KORTATU IN WARSAW PART 2: SKINHEADS ON THE RAMPAGE
Either way, when it came to attending gigs, by 1987 there was a far greater deterrent for many of Poland’s punks than potential run-ins with the police: the now burgeoning skinhead movement. From 1986 up until the early 90s, skins made their presence felt at virtually every punk gig in Warsaw, where they specialised in mugging people for their boots and army surplus gear. Sometimes they invaded punk, alternative or metal festivals, starting mass brawls with the crowd to assert their dominance. Still a fairly new subculture in Poland, skins were out to make a name for themselves. They wanted to be the baddest of the bad – not unlike the punks a few years earlier when battering, for instance, the hippie audience of prog rockers Ogród Wyobraźni at the Jarocin festival in 1983. Now it was the punks’ turn to run.
“At the beginning of Róbrege ’87, the skinheads were hanging outside the Intersalto Circus tearing off people’s badges, robbing their boots, and so on…”, Kuba remembers. “Later they came inside to watch the bands and started fighting in the pit. But I hardly remember that.” Although the quality of the footage is very poor, there are a few frames in the Róbrege ’87 documentary on YouTube capturing what we presume are skinheads with cropped hair and braces outside the Intersalto Circus:
There’s also footage of a brief disturbance in the crowd and of a skinhead manhandled by bouncers to audience chants of “down with fascism”:
According to the Brown Book 1987-2009 published by the Never Again Association (an ‘official’ anti-fascist organisation that cooperates with the Foreign Office and the Polish Football Association), this is what occurred at Róbrege ‘87:
„Between 21 and 23 August, dozens of skinheads armed with sticks, metal pipes and knives terrorised the audience and participants of the 5th Róbrege music festival … Among other incidents, there were dozens of beatings and a big fight between skinheads and the audience, involving the use of knives and other dangerous tools. The incidents were chauvinist in nature – the attackers regarded the alternative youths attending the festival as ‘filth’ and ‘inferior’ Poles.”
Leaving aside the political motives, which the authors deduce from the incidents as if they were self-evident, I wondered if this was an accurate account of the events at Róbrege. “Well, there were scuffles all the time”, Piotr of QQRYQ remembers – but then he adds some context: “At the time, there was terrible thuggery and violent crime in Poland’s streets, and Warsaw was a dangerous city. When the skins became more numerous, it was almost a natural development that they’d get caught up in this vibe too. All the more so since some of them were into robbery – they’d mug people for boots, for example”. He doesn’t remember any big punch-up or attack, however, “only lots of minor skirmishes”. What’s more, he believes the Brown Book “goes a bit overboard when citing knives” – he remembers “only one incident when someone inside the festival started waving a knife about, and the bouncers quickly overpowered him”.
Trojan, the aforementioned ex-skinhead from Upper Silesia concurs: “The Brown Book entry is a gross exaggeration – an attempt to present events that were trivial at the time as an apocalyptic battle between good and evil. I don’t remember any big brawl, least of all one involving weapons”. Like Piotr, he recalls “plenty of minor scuffles, usually involving tearing off badges and patches of ‘enemy’ bands.” He adds that “skinheads didn’t operate as one big organised group, but were a number of groups from different cities. Often they didn’t know or distrusted each other. Fights between skinheads were frequent too – let me just remind you of football antagonisms…”
What about the ideological motivation that the Brown Book authors see behind the skinhead violence? “At the time, there wasn’t any ideology behind it”, Trojan continues. “What kind of ideology are they referring to anyway? Polish chauvinism against Poles? White racism against whites?” According to Trojan, the “politicisation of the Polish skinhead scene started later”. What you had in 1987, he says, were “subcultural antagonisms and a bit of common crime, such as stealing people’s jackets or boots”.
Viva la Contra
On Saturday 22 August, after a set by the Russian alternative act Va-Bank, who Dolores remembers being booed by some elements in the audience on account of their country of origin, Kortatu finally hit the stage. Eyewitness recollections of their set are blurry: “I don’t remember their performance all that well”, Kuba regrets, “Just that they played and that it was wild and exotic for us, because we hadn’t seen many bands from the west.” Piotr of QQRYQ zine has a somewhat clearer recollection: “Kortatu were great. They were very energetic on stage, and the music itself was highly original and captivating”.
Alas, for some reason Kortatu weren’t one of the 18 bands filmed for the Róbrege 1987 documentary, although a YouTube channel called Radioactive Rat has published a one-track sample from what seems to be 38-minutes audio recording in decent quality – alas, the whole thing isn’t available for sale. Hear Kortatu perform ‘La linea del frente’ at Róbrege here:
As for scuffles erupting during Kortatu’s set, Piotr – unlike Fermin of Kortatu (see interview) – doesn’t remember any: „Every now and then, fights broke out outside the Intersalto and on the festival grounds too, but from memory, no such thing occurred when Kortatu were playing. Maybe people shouted a few things, but most were just dancing and having fun.”
And shout a few things they did. In the 1987 mail interview with QQRYQ, Kortatu bassist Iñigo commented ironically: “I enjoyed playing that concert a lot, especially since it’s unusual for us to hear punters shout things such as ‘Redskins fuck off’ or ‘Viva la Contra’” [Contras = US-backed rightwing terrorist groups in 1980s Nicaragua]. Apparently, heckles along these lines were provoked by the fact that Iñigo wore a t-shirt of Redskins, the UK band, on stage. “Personally, I didn’t hear anything of the sort, says Piotr, but the ex-skin Trojan recalls that “an anti-communist skinhead named Szczygieł shouted ‘Viva la Contra’ when Kortatu played their ‘Nicaragua Sandinista’ song”.
Even so, Kortatu made an impression on the skins in the crowd. Trojan confirms that his crew “had great fun during Kortatu’s set, especially since most of the other bands played music that wasn’t very digestible for us: some kind of new wave reggae…” Kortatu remain a band loved by Trojan to this day.
The following year, the aforementioned skinzine Fajna Gazeta reprinted Piotr’s Kortatu interview from QQRQ zine. ‘Robson’ (Robert), then a budding skinhead from Wrocław and later the manager of Poland’s best-known nazi band, Konkwista 88, remembers: “I got a copy of Fajna Gazeta at Róbrege ’88 – a strange zine. They reviewed everything from Redskins to rightwing bands – a real mish-mash. And they had an interview with Kortatu, a leftwing skin band… I thought it was funny that they’d reprint stuff from punk zines”. Robson would learn to appreciate the likes of Kortatu more when switching sides and becoming a redskin himself in the mid-90s…
Conspiracy theories
Let’s turn to another aspect relating to the supposed skinhead attack against the festival: in Polish antifa circles, rumours have been circulating for years that the skinheads were set up by state security services to destroy Poland’s “cultural opposition”, i.e. the alternative scene. Such conspiracy theories appear to be partly based on a later incident in Sosnowiec, where in 1988 a member of a skinhead mob attacking a street demonstration by Fighting Solidarność (a split from the anti-communist Solidarność trade union) turned out to be a former member of the ZOMO paramilitary police. The Brown Book says: “As a result of this, speculations emerged that the skinhead subculture was at that time partly inspired and controlled by the Communist special services, which tried to use it to fight against the youth political opposition and contesting subcultures”. And in an interview with the hipster magazine Vice, antifa activist Rupert claims that “outside Róbrege we were fighting with nazis on one side and cops on the other … big mobs would show up and the police didn’t intervene.” He darkly implies that “many nazi-skins had members of the police or military in their families”.
One thing to keep in mind is that the police had informers in all subcultures that it considered a potential threat to public order – not just in the Eastern bloc, but in countries such as West Germany too. Another is that Polish antifa consists largely of anarchists (often of a decidedly liberal bent) who are quick to put an equal sign between the socialist regime and fascism – after all, both were “authoritarian”. By way of confirmation bias, then, isolated incidents of informers or provocateurs among skinheads become a secret understanding, a unity of interests, or even a conspiracy between “nazi skins” and the Polish equivalent of the KGB…
Our ex-skinhead mate Trojan, likewise, casts doubt on such theories: “The Security Service (SB) had people in all circles, and in subcultural circles it was very easy to extort cooperation through blackmail. It’s difficult to speak of skinheads as a whole, though. Yes, there was a scuffle in Katowice or Sosnowiec between skinheads and members of Fighting Solidarność, and allegedly it was instigated by an SB officer… On another occasion, skinheads raided the premises of the Polish Socialist Party/Revolutionary Democracy in Warsaw [an oppositional socialist party formed in early 1988 – MC], and once again there were rumours that this was instigated by the SB. But none of these rumours were ever confirmed.”
What’s more, confirming something that we mentioned earlier, Trojan questions the political significance that the alternative scene attributes to itself in hindsight: “The so-called alternative scene – and I don’t mean punk rock, but new wave and so on – was organised by official institutions. In fact, the Solidarność underground at the time accused the alternative scene of redirecting the rebellious sentiments of the young into safe channels”.
For some people, events always present themselves in black and white: in this case, as an epic battle between the forces of light on one side (anarchists, anti-communist dissidents and the alternative scene) pitched against all the forces of darkness on the other (Communists, ‘nazi skins’ and cops). I’m afraid reality is more complex. Neither the ruling party apparatus, which was rife with contending factions, nor the opposition – which ranged from far-left to far-right and compirsed all shades in between – was homogenous. The same applies to Poland’s early skinhead scene. The relationship between Poland’s “cultural opposition” and “actually existing socialism” might be worth an investigation in its own right. I’ll just leave it at saying that the retrospective self-stylisation of some figures from the punk and alternative scenes as freedom fighters should be viewed critically.
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