> For two decades he remained silent about his prewar and wartime work so as to avoid the attention of Poland's Soviet-dominated government [1]
Why would he want to hide that fact from the Soviets?
Why would he want to hide that fact from the Soviets?
1) Formalism was called Bourgeois Formalism by the state critics. Elitist art, opposite of what would become Socialist Realism.
2) If you click the names at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_formalism , some of the biographies will lead you to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootless_cosmopolitan . Being a Jew in the USSR was an additional risk.
3) Slightly later in history, but typical use of formalism-as-a-prejorative : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhdanov_Doctrine
tldr: young authoritarian states need enemies. Both internal and external. Repression of any form of dissent is a way to unite (or scare into submission) the masses. See also: "degenerative art" in Germany. Also being apolitical is a political statement.
There's a good timeline of the 20s in Russian: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%91%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%8C%D0%B1...
was recent memory, with Soviets mass murdering educated Poles, among others.
Skalski was a Polish aviator and fighter ace who served with the Polish Air Force and British Royal Air Force during the Second World War. Skalski was the top Polish fighter ace of the war and chronologically the first Allied fighter ace of the war. He returned to Poland after the war but was imprisoned by the communist authorities under the pretext that he was a spy for Great Britain. While in arrest he was tortured and then, in a show trial, sentenced to death on 7 April 1950. Skalski refused to ask for clemency but after his mother's intervention with the president of communist Poland, Boleslaw Bierut, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. He remained in prison until 1956 when a court overturned the previous verdict.
The Soviets and Nazis started WW2 by attacking Poland. The Soviets won. Why would he want to collaborate with the enemy?
After 1941, the Americans allied themselves with the Soviets because of the doctrine of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", but for Poles the Nazis were the enemies and the Soviets were the enemies too.
For example Witold Pilecki, Polish guerilla group (AK) member who voluntered to get captured by Germans and put in Auschwitz camp to see what happens there. Then he wrote a report and escaped from the camp. After the WW2 he was captured by soviets, sentenced to deatch and executed (supposedly for speing for western powers). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witold_Pilecki
Leaders of these antinazi partizan groups from WW2 were invited after WW2 to Moscow with the supposed goal being to negotiate. When in Moscow they have been captured and sentenced to death in a show trial, and then executed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_the_Sixteen
Pre-WW2 Polish politician Mikołajczyk and a leader of one of the biggest parties - PSL (agrarian party) - returned from exile to Poland after WW2 and was allowed to have his party in elections (as an exception to appease Polish farmers - other parties were banned and over 30 000 people were imprisoned and executed just before the elections). The elections were falsified to absurd level, PSL was the most popular party by far, yet they got 10% of votes officially. Mikołajczyk escaped to London again and later to USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Miko%C5%82ajczy...
There's thousand such examples. People were terrorized and kept silent out of fear for their lives. There were whole chapters of history you weren't supposed to talk about (like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre ).