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Comrade Ragball and a Slimeball as Unigue Visions of the Other in Postwar Poland
Suddenly a drop of bitterness,
A hideous thought emerges: Sadat!$
The cold Egyptian pederast,
The cunning and venomous adder!
Didnt’ he bite my lips with passion?!
Didnt he pretend to be so excited
and put his rwk?? in my pockets?!
And when he took everything out,
The thief showed me the door in the Middle East.
The character was obviously based on that of the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev,
grotesquely distorted of course. Indeed, Brezhnev had a habit of kissing all com¬
munist dignitaries on the lips in greeting them. The poem’s culmination comes
when Leonida is so delighted with her reflection in the mirror, or so drunk with
her self-proclaimed infatuation with Dick (a reference to Richard Nixon), or with
cognac, that she strips off all her clothes and stretches in front of the mirror in bliss.
When the mirror is asked the ritual fairy-tale question, “(Mirror, mirror, on the
wall) Who’s the fairest of them all?”, her reflection in it suddenly becomes yellow
and ugly and the mirror mentions Tsarina Mao. Upon hearing this Leonida experi¬
ences such a shock that the whole Kremlin starts trembling as she wriggles naked
on the floor in despair. Her subjects start coming in totally confused about what is
happening, from which Leonida (Fig. 9) concludes bitterly that the dumb subjects
never understand their ruler and must be dealt with severely:
the people are the svolotch'® and shit,
and must be whipped, whipped, and whipped!
Conclusion: Ragballs and Slimeballs in the Contemporary Polish Press
The concepts of Szmaciak and gnida have gained popularity in Poland over the
decades since their first occurrence in the public space. For many dissidents in the
1980s and 1990s, Szmaciak was a synonym of an opportunistic grassroots commu¬
nist party activist and was most frequently loaded with contempt. Nowadays the
term is used essentially as a term of abuse in the political struggle between two par¬
ties of anti-communist origin—both right-wing: the nationalist, strongly Catholic,
and socialist Law and Justice party (in power in the years 2005-2007 and since
October 2015) and the liberal, promarket, largely conservative but nonideological
Civic Platform (in power in the years 2007-2015). The term Szmaciak is mainly
° Anwar Sadat, president of Egypt 1970-1981, who is known for loosening close ties with the Soviet
Union after the initial rapprochement.
9 “Hands in Russian.
1% ‘Scum’ in Russian. In this context the term could also be understood to be labelling people as swines.
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