WORLD VIEW:History and politics inescapably coincide in the debate on the end of communist rule in Poland, writes PAUL GILLESPIE
‘WHO BENEFITED?” Alexander Kok, president of the Villa Decius cultural centre in Krakow, asked this pointed question when introducing a recent conference at the centre on the challenges of freedom 20 years after the transformations of 1989.
What about the Silesian miners and the other Polish workers who formed the backbone of Solidarity from 1979 to 1989?
“Who lost?” is easier to answer than who benefited, Kok believes.
Behind both lies the question, “Whose freedom?”, which has a wider European relevance.
These issues are at the centre of Poland’s debate. It was a deliberately non-violent transition, eschewing the classical revolutionary lexicon. The trade union and intellectual leaders of Solidarity were aware that violence could be self-defeating, as in the Warsaw rising of 1944 or the police attacks on workers’ rebellions in 1956, 1970 and 1976.
Solidarity’s demand for independent trade unions in 1979 to 1980 was framed within the communist value system and that of the 1970s Helsinki accords, according to one of its veterans Henryk Wujec. This simultaneously endorsed and undermined the regime’s legitimacy when 10 million people and a network of 500 factories responded. Polish pope John Paul II’s messages of support and hope stressed non-violence. A longstanding pragmatic, reformist approach, in contrast to romantic rebellion, was also rediscovered, fighting not for a Catholic Poland but for a pluralist European set of values.
In 1979 to 1980 and 10 years later uncertainty about Soviet intentions played a crucial role in encouraging non-violent methods.
Gen Wojciech Jaruzelski’s coup against Solidarity in 1981 was partly pre-emptive. In 1989 both sides gradually realised that so long as Mikhail Gorbachev was in charge the Soviet Union would not intervene. The knock-on effect elsewhere in central Europe was profound.
But because of Poland’s pioneering role, its round-table participants had to proceed with more haste and less speed through the elections in June 1989 when Solidarity competed against the communists, and then with the jointly agreed radical reforms of August to September 1989, which privatised property, freed prices and brought in the International Monetary Fund to rescue Poland’s deeply indebted and highly inflationary economy.
As Lenin put it in 1917, there are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen; 1989 was certainly in the latter category. This justifies paying detailed attention to these events, since what was agreed then determined so much of the next 20 years.
The populist-nationalist current represented by the Kaczynski brothers regards 1989 as another disaster, according to cultural historian Nina Witoszek- FitzPatrick. Solidarity made a diabolic pact with the communists. It was an act of betrayal. Its beneficiaries were the party elite, who transformed themselves into a new ruling class in alliance with the liberal intelligentsia. The workers who created Solidarity lost out. The Catholic masses were sold out. And Poland was colonised once again by US and European cosmopolitanism. The revolution was at best incomplete, at worst deflected altogether.
An incipient left-wing revisionism on the events draws on some of the same themes, albeit in a more nuanced way. According to Jan Sowa, a sociologist at Krakow university, the intellectuals claim too much of the credit for the transition, partly because they have primarily benefited from it.
Solidarity was created by millions of workers through self- organisation and independent activity. This existed before the intellectuals’ involvement and expressed a longstanding anarcho-syndicalist tradition.
Left-wing intellectuals, such as Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski, understood this better than the liberals. According to Sowa, Kuron later regretted supporting the 1989 reforms, which marginalised the workers’ movement. But his assertion was contradicted by Wujec and others. One quoted Kuron as saying: “I am a capitalist so I can be a socialist later.” And, indeed, he remained in their favour as minister for labour in the 1990s, believing they could rinse Stalinism out of Poland’s social system.
Wojciech Przybylski, editor of the periodical Res Publica Nowa, who was born in 1980, laments the absence of a critical Polish memory of these historic events. There is an “almost complete social amnesia about those days among today’s students”, he said.
But, ironically, there was a consensus that the younger generation is perhaps the main beneficiary of 1989, enabling Poland to play an equal part in Europe.
One of Sowa’s protagonists said there would soon be few people left alive to contradict revisionism with personal memories. But it is unfair to pitch participant accounts against alternative ones by a younger generation, since interpretations were contested during the events.
Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev has produced a wider piece of revisionism about 1989. In an essay in the September issue of Prospect magazine, he says the revolutions allowed party and meritocratic elites throughout central and eastern Europe to break free of social obligations and ties. The civil society they promoted has withered, leaving populist nationalism to make a compelling appeal based on the restoration of social intimacy.
History and politics inescapably coincide in the debate on who benefited from 1989.