Word: szpilki
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...only publication in Poland that seems immune to party lockjaw is a twelve-page satirical weekly with the apt name of Szpilki (Needles). Garishly printed on cheap paper, cocky, 24-year-old Szpilki (pronounced "shpeelky") sticks its needles into Communist hides from Moscow to Warsaw. In a cartoon deriding the cultural isolation of Leon Kruczkowski and other hacks on the party's Trybuna Literacka (Literary Tribune), Szpilki this month depicted three self-pitying wallflowers on a vast, empty dance floor. Caption: "The Trybuna Literacka Lonely Hearts Ball...
...reason for Szpilki's durability is that many of its best-known staffers, including Cartoon Editor (and Co-Founder) Eryk Lipinski, 49, have long been Communists or fellow travelers and know intuitively how deep they can sink their shafts. In a country that has long suffered satirists more willingly than reporters, Polish newsmen believe that Szpilki is so popular (circ. 165,000) that it is virtually assassination-proof...
...weekly is also a harsh critic of the West, but to Poles, in their dogged, rear-guard struggle for democracy, Szpilki's sharpest needles are reserved for Communist duplicity and doublethink. In a cartoon that wryly helped to explain its own survival, Szpilki showed a technician standing with a visitor in front of a Rube Goldbergian version of an electronic brain. "You think this criticism machine is big?" said the technician. "You should see the anti-criticism machine...
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