A Narrative that Would Not Go Away

In the final installment of his bestselling trilogy on the political history of the post-1989 Third Polish Republic, Robert Krasowski—a political commentator with strongly conservative leanings—depicts the end of socialism and the transition to democracy as marked by a sense of elusiveness of the “real” and a profound crisis of knowledge. The epistemic confusion would, Krasowski contends, provoke a climate of pervasive distrust and create a breeding ground for conspiracy theories about the new order as a mere façade that concealed something altogether different:

In Poland, one conspiracy narrative, more than any other, would come to embody postsocialism's suspicion of power and its concern with diffuse sources of authority in an increasingly globalized world.Footnote ² This narrative claimed that the changes initiated in 1989 were a sham because they were engineered by the communist authorities. As result, a powerful network, rooted in the former security services and commonly referred to as układ (“system” or “deal”), allegedly penetrated the structures and economy of the post-1989 Polish state, to preside over an empire of egotistic interests based on endemic corruption. The Truth that this conspiracy narrative purports to reveal is that of a “stolen” or derailed transition to democracy: the outgoing regime, along with colluding traitors from the Solidarity movement, staged an illusory change, so that the postsocialist system would remain “rigged” to the disadvantage of ordinary citizens.Footnote ³ In the early 2000s, the stolen transition narrative would enter the public sphere from the fringes to question the foundational myth of the postsocialist state's consensual genesis and to challenge its legitimacy. It became instrumentalized as part of the political campaigns of the conservative right and went on to underpin tangible state policies, especially in the sphere of truth revelation.Footnote ⁴ Its prominence was, according to Krasowski, a driving force behind a development that would eventually drain Polish politics of common sense and detach it from reality.Footnote ⁵

Krasowski depicts the stolen transition as a faulty interpretation of reality and, simultaneously, a grand narrative of postsocialist Poland whose images and idioms have, over its lifespan, become key to the larger discourse on an increasingly contested democratic and economic transformation. He delineates two perspectives on this narrative: one he considers “reasonable” and the other “excessive.” A reasonable approach entails acknowledging the genuine issues of the transformation, while an excessive one may be a sign of a dangerous fixation, potentially bordering on paranoia.Footnote ⁶ Most politicians adhere to one of these two approaches, but Krasowski's protagonist, Jarosław Kaczyński, vacillates between them, and it is never clear if he is a shrewd manipulator or a hapless devotee of the stolen transition. In Krasowski's de-historicized account, the stolen transition turned into a privileged topos because fickle fate connived to bring about a sequence of events that lent credibility to a fundamentally “false vision.”Footnote ⁷ Foremost among these events were the scandals that enmeshed the postcommunist left government of 2001–2005, and the 2005 election that realigned the political scene around two post-Solidarity parties: the national-conservative Law and Justice and the center-right Civic Platform. Both parties were founded on a severe critique of the postsocialist state as inherently weak and in thrall to corrupt cliques, but only Law and Justice would make the stolen transition a cornerstone of its identity. Krasowski's—rather debatable—point is that getting caught up in imaginary plots prevented Law and Justice from undertaking a genuine reform of the postsocialist state during its first stint in government 2005–2007.Footnote ⁸ In the same way, he claims, the Civic Platform missed the opportunity to transform the Republic for the better during its turn in power (2007–15), largely because it became embroiled in countermeasures to Law and Justice's conspiracist fantasies.Footnote ⁹

For all its political bias, Krasowski's account is, in many ways, exemplary of how both academics and journalists approach the stolen transition narrative. The primary focus lies on its political content and how it has been utilized in political discourse: as a central feature of populist rhetoric and a threat to democracy.Footnote ¹⁰ There is little interest in the stolen transition's role as cultural narrative and the varied cultural forms through which it finds expression and audiences, including novels, films, television, and the internet.Footnote ¹¹ What is absent, in other words, is the wider cultural context and the infrastructure that effectively facilitated the circulation of tropes and allegations ascribed such centrality.Footnote ¹² If the stolen transition is as important as often claimed, it is crucial that we seek a more comprehensive understanding of its attractions and dangers. In order to do so we must pay more attention to its articulation in popular representation, the traces it has left on fictional texts, and the cultural work it performs as an artistic practice or in the formation of individual and collective identity.

According to scholars such as Peter Knight or Timothy Melley, fictional texts that revolve around conspiracy plots are never just reflections of actual events or escapist entertainment. Rather, they assume a major if ambiguous role in the narrativization of knowledge, and in the construction and dissemination of attitudes, ideas and beliefs.Footnote ¹³ Melley specifically has used the example of conspiracy fiction, including detective stories and thrillers, to argue for the continued importance of literature and culture today. Fiction not only constitutes a “portable imaginary” of specific scenarios and characters; it scaffolds our perception of reality.Footnote ¹⁴ Without considering popular conspiracy scenarios that dominate the average person's understanding of the realm of secrecy and “shady business” it is impossible to grasp fully some central aspects of recent sociopolitical life. Popular conspiracy fiction emerges, according to Melley, as “an ideological arena with profound effects on democracy, citizenship, and state policy.”Footnote ¹⁵ Critics are right, he asserts, to treat many conspiracy narratives as dangerous, but the emphasis on danger and pathology should not divert attention from the more general anxieties that underpin them and from the important things that they reveal about perceptions of modern society.Footnote ¹⁶

Hence, the aim of this paper is not to assess the validity of the stolen transition narrative, but to throw light on its cultural significance and the anxieties from which it stems. The article explores how the scenario of the stolen transition is staged in three popular crime novels published during the key juncture of the 2000s: Zygmunt Miłoszewski's Uwikłanie (Entanglement, 2007), Marcin Wolski's Noblista (Nobel Prize Winner, 2008) and Szczepan Twardoch's Przemienienie (Transfiguration, 2008).Footnote ¹⁷ In these texts, the uncovering of a conspiracy plot propels the narrative forward and helps construct “a particular set of challenges for the central protagonist.”Footnote ¹⁸ Penned by prominent authors, these works have been translated, nominated for national and international awards, adapted to other media, and generated controversy.Footnote ¹⁹ Significantly, none of the novels analyzed in this paper would qualify as experimental or complex postmodern prose. As argued by Michael Butter and Peter Knight, a much-needed transnational and comparative turn in academia's engagement with conspiracy narratives requires both a shift of focus away from the US, and increased attention to popular and lowbrow texts (“potboilers and B-movies”).Footnote ²⁰

My reading focuses on the emplotment of conspiracy: what are the plots about, how do they work, and who is involved? At the same time, I pay attention to how the conspiracy narratives are embedded in broader histories of the socialist and postsocialist periods, including histories of everyday life, power and social participation. My analysis will show that while the novels comment on wider concerns about the outcomes of the postsocialist transformation, their engagement with conspiracy is never merely a response to specific political parties or political conflicts. Even a small sample of texts from a narrow period will demonstrate that the stolen transition narrative can take different forms, reflect multiple fears and carry different political implications. One of the novels’ shared concerns is a sense of dissonance between a pervasive post-1989 appeal to freedom and autonomous agency, on the one hand, and a growing sense of diminished human autonomy in the face of complex systems, on the other. Such concerns and the collateral fear that one's actions might be governed by powerful external forces are similar to what Melley, in the context of the postwar US has identified as “agency panic” and a chief source of conspiracist thinking.Footnote ²¹ Melley also argues that conspiracy culture today has undergone a shift from narratives about threatening Others (Jews or Masons) to more sweeping suspicions of social systems and enemies from within. Whether and how the novels’ conspiracy scenarios resonate with one or the other type constitutes an implicit question of my analysis. In the following section, I outline the distinct cultural moment that the novels were written at and for as an age of postsocialist anxiety where it became increasingly difficult to know what is real and what is true, and to account for the new sources of external control that differ from the more recognizable forms of oppression under state socialism. I then proceed to a reading of the novels’ fictitious conspiracy plots. My findings are summarized in the conclusion.

Age of Anxiety

Melley presents agency panic—a “troubled defense” of an increasingly beleaguered assumption that individuals are self-directed actors who determine their own fate—as culturally specific and rooted in an American “fantasy of subjectivity.”Footnote ²² In the last two decades or so, however, tensions between the idea of an autonomous subject and the numerous paradoxes of contemporary capitalism have come to be seen as a broader cultural feature of today's world, even though, for many scholars, the US remains the paradigmatic example.Footnote ²³

In the context of postsocialist eastern Europe, several noteworthy characteristics are evident. Melley describes a clash between long-standing traditions of liberal individualism and postwar developments in the media, globalized economy, or mass-communication technologies. For eastern Europe, meanwhile, one of the most debated topics remains the relationship between suspicion and postwar dictatorships or authoritarian regimes.Footnote ²⁴ The discussion of the extent to which eastern Europe has been and could still be more prone to conspiracist thinking than, for instance, its Cold War adversaries is complicated by the fact that present-day conspiracy discourses in the region often reflect global concerns.Footnote ²⁵ Less discussed in the context of suspicion and conspiracy culture are anxieties linked to the more recent post-1989 reconfiguration of the social, which—while structured around economic (free market) and systemic (liberal democratic) change—was also about new rules of conduct and about remaking not only institutions but also human beings.Footnote ²⁶ In Poland, the 1990s especially were a time of more or less uncontested promotion of neoliberal ideology and faith in entrepreneurial individualism. On the one hand, the advancement of such agendas enhanced the status of the individual. On the other hand, intense pressure on the individual to conform to the new rules questioned the meaning, and often the very possibility, of independent subject positions.

Anxieties surrounding various new forms of social regulation and a perceived increase in uniformity became notable in Polish narrative fictions during the early 2000s as the initial optimism of the transformation period began to give way to disillusion.Footnote ²⁷ The anxieties manifested themselves not in systemic critique but in suspicion that there were hidden realities underpinning the postsocialist state and that society was full of zombies, lemmings, and other debilitated subjects.Footnote ²⁸ The new forms of control were not as readily discernible as the repressive methods employed by the previous regime. Centralized authority, coercion, or dictatorial command were, after 1989, replaced by soft power drawing on consensus (the “there is no alternative” discourse). Contentious legislation might be framed as a “compromise” even if widely regarded as a result of politics conducted in secrecy rather than through democratic means.Footnote ²⁹ Concealment or lack of information ceased to be solely a consequence of state repression but became intertwined with elements like media dissemination, even though these factors could overlap.

In addition, the early twenty-first century saw an extraordinary intensification of debates on the nature of the socialist past, largely centered on the paradigm of totalitarianism and the idea of an almighty state able to control citizens made passive through terror and indoctrination. This disputed paradigm gained renewed prominence in the early 2000s, as both liberals and conservatives made “criminality” the core feature of communist ideology across all historical contexts, and criticized the “unfinished” 1989 revolution, claiming it permitted communists to elude justice and retain influence.Footnote ³⁰ A major source of public tension surrounding the past—and the knowability of truth—was Poland's Institute for National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, IPN). The Institute, becoming more politicized over time, captivated the public with its sensational revelations, such as exposing unofficial informant lists, outing prominent public figures as communist-era collaborators, and revealing dramatic connections between the Catholic Church and the communist security services.Footnote ³¹ Most of the scandals would, similarly to the political scandals of the early 2000s, remain unresolved. The point here is not to assess the activities of the IPN or the validity of the totalitarian framing of the socialist past. Rather, the issue is the extent to which the polarizing historical narrative contributed to a sense of epistemological disarray and anxiety that had consequences for those trying to make sense of the world through fiction.

Michał Piepiórka, who has dealt extensively with postsocialist Polish films as socially determined expressions of perceptions of reality, identifies in them a string of paradoxes similar to those Melley finds in postwar US literature. Piepiórka describes postsocialist fictions as permeated with a sense of the self that is loosened from layers of social determination (stable employment, strong interpersonal ties, and so on). As pursued opportunities remain unrealized and give way to apprehension and a sense of powerlessness, the characters retreat into a depoliticized private sphere—in the name of personal autonomy and fulfillment through family life.Footnote ³² The narratives studied by Piepiórka center on a mechanism reminiscent of what Melley labels as agency panic: a fundamental unwillingness to recognize that societal factors shape individual thoughts and behaviors coupled with a reluctant awareness that indeed society plays such a role.Footnote ³³ For Piepiórka and other critics (mainly of leftist persuasion), the stolen transition narrative emerges first as a result of an inability to critique the new system, and during the 2000s, grows particularly strong in response to a string of anxiety-provoking circumstances. The latter include the entrance of multinational companies and corporate culture, widespread precarity, soaring unemployment, and, a moral-panic-inducing mass emigration that followed Poland's accession to the European Union in 2004.Footnote ³⁴ Another concept by Melley that could augment the discussion is “postmodern transference.” This phenomenon involves perceiving vast structures as rational entities capable of executing intricate plans, thus shifting individual agency to the larger system, which then begins to act on its own.Footnote ³⁵ This is what the stolen transition dramatizes as remnants of the old system acting malevolently against the present and depriving individuals of their autonomy.

Entanglement: Conspiracy Filtered through Liberal Imagination

Uwikłanie, which came to be known in English as Entanglement, is the breakthrough work of bestselling author Zygmunt Miłoszewski (b. 1976). It won the High Calibre Award for the best Polish crime novel in 2007 and was among the six works nominated to the 2013 French Prix du Polar Européen for the best European crime novel. It has been adapted for cinema (2011, dir. Jacek Bromski) and for BBC Radio 4's Reading Europe series (2015).Footnote ³⁶ Set in the politically volatile summer of 2005, with the crucial presidential and parliamentary elections looming large, the plot of Entanglement centers on the investigation of a murder that has taken place in a converted Warsaw monastery during a weekend retreat attended by four patients and a psychotherapist. The crime is investigated by state prosecutor Teodor Szacki, who discovers that the murder victim was not merely a successful business owner and an unhappy family man but a former security service (Służba Bezpieczeństwa, SB) agent with an unsavory past.Footnote ³⁷ Thirty years earlier, in 1987, cynically taking advantage of the chaos that followed the Solidarity revolution and the imposition of martial law, the SB agent arranged the murder of his future wife's boyfriend in order to rid himself of a rival. By doing so, he set in motion a chain of disastrous events that would lead to his own death at the hands of the victim's long-suffering family.

Most of the novel follows Szacki as he goes about his job and his troubled private life, but from the start, someone is keeping an eye on his investigation. This “someone” is a secret network of former SB officers, embodied in an enigmatic Chairman who has infiltrated the highest echelons of power. Once Szacki has glimpsed the omnipotence of the network, the conspirators attempt to bribe him, derail his investigation, threaten him and his family, and, finally, commit murder to prevent the truth from coming out.

Entanglement portrays a centralized conspiracy where a group plots for rational reasons, but it does not depict a vast “control center” from which former SB agents run society.Footnote ³⁸ Instead, the novel links conspiracy to the illusory character of contemporary life and the parallel existence of two different layers of reality. One layer appears as commonly accepted everyday life but is in fact an illusion; the other is hidden but true. The conspiracy thrives in the hidden dimension into which Entanglement provides brief glimpses (seemingly ordinary restaurant customers are revealed as agents in disguise). The dark side remains invisible because of the polarization of social life and the threats posed by large systems, such as mass media. The latter threats concern the novel equally if not more than the conspiracy proper, though they never take the form of concrete plots or agendas. The problem for Entanglement is the very nature of contemporary communicative production, which it seeks to capture in the meaningless news summaries with which each chapter begins. These summaries contain plenty of words but no ideas, and what they circulate matters very little beyond the here and now. Szacki is particularly weary of national politics that he perceives as a contrived spectacle staged by the media to divert attention from politics’ fundamental unimportance. Everywhere in society, he discerns rising uniformity and sees himself surrounded by people who are in charge of neither their lives nor their bodies, and whose everyday life is pervaded by a sense of resentment and a simmering if unfocused rage. When shopping in a supermarket, he feels “ashamed of looking like all the other zombies struggling to push along their cheeses, soaps, meats, loo sprays, and books by Dan Brown.”Footnote ³⁹

Indeed, the entire world he inhabits is a source of anxiety to Szacki. Warsaw, his beloved hometown, appears as a “Third World city,” caught between past grandeur—what it was during the interwar Second Republic before the socialist era started—and a potential re-vindication, or what it could become in the future.Footnote ⁴⁰ At home, Szacki's family life is crumbling and he feels that his lawyer wife, who is a passionate football supporter, fails to live up to his standards. For one, she is not making sufficient effort with her clothing and appearance, while he is endlessly attentive to his. Anxiety about the meaning of masculinity has long been recognized as a chief structuring principle of contemporary conspiracism.Footnote ⁴¹ Szacki's self-consciousness, however, appears within the context of an ongoing renegotiation of masculinity that lies at the center of the postsocialist modernization project, and in prolonging the 1990s’ gendered debate about the emergence of a homegrown middle class and the reconstruction of “normal” hegemonic masculinity following “abnormal” socialism.Footnote ⁴² The gendered anxiety that reverberates throughout Entanglement is linked to concerns with the (re)organization of the public sphere and the perceived tensions between collective life and a subject meant to rise above limitations imposed by society. Unsurprisingly, Szacki finds collective demands for public recognition put forth by groups such as women or homosexuals particularly unsettling. What if creating a more inclusive society requires social engineering reminiscent of the pre-1989 era? And what kind of behaviors should serve as markers of identity or basis for making claims within the frameworks of citizenship and human rights? Exasperated with the endless stream of conflicting claims and utterances, Szacki reverts to a privatized ethics that replaces collective quests for equality or justice with an obligation to care for oneself: unless you are gay or anti-gay yourself, he tells himself, none of this matters.Footnote ⁴³

The notion that the current dysfunction of the public sphere could be linked to the socialist past is reinforced when Szacki makes contact with the IPN. The IPN employees who help Szacki solve the case: a geeky archivist and a historian who is a cross between Maximilian Robespierre and Tom Cruise seem to embody an ethos of radical change, defining themselves as oppositional truth-tellers ready to defy the establishment. Where Szacki is confused, they are angry and eager to denounce the “amnesty” they believe to be surrounding communist crimes. According to them, the era of terror was not limited to the early 1950s but extended to the entire postwar period, not least the repressive crackdown of the 1980s. Any other interpretation is not a question of differing perspectives or experiences—it is a question of amnesia. And because amnesia has, they argue, taken hold of collective consciousness, the past lives on in the conspiracy that continues to obscure the truth. The conspirators are able to control minds through “official” historiography and an omnipresent nostalgia for the seemingly harmless products of socialist-era pop culture.Footnote ⁴⁴ Therefore, nothing short of a firm rejection of the communist past will break this evil cycle and turn the zombified postsocialist consumers into citizens who can reclaim their identity, agency, and power. For Szacki, the knowledge supplied by the IPN will change his entire perception of reality, forcing him to reinterpret the present and the past—and to question his own memories.

By assigning a crucial role to its IPN characters, Entanglement betrays a fascination with the revolutionary fervor of radical anticommunism yet seeks to filter it through a more liberal imagination. Even though its fictitious IPN employees are allowed to outline the conception of an unfinished revolution, the novel still holds on to a view of the new democratic order as the opposite of the old system—an idea that contrasts with more extreme narratives that posit 1989 as an orchestrated betrayal. What the novel calls for is not revenge on representatives of the former regime but neutral procedural justice for the state to function correctly, and a moral judgement of the communist crimes so that truth might be restored to society—and the conspiracy defeated. Entanglement emphatically fails to do so by its final page: the real murderer is let off, while the man who takes the blame and goes to prison is conveniently disposed of by the network. Much more important, however, the novel is able to present an explanation that “captures ‘truth’ within a master narrative” and invokes conspiracy with hope: a hope of a potential “second chance” that will sweep away secrecy, make power transparent, and employ it for the good of all people.Footnote ⁴⁵

Nobel Prize Winner: False Elites and Foreign Infiltration

Published in 2008, Noblista (Nobel Prize Winner, hereafter NPW) is the second in a trilogy of novels with a clear political orientation.Footnote ⁴⁶ Its author, Marcin Wolski (b. 1947), first came to prominence in the 1970s as a satirist and science fiction writer.Footnote ⁴⁷ In the 2000s, his work grew increasingly aligned with the conservative rhetoric of Law and Justice. Not surprisingly perhaps, NPW became, upon its publication, the object of media controversy, fueled by, on the one hand, a scandalous review in liberal Gazeta Wyborcza and, on the other hand, the public endorsement of then president Lech Kaczyński.Footnote ⁴⁸ NPW draws on the period's many agent scandals implicating writers and intellectuals, and, similarly to Entanglement, sets its action on the eve of a parliamentary election of 2007, which saw the first Law and Justice government ousted by its more liberal rival, the Civic Platform.Footnote ⁴⁹ Even though NPW conflates socialism, cultural liberalism, and various forms of deviancy, effectively linking them all to a globalized conspiracy, the book was marketed as “optimistic” and the convention chosen by Wolski is that of romantic comedy, satire, and exaggerated stereotypes.Footnote ⁵⁰

NPW's storyline centers on thirty-something Wiktor Leśniewski, a part-time history lecturer at Warsaw University who tells of his investigation of Henryk Barski—a famous writer, respected liberal, and former oppositionist with impeccable anticommunist credentials. Barski is touted for the Nobel Prize in literature, but Wiktor suspects that Barski's illustrious career is based on secret collaboration with the former regime. Wiktor's motivation is personal revenge (the suspicious death of a young lover), but assisting in the investigation is his idealistic PhD student Adam Podlaski, who works for the IPN. To Adam, revealing the “truth” about a prominent intellectual is part of an anticommunist moral cleansing: he believes that the vetting of public figures can alter consciousness and banish the remains of totalitarianism. The investigation soon reveals Barski to be a “fake” authority with no basis in accomplishment or moral capacity. Any proof of collaboration, however, remains elusive; the secret police files are incomplete and other evidence is equivocal.

A turning point only occurs when Wiktor manages to trace a failed writer who has become an internet conspiracy theorist. The man, a longstanding resident of a psychiatric hospital, claims not only that there is a conspiracy, but also that it is controlled by eerie, demonic forces. This represents a pivotal revelation for NPW. Depicting the adversary as a source of moral evil bolsters the novel's portrayal of political discord as an unresolvable struggle, devoid of compromise. This is not merely about conflicting beliefs; it is about different realities, with one containing sinister motives. Additionally, the dismissal of alternative perspectives as inherently irrational sharpens the opposition between authenticity and falsehood, yet it does not prompt NPW to doubt what is genuine or truthful. Due to their personal backgrounds (descendants of anticommunist intelligentsia) and ideological references, the protagonists are highly resistant to truths other than their own. It is in this immunity to “other” knowledge and in the protagonists’ capacity to manage the effects of external pressures that NPW finds its optimism. Even the electoral setback of 2007 seems insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Finally, the connection drawn between writers and conspiracy theorists, both striving to create illusion of coherence, signals the intention to address not only a crisis of relevance among postsocialist intellectuals but also to express more general apprehension about contemporary culture.Footnote ⁵¹

The conspiratorial threat itself is figured as infiltration of foreign—geographically mobile, mostly nonstate—actors such as former KGB agents (many of whom are Jews), or Islamists, in league with the local postcommunist network and liberal elites. Relying on the narrative and epistemic model of gossip, NPW bombards the reader with references to public figures from the world of politics, culture, and media, some of whom have—the novel alleges—been exposed as communist informants. The allegations and rumors are arranged so that they point to a legible pattern and suggests that everyone who is anyone is somehow involved.Footnote ⁵² Though NPW's decentralized conspiracy relies on a post-9/11 imaginary: an “inner circle” controls a web of minor actors or independent cells tasked with specific actions, the plot is ultimately rooted in the early 1980s—a time of momentous decisions for the characters. It was then that Barski, who had previously (for purely egotistic rather than ideological reasons) been an informant for the SB, was recruited by the KGB as a sleeper-agent. Now, Barski has been “asked” to take part in a KGB-fronted terrorist plot with Islamist links that aims to orchestrate antagonism between different European states (Poland and Germany), thus hastening the destruction of the west.Footnote ⁵³

The greatest menace posed by the conspirators, however, does not lie in outrageous terrorist plots but in their continuous manipulation of culture. Postsocialist society, according to NPW, has been overwhelmed by shallow and insincere cultural forms and figures, resulting in a depletion of public life. This process stands in stark contrast to the strong sense of purpose and inner direction that characterized the anticommunist intelligentsia of the 1970s and 1980s. Such true figures of authority, claims NPW, possessed a clearly bounded self with a protected core of inner life that easily withstood external pressure; they created themselves, while the public figures of today are entirely manufactured by others. Especially young people—purposeless and apathetic—are in need of protection from the empty cultural forms.Footnote ⁵⁴ A key chapter at the start of the novel depicts how students at Warsaw University cannot be bothered to attend an open debate on de-communization, and those who do, give their support to a slick Gazeta Wyborcza editor who makes short work of the stammering IPN crusaders. In NPW's narrative, socialism (enemy of the past) and cultural liberalism (enemy of the present) are both hegemonic ideologies that exercise cognitive oppression and curtail freedom of speech. The end of socialism in 1989 thus comes to appear as one step in a struggle against what NPW frames as different facets of an ongoing totalitarian threat. Here, the true anticommunist intelligentsia of the past provides an inspiring example of how to (re)gain personal liberty and collective agency—making it possible to imagine a future defeat of the enemy.

In the meantime, the protagonists must face multiple threats. These include the eternal menace from an autocratic “East”; the global aftermath of 9/11; the weakness of an ineffectual Europe (‘Euroland’); or, multiculturalism and immigration from the Middle East that imperil an idealized “Western civilization,” implicitly understood as Christian and white. But there are also other concerns such as demands posed by “annoying” and “antidemocratic” political correctness; overbearing women (especially mothers who cannot relinquish control of their grown-up sons); and homosexuality that has become visible because it is “fashionable.” Conspicuously absent from the list of threats are the consequences of economic liberalism. In fact, despite Wiktor's struggling agentic trajectory (precarious employment, previous divorce), he seems to be leading a comfortable life with few financial worries. Aided by the romantic comedy convention, Wiktor is able to disarm the looming threats through individual resourcefulness and masculine agency. In the end, he is happily (re)married and offered multiple job opportunities, while social problems are glossed over or blamed on the conspiracy. Even the challenge to liberalism becomes a personal vocation as, in the final paragraphs of the novel, Wiktor vows to leave academia and devote himself to writing so that he can reveal the “blank spots” of history, thus contributing to the inevitable future victory of the “good.”

Transfiguration: Towards Generalized Conspiracism

Przemienienie (Transfiguration) from 2008 is an early work by Szczepan Twardoch (b. 1979), one of contemporary Poland's most popular and critically acclaimed writers, who nevertheless, at the beginning of his career, was a prolific contributor to rightwing outlets through which he voiced his alignment with radical versions of the stolen transition narrative.Footnote ⁵⁵ The novel opens with a grisly murder of a liberal Catholic priest in present-day Kraków. Sequences depicting the police investigation provide glimpses of how a powerful postcommunist network invades minds and directs actions, paralyzing individual lives and thwarting every natural ambition. The murder is never truly solved but swept under the rug by a conspiracy whose impunity contributes to a general dissolution of norms, embodied in the murdered priest—an over-privileged opportunist who had little faith but plenty of entitlement.

The core of the novel consists of a flashback that explores relations between communist-era security services and Catholic clergy, revolving around SB agents and the methods used to monitor Church activities and to recruit informants among priests.Footnote ⁵⁶ In the flashback, we follow young SB Lieutenant Antek Szarzyński, who in 1985 joins the Regional Office of Internal Affairs in the Upper Silesian capital of Katowice as part of a cell specializing in invigilation of the Catholic Church. The novel meticulously details the secret police's surveillance tactics, use of threats, violence, and attempts to scandalize priests suspected of homosexuality, but the protagonist's story is actually one of reversed brainwashing and concomitant struggle to (re)gain control. Antek initially sees himself as completely self-reliant and in full possession of himself, only to discover that he has all along been the victim of extreme manipulation. He was brought up in an orphanage, yet later finds out that he is the child of a “cursed soldier” (żołnierz wyklęty), one of the partisans who kept fighting communism after the end of WWII: taken away from his parents, Antek was “programmed” to become an SB agent. After making this discovery—as the repressed content of history begins to flow into his consciousness—Antek commits a series of brutal murders, avenges his parents and morphs into a punisher of collaborators in the past and the present. The most important of these killings is the “oedipal” murder of the powerful Major Drzewiecki (real name: Holzman) who has been a father-like figure to Antek, but whom the latter murders upon learning the truth.Footnote ⁵⁷ Drzewiecki is a former Stalinist who after 1956 could no longer be an up-front figure, but remained the ultimate puppet master and a key figure in the conspiracy.

Whereas Entanglement and NPW only reveal the full extent of the conspiracy towards the end of their stories, Transfiguration introduces the stolen transition early on as a catalyst for infinite subplots involving secret agents, subversive priests, and numerous others. In this horizontal rather than top-down scheme, most of the conspirators are unaware of each other and have no insight into the plans they help carry out. If the “usual” stolen transition scenario depicts the conspirators as both rationally motivated and competent, the later part of Transfiguration's plot suggests that they too could be mere marionettes. Even those who initially seem to be “in the know” eventually turn out to know very little. This version of conspiracy is not about a secret cabal wielding ultimate power over the course of events but about more generalized suspicion that cannot be resolved in a final revelation.Footnote ⁵⁸ Entanglement's conspiracy plot may at times appear a mere pretext for articulating broader fears, yet power ultimately resides within a distinct unit. In Transfiguration, the adversary is difficult to pin down and authority less clearly distributed. Moreover, in contrast to NPW, outside threats are not so much scapegoated in order to boost in-group identities as used to create the impression of a mutable enemy who, depending on the circumstances, can assume the form of Jews, Jesuits, KGB agents, Masons, or others. The conspirators can be discredited by being antisemites as well as by being Jews; homosexuals can be cast as dangerous deviants as well as suffering victims; and women can appear as victims of misogyny in a text that is blatantly misogynist itself. As Antek uncovers more and more layers of the conspiracy, the intricacy of the plot stretches the reader's imagination to the point where the literal meaning becomes less significant, serving instead as an empty signifier that channels various concerns.

Control is elusive, also when it comes to managing one's own identity. For Antek, nothing is spontaneous; everything is a tactical performance. Identity is about being able to perform different roles, depending on the situation. This “unique” insight makes him, he believes, better equipped to navigate the liminal conditions of the 1980s than “ordinary” people. Antek's incessant roleplaying only serves to re-affirm his distrust of others, but, at the same time, suspicion is, Transfiguration posits, the only logical response to a controlling state. Socialism, accordingly, is framed as an evil conspiracy that converted the population into automatons, leaving no room for authenticity in any form of life. Instrumental treatment of socialist doctrine is shown as common, except for a handful of dupes and former partisans who are depicted as physically repulsive, unintelligent, sexist, and antisemitic. The SB itself functions as a secret society, built on conformity, misogyny, and repression as much geared towards the agents themselves as toward their victims. In this setting, Antek seems not so much a psychopath as the inevitable byproduct of a system that is detrimental to one's personal integrity and sanity. He repeatedly professes to discard the idea of ideology altogether and to rely solely on himself. This standpoint is far from ideologically neutral; it lies at the core of neoliberal elevation of individualism as a safeguard against “collectivism” and external influence.

For the protagonist of Transfiguration, any interference of society ultimately works to impede freedom. It is the social itself rather than secret schemes that constitute a threat to the individual. And while the undemocratic past might be the ideal background on which to showcase the opposition between an autonomous individual and a society conniving against him, the link that the novel establishes between socialism and de-individuation in no way implies that other social systems guarantee personal liberty. The diffuse suspicion and the strategy of updating the past to present-day tastes (evident in the novel's careful styling of 1980s’ fashions) leaves the reader with the impression that the oppressive social controls of then are too close for comfort to those of now.Footnote ⁵⁹ Even the narrative solution chosen by the novel—a never fully explained flight abroad—is emblematic of 2000s’ fiction. In the end, Transfiguration's generalized conspiracy scenario serves less as endorsement of a concrete political party or political program than as expression of opposition to all forms of social control, dismissal of collective action, and a romanticized celebration of self-sufficiency.

By engaging with the stolen transition narrative the novels discussed above create patterns of suspicion that can be arranged in different ways and for different purposes. Their shared concerns revolve around institutional deception and malfunction, the condition of the public sphere and postsocialist democracy (a reality split into a visible and an invisible dimension), and an undermined sense of individual and collective agency. The conspiracy plots are structured by well-established narratives of deceit and center on tropes about the threatened family or about ordinary citizens caught in larger-than-life struggles, into which the novels add more context-specific content and characters that depend on the cultural and political ideas of their time. The latter include the figure of the successful entrepreneur who is in fact an undetected communist-era informant; the emotionally unhinged SB officer; and the IPN historian whom the novels establish in the stories as a symbol of youthful defiance. The novels’ conspiracy scenarios reveal anxiety about both external (exotic adversaries) and internal threats (social systems, changing gender patterns), oscillating between more conventional stories that allow for a total conversion of how the protagonist perceives the world, and more ambiguous fictions that resist emplotment and resolution. However, none of the novels analyzed in this paper constitute a clear-cut type: they all voice common grievances regarding life in globalized capitalist societies and harbor doubts about discerning reality from falsehood, yet persist in relying on the idea of clandestine collusion by powerful groups.Footnote ⁶⁰ A recurrent representative of such groups in the novels is the former Stalinist, almost invariably Jewish, who has moved from the visible to the invisible sphere but retained his privileges and power.Footnote ⁶¹

The conspiracist worldview enhances nationalist notions of uniqueness, placing the blame for the nation's failure to fulfil a great destiny on its enemies. Yet the novels’ complicated concept of a home-bred enemy and their preoccupation with the political unrest of the 1980s reveal a lingering sense that the current predicament of postsocialist Poland might, to some degree, be of its own making. The 1980s, Solidarity, and its aftermath function in the novels as a historical moment of foreclosure that opens up the space of political and creative possibilities. At the same time, Solidarity—as a collective movement that fostered civic engagement and left an imprint on global history—presents a challenge to the novels’ conception of the social as limitation to individual freedom. Moreover, the developments that either coincided with or followed the mass movement of the 1980s, including neoliberal globalization and the rise of increasingly opaque control systems, are the very ones that fuel the frustration and resentment perceived by the novels as the defining features of postsocialism. The male protagonists, while not averse to celebrating Solidarity or other “freedom fighters,” mostly imagine themselves in opposition to an amorphous mass that threatens to eradicate individuality. Such fears expose ambivalence toward democratization, a sentiment also echoed in apprehension about the workings of contemporary culture, which blends with the novels’ embrace of traditional values, such as family or religion.Footnote ⁶²

The prevalence of the stolen transition cannot be read outside of the expansion of rightwing politics in Poland. Nevertheless, it also raises questions that extend beyond this phenomenon to consider the evolution of publics receptive to extreme and extremist messages. The international success of Entanglement suggests that the relationship between the discourses of the extreme and the mainstream is complicated, and that it is not enough to concentrate on the “usual suspects”: the populists or Law and Justice supporters. More research is needed that approaches the stolen transition and other postsocialist conspiracy narratives as a site of cultural as well as political engagement, and studies a broad selection of texts including popular, lowbrow, or ideologically complicit ones. The novels analyzed in this paper exemplify how the tropes of a conspiracy narrative that have been repeatedly instrumentalized politically to dangerous effect can be embedded in a generically flexible format that affords the opportunity to reach a broader public. Even ideologically partisan novels are able to incorporate the playfulness, irony, and self-referentiality known from other popular texts, and to engage with the ambivalent status of conspiracy theories.Footnote ⁶³ The fact that the stolen transition can act as an empty signifier suggests it could hold different meanings for different readers, but to acquire a better understanding of such narratives’ impact and reception, we need more studies that focus on conspiracism as a mode, style or “short-term subject position” rather than a core “belief.”Footnote ⁶⁴

There is more work to be done on how the stolen transition narrative has evolved over the course of time, as little is known of its pre-internet existence and its long-term ability to stay relevant. Similarities between the stolen transition and global conspiracy cultures (fears of vast yet cohesive networks; obsession with secrecy and security services) raise further questions. In the future, it would be helpful to compare the patterns of Polish conspiracy fiction with those of similar narratives in the US, other countries in eastern Europe, and Russia, as well as, within a broader frame, post-authoritarian societies in Latin America or South Africa. The findings of this article suggest that eastern Europe's adaptation into global flows of conspiracy tropes is not always straightforward: attempts to invoke anti-immigrant, Islamophobic plots can be complicated by a context where emigration rather than immigration is a concern. Moreover, this article has dealt with narratives authored by and centered on men; research in the future should also consider postsocialist conspiracy fiction written by women.