Inappropriate object: Warsaw and the Stalin-era Palace of Culture after the Smolensk

disaster
Author(s): Michał Murawski
Source: Anthropology Today , August 2011, Vol. 27, No. 4 (August 2011), pp. 5-10
Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27975453

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Michal Murawski
Michal Murawski is a PhD
candidate at the University
of Cambridge. His thesis,
focusing on the relationship
between architecture, agency
and determinism, is based
on fieldwork carried out
in Warsaw between 2009
and 2010. His email is
g. m. murawski@gmail. com.
Fig. 1. 'Varsovians continue
to gather in front of the
Palace '.
Fig. 2. Conspiracy: 'Kill
them all1. '
1. Tlum przed Palacem
Prezydenckim nie maleje.
Gazeta.pl, 12 April 2010.
http ://warszawa.gazeta.pl/
warszawa/1,34889,7761180,
Tlum_przed_Palacem_
Prezydenckimniemaleje.
html
2. With the exception of
an Extraordinary Session
of the Warsaw City Council
(which now meets in the
Palace of Culture) held on 15
April, at which councillors
unanimously voted to
grant honorary citizenship
of Warsaw to Kaczynski,
who was mayor of the city
between 2002 and 2005.
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 27 NO 4, AUGUST 2011 5
Inappropriate object
Warsaw and the Stalin-era Palace of Culture after the Smolensk disaster
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ASSASSINATION! - Enhanced Smolensk Russia crash site video
T?ieSptntOtTruth 69 videos * Suwcrtw
Introduction: Which palace?
On 10 April 2010, a Polish government plane went down
in the woods near Smolensk in western Russia. President
Lech Kaczynski and 95 other passengers were killed. They
had been on their way to a ceremony commemorating the
70th anniversary of a massacre in the Katyn forest, near
Smolensk, in which thousands of Polish army officers had
been shot on the orders of Stalin.
For several hours on 12 April, the Warsaw section
of gazeta.pl (Fig. 1), the online portal of Poland's most
popular newspaper, ran its lead story under the headline
'Varsovians continue to gather in front of the Palace.' The
link to the article was accompanied by a stark photograph
of the Palace of Culture and Science, a 231-metre high
Stalin-era skyscraper 'gifted' by the USSR to the Polish
People's Republic in 1955.
The Palace was designed by a team of Soviet architects
in a style which replicates that of Moscow's seven 'wed
ding cake' Stalinist high-rises, and was built by an army of
specially-imported Soviet labourers and engineers. Stalin's
Palace - which, together with the surrounding Parade
Square, occupies a once-densely populated, 60-acre plot
in the very centre of Warsaw - was openly intended by
its designers and their Polish and Soviet political patrons
to dominate its host city. It was to act, in the words of one
regime-friendly local architect, as 'the guiding star leading
the transformation of old Warsaw, princely Warsaw, royal,
magnates', burghers', capitalist Warsaw, into socialist
Warsaw' (Szymon Syrkus cited in Rokicki 2003: 114).
The opening line of the gazeta.pl story read, 'Official
delegations, inhabitants as well as guests to the capital
city are arriving with flowers and candles, intending to
pay homage to the victims of Saturday's catastrophe.' It
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nacaw wafszswiv khis wwwbt www
continued, 'Some are praying, others are simply standing
still and staring in the direction of the Palace.'1 What
were these crowds of people doing outside, of all places,
Warsaw's most obvious material relic of Russia's histor
ical domination over Poland?
In the days after the crash, a grainy cameraphone video
started to circulate on YouTube (Fig. 2). The clip showed
footage of the crash site, and was accompanied by com
ments interpreting what appeared to be figures moving
amid the wreckage and muffled bangs heard in the dis
tance as proof that Russian FSB agents had shot dead sur
viving passengers. Were the throngs outside the Palace in
thrall to conspiracy theories that the Russian government
had orchestrated a 'second Katyn', and was responsible
for murdering Poland's Russophobic president, the greater
part of its senior army leadership, and scores of senior
figures? Had they gathered to protest? But if this was a
demonstration, why the flowers and candles?
I have omitted two significant details from my account
so far. It turns out that when the Warsaw editors of gazeta.
pi have not yet found a suitable photograph or image to
accompany a headline story, the image inserted is a stock
snapshot of the Palace of Culture. There were, in fact, no
anti-Russian demonstrations or sacrificial offerings any
where near the Palace in the first few days after the catas
trophe. In fact, the Palace of Culture played almost no part
whatsoever in the many officiai ceremonies and sponta
neous expressions of grief that took place after 10 April.2
The Palace's muted presence stood in contrast to the
billboards, ribbons, candles and flowers that were ubiq
uitous elsewhere in Warsaw following the catastrophe,
and constituted a marked departure from its recently
consolidated role as Warsaw's Most Important Building:
a venue for public ceremonies and a prominent signpost
for the marking or commemoration of important public
events and anniversaries. Gazeta.pl's blunder was banal,
an unwitting digital faux pas. But it demonstrates the ten
sion at the centre of my analysis: the ambiguity between
the Palace's extraordinary level of integration into the eve
ryday life of the city, and the uncanny, still painful dimen
sion of the relationship between the Palace and Warsaw.
The word 'palace', if uttered on its own, is normally
understood in Warsaw to refer to the Palace of Culture. For
a time after Smolensk, however, it acquired a new asso
ciation with the Presidential Palace (Fig. 6). It was out
side the Presidential Palace that crowds gathered, to stand
vigil and to lay a sea of candles and flowers. And it was
outside the Presidential Palace that the most significant of
the many post-disaster controversies boiled up and over in

3. If these abated
temporarily, the defenders of
the cross have since returned
to guard their patch outside the
Presidential Palace. Now that
the cross has been removed,
they claim to be guarding the
'truth' of what happened at
Smolensk.
4. See, for example, Doss
2010, Forty & Kuechler 1999,
Klekot 2007, Kuechler 2002,
Margry & Sanchez-Carretero
2007, Santino 2006.
5.1 analyze the phenomenon
of increasing interest
in Warsaw's modernist
architecture during this decade
in Murawski (forthcoming).
6. On the continuity between
Warsaw's communist-era and
capitalist-era 'iconospheres',
see Chmielewska (2005).
7. See EwaKlekot's (2007)
text on how John Paul II was
mourned in Warsaw's urban
space. It is important to point
out that the Pope was strongly
associated with the Palace's
surroundings, having conducted
the final mass of his 1987
pilgrimage to Poland (his last
visit to the country before the
collapse of communism) in
Parade Square, when a gigantic
altar and crucifix were erected
in front of the main entrance to
the Palace. During other visits,
historically important open
air papal masses were also
held in Victory (now renamed
Pilsudski) Square, and in the
Tenth-Anniversary Stadium.
8. Wat?sa, L. 2010.
To Katyn nr 2. Jestem
zdruzgotany. Gazeta Wyborcza,
10 April. http://wyborcza.
pl/l,105744,7753298,To_
Katynjnr_2_Jestem_
zdruzgotany.html.
9. Kwasniewski: Katyn
to przeklete miejsce. Gazeta
Wyborcza.pl, 10 April 2010.
http://wiadomosci .gazeta.pl/
Wiadomosci/1,80708,775524
1 ,Kwasnie wski__Katyn_to_
przeklete_miej sce.html.
10. For more on these
plaques, see Marta Zielinska
(1989) and Chmielewska
(2005).
11. By Design 2009.
12. Melanie Van der Hoorn's
book Indispensable eyesores
is devoted to ethnographic
descriptions of several
buildings that are the 'concrete
and repugnant embodiments of
a deplorable period in history,
and on the other hand ... part of
a local, sociocultural identity.
Their elimination would,
literally and figuratively, leave
a large gap' (Van der Hoorn
2009: 5).
13. See Murawski (2009)
for an examination of the
ineffectivity of Warsaw's
reconstructed historical
buildings as 'empty signifiers'.
14. For other texts that
employ the Gellian trope
of 'not just standing for' in
relation to architecture, see
Van der Hoorn (2009: 8) and
Humphrey (2005: 54).
the weeks after Smolensk. A group of scouts had placed a
large commemorative cross in the forecourt of the Palace,
at first with the intention of taking it down following the
installation of a permanent memorial. The state's efforts
to remove this cross - which it argued had been erected
without permission, and which it sought to remove to
preserve the forecourt's secular character - sparked off a
wild and aggressive round of demonstrations and debates,
which lasted for much of the summer and autumn of 2010
until the cross was finally removed.3
This text, however, is not about how ephemeral objects
spontaneously become deployed in practices of mourning.4
Rather, it is about why, how and for how long one, very
permanent, object - the Palace of Culture - spontaneously
withdrew and was withdrawn from participation in the
rituals of a city in mourning. I hope to demonstrate the
manner in which the topography of mourning in Warsaw
in the days after 10 April highlighted the abject dimension
of the Palace's presence in the city.
Pope versus president
The Palace's participation in the life of Warsaw has
increased since 1989, the year in which Poland's Soviet
backed 'People's Republic' - on behalf of which the
Palace exercised its agency over Warsaw - ceased to exist.
The Palace's identifiability among Varsovians as the city's
primary 'symbol' rose from 21% in 1990 to 32% in 2000
(Jatowiecki 2000). Confirming what many of my inform
ants told me about an exponential rise in the presence of
the Palace of Culture in various realms of their lives during
the first decade of the 21st century,5 in an internet-based
survey I carried out in late October and early November
2010,63% of over 5,000 respondents considered the Palace
of Culture to be Warsaw's 'most important and easily iden
tifiable' symbol, against only 12% for its nearest compet
itor, the Warsaw mermaid - the Polish capital's traditional
emblem, enshrined in the city's historic coat of arms.
In a conscious reappropriation of the trend for hanging
multiple-storey propaganda banners from the Palace's
main facade during the years of the Polish People's
Republic, Warsaw's municipal authorities have in recent
years started using the Palace as a signpost to mark impor
tant events and to underline significant dates, such as the
anniversaries of Poland's accession to the EU on 1 May
2004, the first postwar free elections on 4 June 1989, and
the outbreak of the Second World War on 1 September
1939 (Fig. 3).6
Of my survey respondents, 62% said they approved of
hanging signs on the Palace's facade, but when asked how
they felt about the messages displayed, responses varied
widely. The 1989 banners had a 68% approval rating, the
Second World War ones, 72%. However, when it came to
commemorating the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland, on
17 September 1939, the figure dropped to 41%. Strikingly,
only 13%? of Varsovians wanted to see the anniversary of
the Smolensk plane crash commemorated on the front of
the Stalin-bestowed Palace of Culture. One of my friends,
an architecture critic, remarked that he would sooner have
seen the first couple's bodies dangling from the front of the
Palace than see their faces emblazoned on commemora
tive portraits in the same place. While the freshness of the
Smolensk catastrophe may have impacted on these num
bers, it is important to bear in mind just how many surfaces
in Warsaw were covered by sombre posters featuring the
faces of the president and his wife, or listing the names of
the dead, in the weeks after the crash.
The apparently low enthusiasm for a Smolensk com
memoration at the Palace of Culture seems all the more
surprising when one bears in mind what happened around
the Palace after the death of John Paul II,7 on another
April day, five years before Smolensk. A month before the
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Pope's death, the curators of Warsaw's planned Museum
of Modern Art had erected a giant billboard - an aerial
shot of 3,500 Brazilian soldiers standing in formation to
make up the facial profile of John Paul II - on the edge
of Parade Square. The billboard was still on display on
2 April 2005, when the Pope finally died (Fig. 4). To the
fascination and amusement of the artist, Piotr Uklanski,
and the museum curators, the photograph was immedi
ately transformed into a ready-made roadside shrine to the
Pope. Candles were lit and flowers were laid in front of
this bizarre billboard, whose very strangeness seemed to
make it all the more captivating to mourners. Not to be
outdone, the Palace's administrative director immediately
arranged for a gigantic poster of the pontiff to be hung
from one elevation of the Palace of Culture, while the
Vatican's flag was hoisted from another facade. The flag
and the face were soon joined by an 11-storey-high cru
cifix in light, lit from a cross-shaped swathe of windows
on one of the Palace's facades (Fig. 5). If the Pope could
be so lavishly emblazoned on the Palace immediately after
his death, why could the same not be true for the victims of
the Smolensk catastrophe?
The unsolved murder
In the words of psychoanalyst Theodor Reik, 'the unsolved
murder is uncanny' (Vidier 1994: ix). Conspiracy theories
about the Smolensk disaster continue to abound, new video
clips are periodically released or uncovered claiming to
show suspicious goings-on in the environs of the wrecked
presidential plane. After a warm coming-together in the
first weeks after 10 April, relations between Poland and
Russia have become tense again, as three competing
investigations (two Polish, one Russian) into the crash's
causes continue to produce radically different findings. In
the hours after the disaster was announced, senior Polish
politicians posited a direct continuity between Katyn 1940
and Smolensk 2010 (separated from each other by 70 years
and only 9 miles). Poland's first post-communist president
Lech Walesa referred to Smolensk as 'Katyn Number
Two',8 while his successor and Kaczynski's predecessor,
Aleksander Kwasniewski, spoke of a 'cursed place'.9 A
year has passed since these statements were made, but
Smolensk, still unexplained, is having difficulty shedding
its aura of mysterious death.
Why should the Palace be caught up in these associa
tions? I have found that although many Varsovians still
talk about the Palace as a painful reminder of the long
years of Soviet domination, this talk tends to be on an
abstract level. One afternoon, I got talking to some Dutch
student film-makers, who were shooting a film in the
Palace. They had come up with the plot of the film in con
sultation with a Polish friend of theirs, an emigrant living
in the Netherlands. A promising young violinist wins a
competition to take part in a prestigious concert, held in
one of the Palace's grand rooms. The prodigy's father,
himself a professional musician but also a diehard oppo
sitionist who suffered much during the communist era, is
faced with the terrible dilemma of whether or not to cross
the threshold of this building, which for him still embodies
all the worst things about a regime he spent most of his life
fighting and despising. The film culminates in a finale at
the Palace entrance. The father asks himself whether his
hatred for the memory of this terrible system is so strong
that he will dishonour his own son. In the end, of course,
the father conquers his qualms and flings himself through
the Palace doors.
As well as chatting with the directors, I also spoke to the
film's Polish actors. Both young and middle-aged among
them agreed that they found the plot to be terribly con
trived and rather silly, the kind of thing only a foreigner
or (especially) a Pole living abroad would come up with.
6 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 27 NO 4, AUGUST 2011

Bataille, G. 1985. Visions of
excess: Selected writings
1927-1939. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota
Press.
ByDesign 2009. Zizek on
parallax and architecture.
ABC Radio National.
13 May. Accessed
at: http://www.abc.
net.au/rn/bydesign/
stories/2009/2567788.htm.
Castillo, G. 1997. Soviet
orientalism: Socialist
realism and built tradition.
Traditional Dwellings and
Settlements Review 8(2):
32-47.
Chmielewska, E. 2005.
Logos or the resonance
of branding: A close
reading of the iconosphere
of Warsaw, Space and
Culture 8(4): 349-380.
Doss, E. 2010. Memorial
mania: Public feeling
in America. Chicago:
University of Chicago
Press.
Douglas, M. 1966. Purity and
danger: An analysis of the
concepts of pollution and
taboo. London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul.
Forty, A. & S. Kuechler (eds)
1999. The art of forgetting.
Oxford: Berg.
Gell, A. 1998. Art
and agency: An
anthropological theory.
Oxford: Clarendon.
Humphrey, C. 2005.
Ideology in infrastructure:
Architecture and the Soviet
imagination. Journal of
the Royal Anthropological
Institute (NS) 11(1): 39-58.
Jalowiecki, B. 2000.
Percepcja przestrzeni
warszawy. Studia
Regionalne i Lokalne 2(2):
79-100.
Klekot, E. 2007. Mourning
John Paul II in the streets
of Warsaw. Anthropology
Today 23(4): 3-6.
Kristeva, J. 1982. Powers
of horror: An essay on
abjection. New York:
Columbia University
Press.
Kuechler, S. 2002.
Malanggan: Art, memory
and sacrifice. Oxford:
Berg.
Lesniakowska, M. 2004.
Warszawa XX wieku:
Strategie niepamieci.
In: Rocznik Warszawski
XXXIII. Warsaw: Zamek
Kr?lewski w Warszawie,
pp 147-53.
Margry, P. J. & C. S?nchez
Carretero 2007.
Memorializing traumatic
death. Anthropology Today
23(3): 1-2.
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 27 NO 4, AUGUST 2011 7
The Palace, for them, is normal - amusing, perhaps, and
intriguing, but certainly not terrifying or evil. According
to them, it would be absurd to think that the building's
associations with the past/Stalin would have such power
as to stop people from physically approaching it, or from
crossing its threshold.
This kind of abstracted, de-Stalinized Palace brings to
mind Bataille's (1985) reflections on the obelisk on the
Place de la Concorde in Paris, which has stood since 1836
on the same spot as the guillotine that decapitated Louis
'XVI. According to Bataille, the decision to place an obe
lisk - a gift from the Viceroy of Egypt Muhammad Ali to
King Louis Philippe of France - in this square was the
perfect gesture of power, intended to imbue Paris' most
important (and bloodiest) public space, the 'central point
from which avenues radiate' (Bataille 1985: 215), with
a serene, content-less monumentality, wiped clean of all
traces of the murders of God and time that had taken place
there just a few decades previously. For Bataille, the obe
lisk has become the 'apparently meaningless ... measured
navel of the land of moderation' (1985: 220), encircled by
a constant flow of oblivious, fast-moving traffic: 'As far as
the eye can see, a moving and empty human dust gravitates
around it'(1985: 215).
The Palace is not directly comparable to the French
obelisk, however. Its symbolism is much more direct, and
its significance not reducible to the symbolic. But it too
functions as a pivot in modern Warsaw, as a monumental
source of spatial and social axiality which, for the most
part, is able to successfully enact the forgetting of the
turbulent past which it itself materialized. One Warsaw
architectural historian describes the Palace of Culture as
belonging to a complex web of interlinked 'strategies of
nonmemory' (Lesniakowska 2004) built into Warsaw by
the communist authorities during the reconstruction of the
city after the Second World War. She pointed out to me
the particularly cynical 'non-memorial' poignancy of sev
eral plaques (Fig. 7) embedded in the ground of Parade
Square at various points around the Palace. These mark
the intersections of streets that once ran their course where
the Palace and square now stand - most of the buildings
in these streets were destroyed during the war, but many
surviving tenements, housing some 3,500 people, were
demolished between 1952 and 1955 to make way for the
revolutionary bastion of the People's Poland, the Palace
of Culture.10
Referring directly to the Palace in an interview with
Australian radio in 2009, Slavoj Zizek expressed admira
tion for the ideological 'honesty'11 of what he calls (exactly
incorrectly) Stalinist 'neo-Gothic Baroque' architecture
(Zizek 2010: 250). While I am sympathetic to Zizek's
point of view, the Palace's architecture is not unproblem
atically 'honest'. As evidence of the Palace's inherent
duplicity, Varsovians frequently pointed out to me that its
monumentally stone-clad appearance is made up of a layer
of plaster, which covers the Palace's 'real' brick and steel
construction (Fig. 8). And the Stalinist ideological impera
tive that the arts should aim to be 'socialist in content' but
'realist' or 'national' in form meant that the Palace's trans
formative mission of destroying the old and creating the
new was cleverly obfuscated by the inclusion in its design
of selected elements of what its Soviet architects consid
ered to be the Polish 'national style'. These 'vernacular'
elements were lavished all over the interiors and facades of
the Palace, in order to emphasize its rootedness in Polish
culture and folk tradition. The brilliant conceit of Stalinist
socialist realism was, in Greg Castillo's words, to 'monu
mentalize the forms of vernacular design to symbolize the
regional identity of peoples, at the same time ... elimi
nating the social and political structures that underpinned
vernacular traditions' (Castillo 1997: 33).
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The ambiguity of this attempt to 'root' the Palace of
Culture's clearly imported, outlandish design in its context
is indirectly mirrored in the attitudes of Varsovians towards
the Palace today. Inhabitants of Warsaw often repeat that
the Palace is the building that best defines and stands for
the city, as well as emphasizing their intense, often inti
mate personal connections to the Palace. Nevertheless,
pretty much all my interlocutors in Warsaw, whether they
liked the Palace or not, were agreed: it continues to feel
very alien, 'Eastern', 'Russian', 'Byzantine'.
Of my survey respondents, as many as 70% said they
considered the Palace to be a building that 'suits Warsaw',
against only 22% disagreeing. However, when the ques
tion moved away from the municipal context of Warsaw
to the national domain of Poland as a whole, the responses
shifted markedly. Only 13% thought that the Palace was
a building whose style is 'Polish above all', against 48%
who answered 'foreign above all', and 33% who opted for
'don't know/unsure'.
Anthony Vidier reminds us that Freud defines the
uncanny as the domain 'where relations of the familiar
and the unfamiliar - das Heimliche and das Unheimliche
- become ambiguous and merge with one another' (Vidier
2000: 70). The tense, uncertain dialogue between strange
ness and familiarity is axiomatic to the relations between
the Palace of Culture and Warsaw. In a strikingly unam
biguous way, the Palace of Culture is paradigmatically
uncanny.12
Conclusion: The little Katyh forest
According to Allan Stoekl, Bataille saw the Parisian obe
lisk as an 'empty signifier', aesthetically impressive and
mysterious, but devoid of any coherent associations and
of completely random provenance, its effectivity rooted
precisely in the fact that it means nothing (Stoekl 2007:
124). In marked contrast to Bataille's obelisk, the Palace
is crammed full of unstable meanings, associations and
connections.13 Perhaps first among these is the matter of
the Palace's official patron, Joseph Stalin. In the wake of
de-Stalinization after 1956, references to the patron were
dropped from official documents and media references to
the Palace, as well as from the body of the Palace itself
(Fig. 9). And indeed, today, the Palace's Stalinist prov
enance tends to be abstracted in the everyday, or diffused
into humour. Smolensk, however, made clear that Stalin's
'distributed personhood' (Gell 1998) can still emanate
awkwardly from within the Palace walls. To paraphrase
Alfred Gell's (1998: 231) account of the agentic con
nection between kula operators and the shells and arm
necklaces associated with them, the Palace of Culture does
not merely 'stand for' for Stalin in a symbolic way, to all
intents and purposes, it actually is Stalin.14
Less than two weeks after the Smolensk catastrophe, I
carried out an interview with Tadeusz Koss, the first pre
war owner of a plot on Parade Square to have finally man
aged to regain ownership of his land. When I asked Koss
a stock question about his attitude towards the Palace, he
launched into an angry historical diatribe:
It is a disgrace that this thing is still here. It should have been
blown up straight away. It is a reminder of the darkest era of our
existence. And it was done by a man who made the decision to
carry out the massacre in the Katyn forest. 23,000 men, from
the flower of the Polish intelligentsia, murdered by a shot to
the back of the head.
After 10 April, I heard people making remarks linking
Katyn, Smolensk and the Palace of Culture on several
occasions. Towards the end of April, a curator from
Warsaw's planned Museum of Modern Art reminded
me of an anecdote he had told me, which he originally
heard in a lecture about the history of Parade Square. The
lecturer, an architectural historian, had cited press extol
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Fig. 11. 'Mr President, stay
in Warsaw! ' 'Wawei is not
Cardinal Dziwisz s personal
manor. '
Fig. 12. 'Waweifor the
great! '
Murawski, M. 2009.
(A)political buildings:
Ideology, memory and
Warsaw's 'old' town.
Docomomo E-Proceedings
2:13-20, December, hup://
www.docomomo.com
com/e-proceedings2
dec09/Docomomo%20
E-proceedings2.pdf.
- (forthcoming).
Cosmopolitan architecture:
"Deviations' from Stalinist
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In contrast, Navaro-Yashin emphasizes that the Cypriot
objects constitute a 'domesticated abject', located at the
core of the social realm, rather than being peripheral or
external to it. Nor does Julia Kristeva's definition of the
abject as that which is 'not me' (Kristeva 1982: 2, cited in
Navaro-Yashin 2009: 6) satisfy Navaro-Yashin's attempt
to describe her informants' relationship to the 'booty' with
which they live. Instead, like Warsaw's uncannily foreign
domestic Palace of Culture, 'The abject is so much inside
me now that I don't know what I would be without it'
(Navaro-Yashin 2009: 6).
In everyday Warsaw, the Palace of Culture has been
/^appropriated from the donor-oppressor (rather than
appropriated from the owner-victim, as in the North
Cypriot houses). As the amused reaction of the Polish
actors to the script given them by Dutch film-makers dem
onstrates, its abjecthood has become sidelined to the extent
that it has been turned into a figure of abstraction. But the
imperative to mourn Smolensk in the proper way revealed
the ongoing force, as well as the precise dimensions, of
the abject.
Epilogue: Speak ill of the dead
Public and private conversations in the days after 10 April
were full of proclamations of surprise at howr well Poles
were rising above their usual petty political rivalries, at
how convincingly they appeared to be 'united in grief.
According to one writer, the journey back into the abyss
of division, or, as she put it, from 'communitas to poli
tics' (Nizynska 2010: 474) began on Tuesday 13 April,
with the sudden decision - made in all probability by the
Archbishop of Krak?w, Cardinal Dziwisz, and the dead
ments ?rom 1955 describing Warsaw's citizens responding president's family - that Kaczyiiski and his wife would be
buried, not in Warsaw, but in the crypt of the cathedral on
to a brand-new park planted on the north side of Parade
Square 'as if an enchanted garden had been created in the Krakow's Wawel Mound, resting place of Poland's kings
course of just one night'. He had then reminded his audi and revered national heroes. While an apolitical condition
ence of a long-forgotten, 'tragicomic' moniker the park of mourning was still posited as desirable, no one was
had quickly acquired among Varsovians in the 1950s: under any illusions any more that powerful cracks had
the little Katyn forest. For the museum curator, this dark appeared in the pure community of grief.
nickname reflected people's reactions to the brutal manner On 14 April, a demonstration against the 'Wawel deci
in which the Palace had been thrust onto the city. Just as sion' took place in Parade Square. For the first time since
the 'enchanted garden' could only be created overnight by 10 April, the Palace of Culture returned to real newspaper
replanting outside the Palace several decades-old trees that headlines, as protesters gathered outside it, carrying ban
ners (Fig. 10). No one was bold enough to shout slogans,
had been torn from the ground elsewhere, the Palace's rela
tionship with the urban fabric into which it had been thrust and the very fact that the protest was not held anywhere
was entirely artificial - in order for it to be built, existing near the scene of the ongoing vigil outside the Presidential
houses and tenement blocks had to be destroyed, people Palace was an explicit act of deference to the mourners
relocated, streets erased, the established city uprooted. gathered there. Some of the protesters' placards demanded
I would argue that the remarks of Koss and the curator that the president's body be buried in the capital city ('Mr
about Katyii and the Palace are revelatory. They bring President, stay in Warsaw!') (Fig. 11). Others referenced
out into the open what, after Smolensk, everyone else in the illegitimacy and unaccountability of the Wawel deci
Warsaw knew, but did not necessarily think or say: Stalin sion ('Wawel is not Cardinal Dziwisz's personal manor')
committed the 1940 massetere in the Katyn foresi ?> Stalin (Fig. 11). Some were more or less directly denigratory
built the Palace of Culture Stalin is the Palace of Culture towards the dead president, such as 'Wawel for the great!'
?> ?Ve don yet know how the 2010 Smolensk catastrophe (Fig. 12) - referencing Kaczynski's short physical stature,
happened but we do know that it happened in almost the in addition to suggesting that his undistinguished term
same place as Katyn, and that it was a kind of repetition as president did not wan-ant his burial among Poland's
of Katyn ? the Palace of Culture, must, therefore, become greatest historical figures.
a contingent taboo - it must be made to have as little as It has been pointed out that the debate over Wawel
possible to do with the Smolensk catastrophe, it must be marked the first violation of the taboo de mortuis nihi nisi
forgotten in order for the successful work of mourning to bene - one does not speak ill of the dead (Nizynska 2010:
474). Those opposed to the 'Wawel decision', who trans
occur. You don ? invite the murderer to the funeral.
Yael Navaro-Yashin (2009) has written about objects gressed the mourning taboo by gathering in the murderer's
and homes previously belonging to Greeks in Northern (Stalin's) shadow, next to the 'little Katyn forest', chose
Cyprus, taken over and used by Turkish inhabitants of the this spot as an effective place from which to make the
island in the years since partition in 1974. According to brashly political move of questioning the dead president's
Navaro-Yashin, a certain melancholia accompanies the martyrdom. In other words, the abjected Palace was able
use of these things, which have not yet been detached to enter Warsaw's post-Smolensk topography of mourning
from their connection to their former owners. In her only once the mourning taboo had been transgressed - and
reading, Mary Douglas' account of taboo (1966) posi it was an optimal spot from which such a transgression
tions danger only at the anomalous margins of purity. could be launched. ?
10 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 27 NO 4, AUGUST 2011
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