Czesław Miłosz in his book The Captive Mind makes parallels between Kitman and the act of public hypocrisy (that is, publicly professing orthodoxy, while privately believing heterodoxy with the hope of one day being in a position of authority to spread one's hidden ideas) in the name of individual conscience under the Communist régimes of post-war Europe.
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Czesław Miłosz in the The Captive Mind uses Ketman (a variation on Kitman) as a metaphor for understanding how intellectuals behaved under the totalitarian regimes in Postwar Communist Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Hungary.