Marian Bielicki: Making Individuals Under Communism
by Adam Reed
There must be many reasons why it was in Poland that a nation first liberated itself from Communism. It might be that one of those reasons was a children's novel, written by Marian L. Bielicki in 1954 under the unremarkable title Bacterium 078. I now know that Communism began to lose possession of my soul when I read it, after receiving it as a prize for being the top student in the third grade of TPD School 19 for the school year 1954-55. Looking at it again, I think that the book was written for sixth or seventh-graders. But things in TPD 19 were different.
Like all kids in Communist Poland, I spent the first half of first grade in a government school, saying Roman Catholic prayers I didn't believe under a masochistic-looking crucifix, taking lessons in reading and writing and counting and Cathechism, and many tests. The tests were to determine what kind of school I was to be placed in after the Christmas break. Being Communist, Poland was poor, and education was rationed. Future peasants and laborers went to a four-year school, future factory and service workers got seven years, future office workers and technicians 11, and so on. The school I wound up in for the second half of first grade was a TPD school, which was great because it did not have crucifixes or prayers or Catechism lessons. It had even more frequent tests than the first school, and for the second grade I was assigned to another TPD school, TPD 19.
TPD stood for the Society of Friends of Children, a nominally private—nothing was really private in Communist Poland—association of teachers' cooperatives. It was nominally private so that its schools did not have to follow the Ministry of Education rules, and were slightly independent, rather like "Charter Schools" in the United States. TPD was charged by the government with educating specially gifted students, in such things as sports, music, chess, ballet, languages or visual arts. It was never made clear what the students of TPD 19 were supposed to be gifted in, but the identity of its sponsoring collective was a hint. Every school in Communist Poland had a sponsoring collective, usually a factory or a collective farm. Our sponsoring collective was the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which was a fancy name for the Ministry of Prisons and Police. A popular joke, related to me by my father, asked why it took 3 cops to give out traffic tickets. The answer was: one to read the license plate, one to write the ticket, and a third to keep a watchful eye on those two dangerous intellectuals.
Reading Bacterium 078 today, its theme seems copied from Ayn Rand's Anthem. Not a remarkable thing in itself, since many Polish airmen and soldiers spent World War II in Britain, where Anthem had been published in 1938. The amazing thing was that Bacterium 078 got past the censors, that it got several big print runs and dozens of favorable reviews in a Communist police state, that it was given out to the state's closely watched students, and that all those who caught on—and there must have been many—never admitted to what they must have understood. The book was written—and it must have taken extraordinary skill in applied philosophy—in such a way that no one could dare to identify its theme, without revealing that he understood more about the nature of Communism than anyone under Communism was allowed to understand. Indeed, it was written so that an official reader could pretend that it was innocuous with less risk than revealing it for what it was. The author understood the lie that Communism was built on, and used that lie as a shield, as impenetrable to those to whom it was transparent as to those to whom it was opaque.
The story is set in Japan in the 1930s and 1940s. Before its defeat in WWII, Japan had developed its own unique totalitarianism, built not on any conceptual ideology but rather on Japan's traditional values and culture. The central characteristic of that culture was groupthink—not the mild residual groupthink for which Japanese organizations are still infamous in 2005, but the original full-strength, pre-American version. It merged the central belief of Shinto—that Japan's national traditions are the earthly manifestation of the Gods—with the central Buddhist idea that the ideal state of the mind was non-will, non-self, and non-value. It was a culture that came closer to absolute collectivism and total group-think than any other modern, industrial nation on Earth.
The protagonist is a microbiologist who belongs—"belongs" with a literalness initially unimaginable to a European—to a biological warfare team sent to China to test "Bacterium 078" on human subjects: Chinese arrested for being "too Westernized" to fit into the Japanese idea of what proper Asians ought to be like. In an obvious concession to Communist censorship, those "un-Asian" Chinese are mostly Communists. (I later found out that the episode was similar to things that actually happened, except that the "un-Asian" prisoners in Japanese prisons were usually Christians.) The protagonist, trying to understand the effect of Bacterium 078 on the nervous system, starts to study the prisoners' personalities—and discovers the concept, completely foreign to him, that these men think of themselves as individuals. Gradually, through many painful discoveries, he becomes an individual (and, in another sop to the censors, a Communist). At the end, he is trying to sabotage the final weaponization of Bacterium 078 by the team he used to belong to, now working in postwar Japan for an American weapons conglomerate. The final action is a spectacular victory of the Individual over the Collective. Yes, in the book the Individual is a Communist, and the Collective is working for the evil Americans, but the theme is clear and the inspiration powerful.
The superficial details were, of course, politically correct. Imperial Japan was an ally of the anti-Communist Hitler, so it was OK to bash it for anything. Communist propaganda portrayed Communism as "scientific socialism," so making the protagonist a scientist who becomes a Communist was not something anyone could criticize. The superficial politics was entirely as required by Communist propaganda.
But the real beauty of the book's approach was that no one - censor, critic, teacher, student—would have dared point out the book's actual message and the reversal of collectivism and individualism in the plot. In official propaganda, America—capitalist society—was a regimented assembly-line hell from which a person of authentic mind and feelings could only be totally alienated. That propaganda image of capitalism was very much drawn from the totally alienated real life that real individuals were living under real Communism. And vice-versa: according to propaganda, the Communist ideal was the totally authentic, self-realized human being. To denounce the book for its real message, the censor would have had to identify, as lies, the lies that the Marxist state was built on. And for that, he knew, he would have been killed.
As I was writing this article, I looked up Marian Bielicki on Google, and found that an English-language edition of Bacterium 078 was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1955. I have not seen it, but I doubt that the translator really understood what he was translating that year.
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