During martial law in the early 1980s, Teresa Torańska, a journalist affiliated with the Solidarity movement, interviewed a number of Polish Stalinist leaders. These leaders had long since been expelled from the PZPR and were objects of popular and even official vilification. In particular, she did a series of interviews with Jakub Berman, a veteran Polish Communist, whom many Poles widely regarded as the eminence grise of Polish Stalinism. He was expelled from the Central Committee of the PZPR after Bierut's death in March 1956 and within a year from the PZPR itself. In the course of her interviews, Torańska pressed him and other Stalinists about the ethical compromises, corruption, and crimes that characterized their misrule in Poland. They in turn sought to justify themselves and their party's effort to transform Poland. One exchange is particularly revealing:

[In response to Torańska's accusation that Poland had no need of Communist efforts at cultural development:]

Berman: Of course it wasn't just a question of education or illiteracy—those are just details—but rather of changing the country, of building a completely new Poland of a shape and structure previously quite unknown in its history.