Poles liked the Aesopian message, too: while Edward Gierek, Poland’s leader in the 1970s, was not in Stalin’s league as a terrorising Big Brother, that made him all the more tempting to satirise. But in Poland Kapuściński’s reputation had been established long before, as a communist and anti-imperialist. Born in 1932 in Pinsk, a city of mixed ethnic population (two-thirds Jewish, a quarter Polish) that was part of Poland between the wars and the Soviet Union after the war, Ryszard was the son of Polish teacher-settlers in the eastern borderlands. A student at Warsaw University in the late 1940s, he became an activist in the Polish communist youth organisation and soon joined the Communist Party. His first success as a journalist was a 1955 exposé of the dismal reality of workers’ everyday lives in the new steel town of Nowa Huta, but he soon became a foreign correspondent, writing enormously popular reports on Africa for the journal Polityka, edited in the 1960s by the ‘liberal’ communist leader Mieczysław Rakowski. This was the great age of Soviet-bloc journalism, when – as with Alexei Adzhubei’s Komsomol’skaia pravda in Moscow – the most innovative and enterprising writers and editors were still communists by conviction as well as Party card. It didn’t hurt that Kapuściński was a foreign correspondent with sex appeal, à la Humphrey Bogart: hollow cheekbones, turned-up collar, cigarette permanently between the lips.

For several decades, Kapuściński swam smoothly through the stormy seas of Polish politics, helped by powerful patrons (who were also personal friends) in the Party’s Central Committee, and also by the fact that he was out of the country at the most difficult moments: 1956 (when Soviet invasion threatened and Gomułka replaced Bierut as leader), 1968 (an upsurge of nationalist anti-Semitism within the Party), and 1970 (Gomułka’s ouster). His popularity held up in the 1970s, although he was less in tune with the new generation of Western-loving, consumer-oriented cynics who found communism old hat than he had been with their parents. True to his long-standing enthusiasm for liberation movements, he embraced Solidarity when it came along at the end of the decade, and left the Party in 1981 after Jaruzelski imposed martial law, though without public denunciation or completely breaking personal ties with old Party comrades. The collapse of communism in 1989 was a difficult moment, but Kapuściński more or less went with the flow, establishing his post-communist credentials by touring the dying Soviet Union and writing Imperium (1993). As his biographer, Artur Domosławski, comments wryly, it was quite a feat to write a book about Gulag and Soviet imperialism without any comment on the fact that the author had been a Soviet-bloc communist for most of his adult life. True, even as a communist, he had never gone out of his way to praise the Soviet Union; and, as a post-communist, he criticised the ‘war on terror’ and the American interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. In a 2002 interview with a Polish newspaper, he said forthrightly that he ‘interpret[ed] all the talk about exporting Western democracy as an attempt to justify expansion operations. In colonialism, too, conquest was justified by the fact that it brought progress, higher civilization, and conversion to the true faith.’

Kapuściński had many friends, as well as many lovers (as befitted the Bogart persona), but they all felt he was a man of secrets and wondered if they really knew him. Domosławski, himself a friend, feels the same way. An honest biographer, he has to confront two big problems about his subject that surfaced after the fall of communism in Poland. The first is whether Kapuściński exaggerated his adventures as a foreign correspondent and generally embellished his life. It seems clear that one should take any stories of his about facing firing squads in various hotspots of the Third World with a grain of salt. There also seems to be no substance to his (post-1989) claim that his father, a reserve officer in the Polish Home Army, miraculously escaped from a Soviet transport to Katyn and certain death during the war. Undoubtedly he had a tendency to take rumours in the bazaar at face value if they served his purpose, making his portrait of Haile Selassie, for example, full of inaccuracies. Nor was he above trimming his sails a little for the foreign market, as in his removal of any reference to CIA involvement in the 1953 coup against Mossadeq from the American edition of Shah of Shahs. Still, he never claimed literal accuracy for his work, regarding himself as a writer as much as a reporter, like Bruce Chatwin and V.S. Naipaul, and aiming to present ‘the essence of the matter’, not the petty details.

The second problem was that in 2007, a few months before his death, Kapuściński was found to have a file as an informer for the security police. Given his extensive high-level connections and the fact that he was travelling freely throughout the world, this should not have come as much of a surprise, and Domosławski doesn’t pretend that it did. Kapuściński’s main services to the security police occurred in four years in Latin America in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when he passed on gossip about Third World leaders and CIA-connected Western journalists to two intelligence officers (also friends of his) working in the Polish Embassy in Mexico. The sum total of Kapuściński’s information was small and apparently trivial; unlike the infamous Victor Louis in the Soviet Union, whose journalistic reputation in the Cold War years rested entirely on scoops fed to him by the KGB for placement in Western media, Kapuściński really was a journalist, not an agent of any significance. As Domosławski points out, however, it is probably wrong to paint him as an unwilling collaborator, as some defenders have done. Kapuściński was a communist when he gave his information, and the people he gave it to were friends. From his standpoint in the 1950s and 1960s, this surely seemed more like a normal patriotic duty than a ‘pact with the Devil’, just as conversations with friends in the CIA would have seemed to American foreign correspondents in the same period.

That is not to say that at least one act of information-giving on Kapuściński’s part doesn’t leave a nasty taste. Many Polish intellectuals remain bitter about the report he gave the security police on a conversation with the Polish émigré Maria Sten in Mexico in 1969. Sten, a specialist on pre-Columbian cultures, had recently left Poland after being a target of anti-Semitism; and Kapuściński quoted her as speaking of 1968 as ‘the most tragic year’ in Poland’s history when ‘“the best people”, in other words the Zionists,’ had been forced to leave. This report probably wouldn’t have hurt her, Domosławski concludes, since she wasn’t planning to go back to Poland. Still: ‘Does the note have the tone of a denunciation? Unfortunately, yes, it does.’ No doubt this passage is one of the reasons that Alicja Kapuścińska, Ryszard’s widow, previously trusting enough of Domosławski to give him an interview, called the biography ‘an act of patricide’ and tried to block the Polish publication in 2010 and subsequent foreign translations. In fact, it is not a hostile biography but rather a friendly one – warts and all, no doubt, but the warts are painted with a sympathetic hand, not overpowering the face.

Zygmunt Bauman, the British-based Polish sociologist who is presumably a friend of both Kapuściński and Domosławski, probably goes too far in calling it ‘a great book about a great man’ in his blurb. Let’s call it a good book about an interesting man and accomplished writer–journalist, whose angle on the second half of the twentieth century – the Second World looking at the Third World – is, for most of us, intriguingly unfamiliar.