In the late 1970s Teresa Torańska, a Polish journalist employed by literary weekly Kultura, began a series of interviews with a retired communist statesman. These were no ordinary apparatchiks, but the people who had once occupied the very pinnacle of postwar Poland’s Stalinist hierarchy. The resulting book, Oni (in English, Them), was explosive. Torańska’s subtly forensic interview technique drew her subjects into a dramatic exposé of themselves and their regime. These men and women were first victims, then perpetrators of the most chaotic and violent periods of High Stalinism. Despite being clearly traumatized by their experiences — and their own actions — most remained deeply loyal to their beliefs and convinced of their righteousness.

The interviews were freely given and delivered with startling candor. The Stalinists who had led Poland from the end of World War II to its abortive reform period following 1956 were determined to record their testimony to a society that had, by the final decade of Polish communism, begun to openly portray them as monsters. Upon completing the book Torańska relocated to Paris, unable to officially publish such an inflammatory portrait of the regime’s architects at home. The book filtered its way back into Poland through the underground channels of samizdat literature, at that time flourishing via the emerging state-within-a-state, Solidarność.

Torańska is a visible presence throughout the text. Although she allows her subjects to speak at great length, her own interventions leave little room for doubt as to her own political standpoint. The fact that she is able to advocate so frankly for the dissident cause in dialogue with communist grandees attests to the system’s lack of energy by its final decade. Stefan Staszewski, a one-time Jewish communist propaganda chief, and later Catholic-convert anti-communist, is able to agree with her wholeheartedly on many points, embellishing her arguments with anecdotal flourishes. Staszewski embodies the staggering contradictions of the era.