Łukasz Bertram1; 1 Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland
Discussion
The post-war introduction of communism in Poland was accompanied by a revolution in every county. My paper will deal with the experience of key actors in this process – local officers of security forces. My approach is to embrace bottom-up perspective on the practices of individuals as well as the narrative strategies they use to recall and interpret them. Thus, the paper will be based primarily on an extensive archival collection of memoirs of the members of the studied group. My chief aim is to capture the tension in the identity of officers serving at the level of a rural commune or small town. On the one hand, they were representatives of political power and carriers of the revolutionary ideology, while on the other, their habituses – as understood by Bourdieu – were deeply rooted in the everyday experience of Polish countryside. Therefore I will address such issues as: how the authors of these narratives reconstructed their paths to the ranks of the security forces: as a channel of social advancement of representatives of the unprivileged strata, a space for ideological formation or class resentment, a demand for subjectivity? How did they depict the violence – their own and on the part of the anti-communist underground – and what strategies they used to legitimize the former? And what was the relation between the ideological clichés the authors were adjusting to, and their individual emotions and memory of the chaotic post-war reality?
