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deliberates, and then agrees. The general, satisfied, leans back and states that he is not surprised:
    “You have already understood that anyone who wants to change the world can’t continue to pay lip service to phony parliamentarianism, and you know that the liberal games of merchants were a short-lived bit of excess in human history.” 44
    Whether or not he used those exact words, archival evidence makes clear that Serov really was impressed by Piasecki and apparently hoped to jumpstart hispolitical career by naming him mayor of Warsaw. (When reminded of Piasecki years later, Serov is said to have asked, “And so—did he become mayor of Warsaw?”) 45 But Serov left soon afterward for Berlin, along with most of the rest of the Red Army leadership. He never returned to Poland.
    That left Piasecki in an odd position. He had clearly obtained a blessing of some kind from the Soviet Union. But Polish communists, who understood the significance of his Falangist past quite well, were more suspicious of him and his motives and did not at first promote his political career; nor did they make him mayor of Warsaw. Still, in November 1945 they allowed him to publish the first edition of communist Poland’s first “official” Catholic newspaper,
Dziś i Jutro
(
Today and Tomorrow
).
    From the start, the paper offered harsh criticisms of the then-legal Polish Peasants’ Party and of its leader, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, and it urged Poles to support the communists in their “Three Times Yes” referendum. After that referendum had failed to provide a ringing endorsement for the new regime, Piasecki wrote to Gomułka. The current system, he argued, “should be enriched by the political representation of Catholics.” 46 He also published an interview with Bierut, in which the communist leader declared grandly that “Polish Catholics have no more and no fewer rights than other citizens”—a comment that implied they might even have a right to their own party. Eventually, this came to pass and in 1952 Piasecki founded Pax, a loyal, legal, pro-communist Catholic “opposition” party, the only one that would ever be allowed to exist in communist Poland or indeed anywhere else in communist Europe.
    Both Pax and Piasecki existed in a strange, undefined, and ambiguous political space. On the one hand, Piasecki expressed his loyalty to the regimeenthusiastically and often. “Our main goal,” he wrote at one point, “is the reconstruction of a Catholic doctrine with respect to the ongoing conflict between Marxism and capitalism.” At the same time, Piasecki was one of the few people in public life who never quite cut himself off from the traditions of the wartime underground and was never forced to denounce his Home Army comrades. Those in his circle, many of whom had had extensive Home Army careers, never had to renounce their pasts either, and they were never arrested.
    All of this was extremely unusual in public life at the time, and it created, in the words ofJanusz Zabłocki, one of his former colleagues, “an enclave of freedom” around Piasecki, as well as an aura of mystery. Nobody quite knew why the leader of Pax was exempt from the rules—at one point he even managed to expel a police informer from his inner circle—but everyone saw that he was. Most assumed that “there must have been an agreement at the highest political levels” which allowed Piasecki such leeway—presumably an agreement with Soviet officials—and many hoped that his position would grow even stronger. Zabłocki joined the staff of
Dziś i Jutro
under the influence of this belief. So didTadeusz Mazowiecki, the Catholic intellectual who would become Poland’s first noncommunist prime minister in 1989. Both men reckoned that Pax would sooner or later play an important role in governing the country. 47 Piasecki himself hoped the same.
    Throughout his career, Piasecki’s ambiguous status made everyone uneasy. Perhaps because he did have a