Cold War Reckonings: Communism (and anti-Communism) in the Family

My talk will offer some reflections on personal experiences of encountering a perplexing absence within Australian university life of references to Soviet crimes. I will discuss this in relation both to my Polish family’s history in Communist Poland, and to work which Kasia Kwapisz Williams and I have done documenting 20th century autobiographical writing in Polish by Polish-born Australians. Much of that writing was concerned with traumas of displacement under Nazi and Soviet occupations in World War II.

A talk given by John Docker in the Humanities Research Centre of the ANU in the late 1990s spoke of how troubling he found his father Ted Docker’s enduring loyalty to the Soviet Union even under Stalin. It was the first time I’d heard an Australian voice engaged in reckoning with an earlier generation’s support for Stalin. Yet the causes Australian communists like Docker senior fought for – labour rights, women’s rights, and radically for the 1940s, Indigenous rights, indicate that in many ways they were at the forefront of local struggles for justice. As the ADB entry on writer Oodgeroo Noonuccal points out (Biography - Oodgeroo Noonuccal - Australian Dictionary of Biography (anu.edu.au)), the Australian Communist Party was the only party in the 1940s that did not support the White Australia Policy. It is all the stranger, then, to contemplate that Stalin, who in 1944 deported 8,000 Crimean Tatars – people indigenous to the Crimean peninsula – in a process of “detatarization” that has since been recognized as genocide, was regarded by so many Australian activists at the time as a kind of lovable mascot (cf. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27509240?seq=3 and Perceptions of the Soviet Union in Australian political discourse between 1943 and 1950. (adelaide.edu.au)).

While the effective wall of lies maintained by the Soviet leadership played an obvious role, part of the reason for this disconnect must have been the lack of relevant languages among most communist Australians; they had no direct access to dissident testimonies produced in Russian or Ukrainian and smuggled out from the Soviet Union. Post-WWII East European refugees to Australia who wrote of their wartime experiences did so mainly in their own languages (such as Polish, Latvian or Hungarian) in community publications that most other Australians as linguistic outsiders were unable to read. Partly, though, it seems clear that the disjunct represents an element of cognitive dissonance, one comparable to other forms, like the reluctance of some Polish nationalists to recognize historic anti-Semitism.