The Captive Mind

The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz defected from Soviet-occupied Poland in 1951, and in 1953, published The Captive Mind. During the 1940s, Milosz observed first-hand the conversion of Eastern European intellectuals into puppets of the repressive Soviet regime. The Captive Mind presents his analysis of this complicity and earned Albert Einstein’s praise as “a very good contribution to our…understanding of the situation faced by the Eastern European intelligentsia.”

In his preface to Captive Mind, Milosz surveys the intellectual landscape of Eastern Europe in the aftermath of WWII. Hitler’s tyranny rendered nationalism and fascist ideology abhorrent to post-war political thinkers. Milosz spent the war years in Nazi-occupied Warsaw and witnessed the carnage. When Hitler was finally defeated, the Allied victors divided the spoils of war, and Stalin’s Soviet Union gained control of several Eastern European countries, including Poland.

The Soviets installed communist governments in the new “Eastern Bloc” territories. Milosz concedes that, initially, Stalin’s future-directed idea of dialectical materialism had some appeal. In the 1940s, Poland was still a relatively poor country practicing pre-industrial farming methods. The communist philosophy of dialectical materialism (or, diamat) posits that human history advances through stages of social conflict over basic material needs. According to Stalin, government control of the economy – and everything else – was a means to end exploitative capitalism and usher in the final, class-free stage of history. While attractive in theory, in practice, diamat gave license to totalitarian repression.



Karl Marx’s nineteenth-century interpretation of diamat envisions it as a progressive, moral process, and Marxism had influenced Milosz’s own intellectual development. Thus, Milosz aligned himself with the communist government in Warsaw. In 1945, he accepted the post of cultural attaché at the Polish embassies in Washington and Paris. By 1951, however, he could no longer tolerate the despotic rule of the Soviets and defected to France.

Milosz does not condemn the Eastern European intellectuals and artists who remained loyal servants of Stalin’s agenda but instead, considers the factors that facilitated their cooperation. To underscore communism’s power to infiltrate hearts and minds, Milosz draws on a pre-war novel by Stanislaw Witkiewicz, which imagines a Mongolian invasion of Poland. The Mongolian forces subdue the Polish populace by distributing Murti-Bing pills, a drug that induces compliance and contentment. With time, however, regret gnaws at their contentment, and the Poles develop personality disorders due to their conflicted allegiances.

Milosz suggests that, like those under the influence of Murti-Bing pills, post-war Polish intellectuals abandoned their national identity to embrace the alleged progressivism of Stalin’s diamat, but they could not eradicate latent feelings of disloyalty.



Western Europeans, along with Americans, had long considered their culture superior to that of Eastern Europeans. After the World Wars left Europe in shambles, Europeans gained an uncommon awareness of the fragility of systems of social organization. Western populations, and particularly Americans, survived the wars with their cities and economies largely intact, preserving their belief in a natural social and moral order. This abiding faith in the stability of social order struck Eastern European intellectuals as naïve, widening the divide between them and their Western counterparts.

It is not so surprising, therefore, that Polish intellectuals and artists sought common ground with the Soviets, but their collaboration with the communist cause was costly. They had to sacrifice their national identity and pledge allegiance to Stalin. They had to sacrifice their cultural identity to the Soviet mandate that all literature, art, and music line up with Communist Party ideology. And they had to sacrifice individual thinking, as an expression of dissent or discontent invited punishment or death.

To reconcile themselves with such sacrifices, Polish intellectuals practiced “ketman,” a term Milosz borrows from writings on the Middle East. Ketman describes “the dissimulation of heretics in Persian Islam, who take great pleasure in pretending to be what they are not in order to avoid…punishment.” Like Persian heretics, Polish intellectuals found satisfaction in maintaining an appearance of Soviet loyalty while secretly harboring opposition to the regime.



Milosz identifies seven various types of ketman performed by those trapped in the Eastern Bloc: national ketman, the ketman of revolutionary purity, aesthetic ketman, professional ketman, skeptical ketman, metaphysical ketman, and ethical ketman. The ketman of revolutionary purity conceals the conviction, shared by Milosz, that Stalinism corrupted Lenin’s “pure” communism by exercising punitive authoritarianism, compelling the collective (state) ownership of industries, and restricting artistic expression. Stalin’s regime sanctioned only those artworks conforming to “Socialist Realism,” a style that promoted idealized depictions of workers and communist society. Practicing aesthetic ketman, many writers and artists pursued work that allowed more artistic freedom, like that of translating old texts or illustrating children’s books.

Milosz presents character sketches of four Polish writers who capitulated to the Soviet system. Although these were writers with whom Milosz was familiar, he disguises their true identities with pseudonyms. “Alpha” is the novelist Jerzy Andrzejewski who, before WWII, wrote for Catholic audiences. When the Soviets took control of Poland, “Alpha” assumed the future belonged to the Communists and cast his lot with them. Beta, Milosz’ name for poet Tadeusz Borowski, survived Auschwitz concentration camp only by collaborating with the Nazis and then used the same strategy with the Soviets. He eventually committed suicide.

“Gamma” and “Delta” are aliases for Jerzy Putrament and Konstanty Ildefons GaÅ‚czyÅ„ski, respectively. A hack writer, Gamma lacked solid principles. He allied himself with the Soviets during the war and afterward quickly rose in the Party ranks, eventually enjoying the privileges of an ambassadorship. Delta was once a popular writer of comic and absurd tales, and the supposedly progressive ideology of communism appealed to him. It was only after the Soviets elevated him to an important cultural role and forced him to produce “Party slogans” that he realized his mistake.



Milosz foresees, in 1953, several threats to the success of communism in the Eastern Bloc. One is the population of former serfs in Eastern Europe. Having gained freedom in the nineteenth century and acquired their own land, they will likely resist efforts to collectivize their farms. The petit bourgeoisie class and black-market trading operations constitute other threats. Nevertheless, the greatest threat is from communism’s own shortcomings, particularly its inability to meet its people’s material needs.

In his final chapter, Milosz reflects on the imposition of Soviet rule in the Baltic nations, where cultural and linguistic differences led to a particularly repressive occupying government.

The Captive Mind drew a great deal of international attention and praise when it was published in 1953. Among Western readers, it continues to be Milosz’s most popular book, despite his volumes of poetry. Czeslaw Milosz received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980.