History of the Present

by Timothy Garton Ash

  Yet this was an astonishing result. Six years after the end of communism, the country that had the strongest anticommunist opposition and the weakest communist party in the Soviet bloc has both a postcommunist government and a postcommunist president. If anyone had predicted this in the autumn of 1989, they would have been laughed out of the room. But then so would anyone who had predicted in the autumn of 1983 that within six years Poland would have a Catholic prime minister. Or, for that matter, anyone who had suggested in 1977, when the twenty-five-year-old Aleksander Kwasniewski joined the ruling communist party, that the party state would soon be engulfed by a ten-million-strong national movement called Solidarity. The kaleidoscope keeps turning. Each turn is a surprise. And each turn changes our view of the past as well as of the present.

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  Now for those explanations. First, there is a regional pattern. Most of postcommunist Europe today has postcommunist rulers. In Central Europe, the Czech Republic is the only clear exception. There are major differences between, for example, countries such as Poland and Hungary, which had intervening periods of transformation under liberal or conservative governments, and those such as Romania, which went straight from the communist frying pan into the postcommunist fire. Polish and Hungarian communists in the 1980s were, in important ways, already less communist than their Czech comrades—let alone their Russian ones.

  Nonetheless, there is a pattern. Postcommunist parties inherit nationwide organizations, offices, personnel, and funds, which are usually enhanced, at the end of communism, by appropriating the property of the party state. The “privatization of the nomenklatura”—itself one of the reasons why communists gave up political power so relatively quietly—produces a new class of communists-turned-capitalists. Actually, the Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas famously described the nomenklatura itself as “the new class,” so this must be the new new class. They back their old-new party by funding or fixing and through the media they own. Former communists also have the habits and discipline for patient, boring political groundwork, which former dissidents and intellectuals generally do not.

  To be sure, the business of democratic politics differs from that of communist politics. But there are people slightly lower down the communist hierarchy who very rapidly adapt to the rather different techniques of acquiring and exercising power in a modern television democracy. You may not be able to teach an old dog new tricks, but the young dogs learn them in no time. After all, they joined the party in the 1970s not because they believed in communism but because they were interested in making a career. And in the real politics of power rather than the intellectual and moral “antipolitics” of dissidence.

  In the electorate, they have a hard core of the old faithful. Then they pick up votes from those who have suffered from the transition to a market economy: the unemployed, workers in large state-owned factories, the middle-aged and small-town dwellers who have difficulty adapting to new ways, and impoverished pensioners. When people had the basic, minimal security afforded by a police welfare state, they longed for freedom; now that they have freedom they yearn for the old security as well. Postcommunists promise that the state will provide more housing, employment, and social security, while preserving the gains of freedom and the market.

  Kwasniewski’s victory partly fits this broad pattern but also has unique Polish features. His Alliance of the Democratic Left incorporates the so-called Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland—the direct successor to Poland’s ruling communist party—whose leader he became in 1990. Although it suffers from internal tensions, the Alliance is much the largest, best-organized, and best-funded party in Poland. Its backers are classic exemplars of the new “new class”—corrupt apparatchiks turned corrupt businessmen. During the campaign, it emerged that Kwasniewski’s own wife had a large shareholding—which he had not declared—in one of these nomenklatura capitalist companies. Kwasniewski gave several implausible explanations of why he had not declared this holding in his parliamentary statement of members’ interests, including the suggestion that he and his wife had separated their finances and he didn’t know about it.

  By contrast with the standard practice in many other postcommunist countries, his candidacy was not promoted outrageously by the news and current-affairs program of state television, which rather favored the incumbent, President Wałȩsa. However, he did enjoy the support of papers such as the bestselling satirical weekly Nie (“No”), the organ of Jerzy Urban, formerly General Jaruzelski’s spokesman during martial law.

  Kwasniewski’s campaign was a masterpiece of 1990s designer electioneering, from his immaculate suits and ties to the perfect delivery of his television sound bites. A friend who commutes between Paris and Warsaw told me it was quite as professional as the presidential campaigns in France. Perhaps this is not surprising, since a leading French public-relations consultant, Jacques Séguéla, was advising him. Séguéla, who has worked previously for François Mitterrand (he claims to have been behind the slogan “La France Tranquille”) and was recommended to Kwasniewski by the Austrian chancellor Franz Vranitsky, says he helped to invent Kwasniewski’s two main slogans—“Choose the Future” and “A Common Poland”—and to prepare him for his crucial television debates with Lech Wałȩsa. In a telephone conversation, M. Séguéla tells me that he likes to do an election campaign every year or two. It is, he says, his “hobby.” Besides Mitterrand and Vranitsky, his advisees have included the Bulgarian president Zhelyu Zhelev and the former Hungarian prime minister József Antall. He finds “Alexander” to be young, clever, courageous, and médiatique. He is, says M. Séguéla, something between a Kennedy and a Bill Clinton, whom he describes as “a great president”—although adding cautiously “at least from the point of view of communications.”

  Kwasniewski also used more old-fashioned methods. He toured the country assiduously, promising good things such as more housing (a major worry for the young), social security, and pensions—things about which, incidentally, the Polish president has little power to decide, even taking the broadest interpretation of his rather ill-defined constitutional powers.

  However, the composition of his vote does not entirely bear out the standard interpretation of postcommunist return. It is true that Wałȩsa got slightly more votes in cities and large towns—where the effects of economic growth have been more visible—and Kwasniewski got slightly more in small towns and the countryside. But his was not simply the vote of losers in an economic game in which his close associates are, after all, among the greatest winners. Voting for him, people also chose a personification of success. And he benefited from a “feel-good factor” in a country that has the fastest economic growth in Europe: 6.5 percent in the first half of 1995. The liberal architects of Poland’s “economic miracle,” such as Leszek Balcerowicz, now leader of the opposition Freedom Union party, observe wryly that Kwasniewski reaps the harvest of the changes they introduced.

  Moreover, Kwasniewski got significantly more votes from the young and Wałȩsa more from the old. Here was the great role reversal. The former communist became the man of the future, making Wałȩsa look like a man of the past. Just forty-three years old (to Wałȩsa’s fifty-two), suntanned, trim (he dieted specially for the elections), snappily dressed, better educated (although it now emerges that he lied about having received a master’s degree from Gdansk University), smooth-talking, yuppielike, “Olek” Kwasniewski sold himself as modern, forward-looking, Western. Perhaps inspired by M. Séguéla, his supporters even called him “the Polish Kennedy.” And the whole message was “Choose the Future.”

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  Yet how could people so rapidly forget the past? In Hungary, one might understand it more easily: 1956 was a very long time ago, and by the 1980s the party’s iron fist was hidden deep inside a thick velvet glove. But not in Poland, where just a few years ago this same Aleksander Kwasniewski was, as editor of the communist youth newspaper and then as minister for youth, justifying the imposition of martial law, the internme
nt of political opponents, and the banning of Solidarity.

  Well, first of all, a lot of people have not forgotten. Many voted for Lech Wałȩsa simply in order to stop an ex-communist from becoming their president. Conversely, some of Kwasniewski’s party electorate voted for him precisely because he is an ex-communist. Indeed, for all the slimming and suntanning and smart suits, Kwasniewski, with his hatchet jaw and slab cheekbones, still has something of the face and posture of the Stalinist worker-hero in Andrzej Wajda’s film Man of Iron. (People are now speculating about a sequel. Man of Silicon?)

  For the young, however, communism and Solidarity are already ancient history—something they are forced to learn about from boring textbooks. Here, the post-Solidarity leaders are victims of their own success. So rapid have been the changes, so self-evident has freedom become in just six years, that the young can hardly remember anything else. On election day, I had lunch with a friend who was a samizdat publisher in the 1980s. “Yes,” he reminisced, “of course in those days you never used to phone beforehand, just appeared at the door.” “But why didn’t he phone?” asked his fourteen-year-old daughter. Long pause. “Oh, you mean because the phone was bugged?” With some young voters, there was an element of conscious revolt. Just because the parents identify so strongly with the post-Solidarity tradition, the children vote against it.

  There remains, nonetheless, a question. In 1989, Solidarity leaders negotiated with Polish communists at the Round Table, and made a power-sharing deal summed up in a famous headline in the Solidarity paper Gazeta Wyborcza: “your PRESIDENT, OUR PREMIER.” The Warsaw Pact still existed, and this seemed the most the Soviet Union would accept. In a spirit of liberal Catholic forgiveness, and having in mind the model of post-Franco Spain, the Solidarity premier Tadeusz Mazowiecki drew what he called a “thick line” under the past. But did that line have to be quite so thick? And was it still right a year or two later, after the Soviet constraint had largely disappeared, to continue without any systematic purges of former communists or secret-police collaborators from public life (such as happened in Czechoslovakia and East Germany), without Latin American—style truth commissions, tribunals (except one specifically on the responsibility for martial law), or other symbolic steps to remind the public, and particularly the young, of what communists had done to Poland?

  This question has divided the post-Solidarity opposition. The right say the revolution should have been completed—not with the guillotine, to be sure, but with purges. Then Kwasniewski would never have got back. One of their representatives put it graphically on election night. In eighteen postcommunist countries, he said, there has been no decommunization and postcommunists are back in power; in two, the Czech Republic and East Germany, there has been decommunization, and they are not. (The figures don’t quite hold up, but one gets the general point.)

  At the other extreme is the former dissident and now editor of Gazeta Wyborcza Adam Michnik, who has counted Kwasniewski among his friends since 1989, written a preface to General Jaruzelski’s memoirs, and in September published a highly controversial article arguing that the time had come for the postcommunist and the post-Solidarity sides to sit down together and try to agree on a common version of the history of Poland under communist rule. The significance of the article was less what it said than the fact that it was signed jointly by Michnik and Włodzimierz Cimoszewicz, a postcommunist member of parliament who soon thereafter became Kwasniewski’s campaign manager.

  Michnik argues that somebody had to break through the social ostracism of the postcommunists, which he describes dramatically as “apartheid.” (But are the former communists now the blacks or the whites in that metaphor?) He also points out that, in spite of de-communization, the postcommunists got nearly a fifth of the vote in East Germany at the last parliamentary elections (not far short of what they got in Poland) and suggests that we should wait a little longer to see what happens in the Czech Republic.

  On balance, it seems to me that this very conciliatory “Spanish” approach to the past probably has facilitated the return of the postcommunists to power in Poland, although, of course, one can never prove that a tougher, more “Czech” or “East German,” approach would have prevented it.

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  Absolutely peculiar to Poland was the role of the Catholic Church. The Church threw its immense authority and influence not so much, initially, behind Wałȩsa—for in the first round there were other conservative Catholic candidates, such as the exceedingly devout president of the National Bank, Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz—but emphatically against the atheist postcommunists. In the late summer, a message from the Episcopate warned against “choosing for the highest positions in the fatherland people who during the period of the totalitarian state were involved in exercising power at the highest party-government level.” Now who could they mean? The postcommunists’ support for a liberal abortion law and resistance to ratifying the concordat with the Vatican further sharpened the Church’s opposition.

  Primate Glemp denounced the representatives of what he delightfully called “neopaganism.” (In a subsequent interview, he averred that neopagan is a purely descriptive term for nonbelievers. Such people could not, he explained carefully, be described as “pagans,” since “a pagan has a specific faith.” Before the second-round runoff, the Church came very close to telling the faithful to vote for Wałȩsa, who famously wears a badge of the Black Madonna of Czȩstochowa on his lapel. The bishop responsible for the pastoral care of farmers sent a special letter to country and small-town dwellers, headed “Don’t abandon the fatherland in need!” At the entrance to St. Stanislaw Kostki, the famous Warsaw church of a Solidarity priest murdered by secret police in 1984, I found a Wałȩsa election poster displayed beneath the timetable of services. On the very eve of the election, Primate Glemp called on the faithful to pray for “the elections, President Wałȩsa, and the fatherland.”

  And still Wałȩsa lost—especially in the countryside and the small towns. In spite of the Church’s appeals, or perhaps even because of them. Three quarters of those asked in one pre-election opinion poll said that the Church should not try to influence the election result. After the event, the secretary-general of the Episcopate, Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek, told me that he thinks people may well have resented what he called the Church’s “paternalistic” approach and that he is sure many good Catholics voted for Kwasniewski. As for young Poles, I suspect many of them will have said, “Neopaganism? Mmm, yes please!” It would be a fine irony if it was the Catholic Church that won the election for the neopagan.

  Yet part of the responsibility must also lie with the whole post-Solidarity side of Polish politics, divided into many, mainly small parties, with several different presidential candidates and as much occupied with fighting among themselves as with serious nationwide politics. They have, in fact, done much worse in this respect than their counterparts in Hungary or the Czech Republic, where the liberal and conservative parts of the political spectrum are consolidated into fewer, larger, better organized parties. Why? Partly because such falling-out is what tends to happen after a revolution, and what Solidarity did in Poland over the whole period from 1980 to 1989 was a revolution, albeit of a new kind. Just because before 1989 people had been more united than in Hungary and the Czech lands, they are more disunited now.

  Yet watching and listening to these theatrical (and sometimes highly enjoyable) quarrels, I am sure that the disunity also has something to do with older Polish traditions. There is the early modern tradition of the so-called noble democracy, with its endlessly disputatious “little parliaments” and with the gentry, great and small, quarreling on the election fields of the Polish kings, perhaps even coming to blows, then as theatrically making it up over innumerable beakers of hooch. There is also the tradition of the intelligentsia, which the urbanized heirs of the gentry became. This heritage was represented vividly in Warsaw at election time by a fine exhibition of intelligentsia family photographs, spanning five or six generation
s, from the great-great-grandfather who lost his estates after fighting against the Russians in the January Rising of 18 6 3 to the latest scion graduating from Warsaw University in 1987. Such traditions do not translate easily into the workaday, opportunistic politics of a television mass democracy. Former communist hacks, unburdened by pride or principle, take to it much quicker.

  Last, but by no means least, there is Lech Wałȩsa himself, who has spent much of the last five years destroying his own monument. Already in 1990, he alienated many former associates and supporters with his “war at the top” of Solidarity and his demagogic campaign for the presidency. As president, he has been erratic and often authoritarian in his style. He once suggested that he would change prime ministers “like car bumpers,” and he has, in fact, several times destabilized the parliamentary government. He has surrounded himself with a court of mediocre and even shady advisers, some with dubious ties to the security services and the army. Most notoriously, there was his former chauffeur Mieczysław Wachowski, until recently his senior minister of state. Above all, though, the former electrician and workers’ leader has failed to become statesmanlike. Not just the Warsaw intelligentsia, whose condescension he so fiercely resents, but many ordinary Poles I have talked to feel that his often undignified manner and broken, ungrammatical Polish do not fit him to represent a proud nation in the world.

  Earlier this year, his standing in the opinion polls fell to as low as 6 percent. Then, having changed his staff—Wachowski and others departing—he tried to adopt a more restrained and presidential style while, at the same time, successfully polarizing the campaign in historical terms: Lech against the Reds. This brought him a remarkable recovery, back up to a third of the vote in the first round, with the alternative candidate of post-Solidarity liberals and social democrats, the veteran dissident Jacek Kuroń, getting less than 10 percent. Then most of the post-Solidarity side rallied around Wałȩsa. For someone who remembers Solidarity, it was touching to see him together again with former advisers such as Bronisław Geremek and Tadeusz Mazowiecki.