandmother and my great-grandmother were the same woman.'

'My grandmother Jadwiga was hanged in 1939 for resisting the n.a.z.is.'

'Then we are related!' With visible pleasure, Buk stood, reached across the table and shook Bukowski's hand, holding it warmly and strongly in his own.

'That's a good beginning,' one of the farmers said, and a member of Bukowski's team agreed: 'Token of a good ending.'

Bukowski, seeing an opportunity to establish his credentials with the farmers, said: 'You know, I was raised in this village. Used to work on your farms. And during the first part of the n.a.z.i occupation I hid in your forest. When peace came I returned to help rebuild this palace ... worked on this room we're sitting in.'

'My family was in Krakow at that time,' Buk said. 'I'm sorry we missed you.'

'So I know your region well, gentlemen. I know your problems.'

'I don't think you do,' a stern voice from the far left of the table said.

Everyone turned to stare at the speaker, a farmer in his late fifties whose worried countenance spoke even more loudly than his words: 'We're caught in a vise, Mr. Minister, high prices for what we buy, low prices for what we sell.'

'I understand, and that's why my team has come down to talk with you.'

'It isn't talk we need, Mr. Minister.' The older farmer spoke with a harshness which surprised some of the Warsaw men. It was obvious that the old days when rural people nodded and agreed with anything the high commissioners said were gone. There was now a contentiousness in this room that was almost frightening. Ten years ago, even two, Szymon Bukowski would have come thumping into this room and said: 'That's how it's to be,' and that's how it would have been. Had there been even a whisper of protest, he would have indicated either by inflection or outright statement: 'Because that's how Big Brother wants it to be.' One always said this with a twist of head or shoulder to the east. In those simple days, what Russia wanted is what Poland got. Now it was all different, and both the farmers and the Warsaw men were sparring more with an unknown future than with each other. They were obligated to determine what the relations.h.i.+p between the Polish city and the Polish farm would be, but far more important, they were endeavoring to discover what the logical relations.h.i.+p between the Polish nation as a whole and the Soviet Union ought ostensibly to be. They were a group of administrators and farmers wrestling with a gnawing problem; in reality they were the forerunners of the 1980s and 1990s grappling with one of the most profound problems in the world: how does a Communist dictators.h.i.+p relax its controls, especially when the collapse of its economic policies demands that such controls be relaxed?

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 cuc.u.mbers, 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.