I am glad that Lem has found his lost satirical masterpiece, I seem to remember liking is SF, too.
But the limited circulation of this attack on Stalin rather undercuts the courage involved.
Would it be unfair to say that this is a bit like that circle of 14 Belgian resistance poets, who produced their work in small print runs ... of 14.
Or as the surrealist painter Marcel Marien said, 'Ah yes, the Belgian resistance: that was after the war.'
[WS:] You are mixing apples and oranges, James. Lem was a left-winger, if not a communist, so why should he launch the same attack on the Soviets as one would do on Nazi occupiers. Bear in mind that many left-leaning intellectuals welcomed the Soviet liberation of Eastern Europe and social changes it brought. An excellent literary documentation of these attitudes can be found in Milan Kundera's _The joke_. The only ones who had a reason to oppose Stalin at that time were the nationalists (e.g. Polish or Ukrainian, who actually sided with the Nazis.)
Keep also in mind that fperhps for the first time in their wretched history, Soviet influence brought many good things to backward countries like Poland, such as quick industrialization, land reform, and general increase of living standards of the poor rural masses that constituted the vast majority of the population (about 75% according to the pre-war census data.) As I see it, until abot 1952, the bulk of the population was pretty happy with Stalinism in Poland, the only ones who were disappointed were nationalists, clericals, and a few disgruntled intelectuals. Things stared changing only after 1952, when the economic plans started falling short of their goals and it was obvious even to the supportes that Stalinist-style of central planning was not working as advertised.
Again we should not project the popular sentiments expressed in the late 1960s onwards on the initial periods of the socialist system in Poland. I would venture to argue that the post 1960s disappointment had more to do with economic stangantion of that period rather than opposition to socialism (Stalin style or otherwise). According to the J-curve theory os social movement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_movement_theory social unrest is likely to develop in situation when initially rapid economic development slows down or stops altogether. The initial phases of development create rising expectations that cannot be met int the slowdown phase, hence the propensity to rebel. I think it explains the EE situation quite well.
So the bottom line is that communists and leftists had little reason to oppose Soviet influences (Stalinists or otherwise) in the late 1940s or even early 1950s. Mild critique of political rhetoric of the times, maybe - but not open hostility.
Wojtek
--------------------------------------------------------------- "When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost. [...] All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men." - HL Mencken ----------------------------------------------------------------