History of the Present

by Timothy Garton Ash

  Then, in 1988, after a new wave of Solidarity strikes, the political ground began to move. The Jaruzelski regime, encouraged by Mikhail Gorbachev, sought dialogue with Solidarity, and, early the next year, all parties sat down to negotiate at a “Round Table”—a model that was later imitated in Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia. By April 1989, they had agreed that elections should take place, that the opposition would participate, and that it should have a newspaper for the election campaign. Lech Wałȩsa asked Adam Michnik to be its editor, and Michnik, in turn, asked Helena and her team from Tygodnik Mazowsze to run it. Michnik, that is, would be the public, political head of the paper; Helena would actually get the thing out.

  There was very little time. The elections were set for 4 June 1989. With scarcely eight weeks to go, a limited company, Agora, was formed to publish the new paper (its founding shareholders—there were twenty-four—included the film director Andrzej Wajda and the Solidarity leader Zbigniew Bujak). A month later, the first issue appeared, with an editorial declaring that its editors wanted to produce a “normal” newspaper. It seems now such a modest ambition, but the country had not known a normal newspaper for more than forty years. The newspaper, its editors promised, would be “multifaced, quick, objective”—and, most important, it would clearly separate commentary from news.

  Yet this first issue was openly partisan. In tabloid format, it carried a front-page appeal to its readers to vote for Lech Wałȩsa, beneath a large photograph of him. On the masthead was the slogan that I had so often heard protesters chant in the streets: “Nie ma wolności bez Solidarności.” “There’s no liberty without Solidarity.” And six of the paper’s eight pages were filled with potted biographies of what it called “our candidates” for parliament. In fact, for the first couple of years, Gazeta Wyborcza was still a long way from its proclaimed ideal of a “normal” newspaper: fact sacred, comment free. Its news stories could be selective and sarcastically partisan. Critics punned that the paper was not “The Electoral” but “The Selectoral” (Wybiorcza rather than Wyborcza).

  In those early days, its poor-quality paper and print made it look very much like the old communist papers—not surprising, since it was actually printed on the same press as the communist party daily Trybuna Ludu. Adam Michnik had to wrangle with communist leaders to get the paper that was needed. The type was set up in lead, by hand; the typesetters drinking vodka by the liter and suffering from lead poisoning. Upstairs at the print shop sat the censor. Once, during the election campaign, I asked Helena if I could take a cartoon up for approval. I found a frumpy woman in a cheap floral dress, with a glass of tea and a cigarette hanging from her lip, who examined the cartoon carefully and then signed it on the back.

  Its first editorial office, at 19 Iwicka Street, was a former nursery school. It still had low tables and child-sized chairs. On warm days, editorial meetings were held around a sandpit in the garden. When I visited the office shortly before the elections, I found an atmosphere of creative chaos, with people dashing about amid plumes of cigarette smoke, shouts, laughter, crying, and telephones ringing all over the place—Helena’s apartment writ large. The underground veterans of Tygodnik Mazowsze, who came to be known internally as “the Mazovians,” were joined by a few distinguished journalists from other camps and by a rapidly growing band of the very young. Helena would sit with them at the nursery-school desks, like a schoolteacher, and show them how to write a news story.

  “The Electoral Paper” was the organ of the Solidarity opposition in the first free election in Poland for more than fifty years. How much did it contribute to Solidarity’s victory? It’s an open question. The Poles had more than enough reasons to vote out the communists after so many years of unelected misrule. But the paper contributed decisively to the next step: the appointment of a non-communist prime minister—the first in Eastern Europe since 1948—and the installation of General Jaruzelski as president, to reassure Moscow. It was the paper that first suggested this. In a characteristic division of labor, Michnik wrote the editorial advancing the radical proposal; Helena thought up the historic banner headline YOUR PRESIDENT, OUR PREMIER. His article, her headline. With interventions like this, Gazeta Wyborcza wrote itself into the history of Poland’s negotiated revolution, rather as the Spanish newspaper El País had done during Spain’s transition from dictatorship to democracy.

  Like so many revolutionaries before them, Solidarity’s leaders began fighting among themselves soon after their triumph. In the aftermath of this “war at the top,” as Wałȩsa described it, the official Solidarity leadership told the paper to remove from its masthead the familiar red logo and the slogan “There’s no liberty without Solidarity.” There was not much solidarity left now that liberty had arrived. In an election in late 1990, Lech Wałȩsa stood for president against his own former adviser, Tadeusz Mazowiecki. The paper backed Mazowiecki, but Wałȩsa won.

  It was high time to do what they said in the first issue they would do: make a “normal” newspaper. The editors moved out of the nursery school and took over two floors of a nearby office building. Today, those offices do look, at first glance, much like those of a normal Western paper: modern, open plan, highly computerized, with a cool aesthetic of pale blues and grays, so unlike the strident red, white, and black of the years of struggle. And yet they aren’t. Helena shares a cramped office at the end of the newsroom with another senior editor. Both have small modern desks rather like something you might buy for a teenage daughter. Casually dressed journalists crowd into this small room for the afternoon conference, standing in the doorway or sitting on the floor. No instructions are barked from the head of a long editorial conference table. Instead, people argue to and fro through the cigarette smoke, with Helena joining in from her little desk. If I half close my eyes I can almost imagine myself back in Helena’s old kitchen.

  But insiders warn me that appearances can deceive. When I use the word egalitarian to describe the ethos of the paper, one of them exclaims, “Egalitarian shmegalitarian! You should see the way Helena talks to an intern.” She can lose her cool and bawl out older colleagues. There’s a toughness there that I, as a friend, may not have seen. I ask Helena if she feels that her new power has changed the way people relate to her. She reflects for a moment and says, “Well, perhaps a little, yes.” I’m afraid it may be a little more than she thinks. Another insider, who preferred not to be named (and that in itself was revealing), told me that younger members of the editorial staff go in fear of her. Several talented journalists have left after arguments. Most painfully, she has ceased to be friends with two of her closest associates from the underground resistance team—those pale, intense women I remember dashing into the old kitchen and burning messages in a candle flame. It’s an old story: together under oppression, divided in freedom.

  Everyone but everyone says that the whole editorial side of the paper revolves around Helena. The only person to dispute this is Helena herself. She is there from morning to night and is renowned for going over pieces line by line. Even close friends sometimes don’t have her private number, because you can always reach her at the office. And she likes other people to be there, too. I was told that one afternoon word got about that Helena had gone out for a few hours to the beautician. Within twenty minutes, the office had emptied. Even if not literally true, the story expresses a deeper truth.

  WHAT IS the paper like now? The offhand, mildly sarcastic tone persists. It’s a tone that is impatient, even contemptuous, of an older, stuffier, conservative, Catholic, nationalist Poland, for which Warsaw slang has the delightful term bogoojcžyniany—roughly “god-fatherlandized.” (“Mrs. Z is very nice, but a little god-fatherlandized.”) The tabloid-format paper’s front page still carries its short, lively, “popgun-style” stories. Picking up a copy at random, I find the headline FED TNIE STOPY—that is, FED CUTS RATES. (Ten years ago, most Poles would not have known what the Fed was, let alone cared about its rates.) There are high-quality color photographs—i
n this copy, the lead picture is of a new Renault car. And there are short items flagging the longer stories inside. But these inside news stories are still written in a sharp, readable style. When I’ve been interviewed by journalists from the paper, I have found that my sentences get chopped up into short, snappy ones, so I started sounding like one of them: bang, bang, bang. There is strong foreign coverage and—reflecting the country’s rapid advance to capitalism—a growing amount of business news. And it has excellent reportage, often written by young journalists on the regional supplements, who track down stories of local corruption, mafias, the drug scene, and so on.

  In the weekend edition, there are long essays—about history, the Polish Catholic Church, Polish-Jewish relations, developments in other postcommunist countries—of the kind more usually found in intellectual monthlies and quarterlies. It’s like having The New York Review of Books in the center pages of a tabloid newspaper. Finally, there is the personal contribution of the editor in chief, Adam Michnik, who sets the political line. His sharply written, signed commentaries have provoked fierce protest even from his own staff— as when, in the middle of the 1995 presidential campaign, he seemed implicitly to give his support to the postcommunist (and ultimately successful) candidate Aleksander Kwasniewski, against none other than Lech Wałȩsa. He was also one of very few people in Poland to criticize, albeit from a position of profound respect, some of the statements made by the pope on his last visit to his native land.

  WANDA RAPACZYNSKI explained to me the commercial strategy of what the rest of the Polish press enviously calls “Agoraland.” Wanda is the paper’s business supremo. She and Helena were childhood friends and attended the same secondary school. Wanda left Poland after the anti-Semitic campaign in 1968 and, at the age of twenty-one, moved to the United States, where she studied to be an academic psychologist, married, had a daughter, then went to the Yale School of Management and worked for Citibank in New York before Helena persuaded her to return.

  The company had to grow and diversify, Wanda said—accounting for the business’s expansion into radio and television. It needed to protect itself against a possible future recession, in which advertising revenues might slump. Advertising—which until 1989 rarely featured in any Polish periodical—now accounts for more than 70 percent of the paper’s revenue: the kind of healthy ratio that you’d expect to find in any British or American publication. Anyway, to diversify was simply “the law of the market.” But where to find the capital? “My borrowing capacity far exceeds the lending capacity of any Polish bank.” Hence the decision to go public. But, before doing so, they had to restructure the company.

  The paper is no stranger to foreign investors. In the heroic early days, it had help from Western friends. The French newspaper Libération sold a special issue on the paper’s behalf. Le Monde donated an old printing press, and a group of American supporters, including Robert Silvers and Rea Hederman of The New York Review of Books, lent money to transport the press from France. Although that press was never actually used, it served as useful collateral for loans from Polish banks. (So much have things changed that a couple of years ago the paper got a letter from Le Monde asking if Gazeta would now like to invest in it.) The editors found a substantial American private investor, Cox Enterprises, and they obtained an $8.5 million loan from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

  Until recently, the company was a business anachronism, a financial world’s wonder: worth millions of dollars, but without any clear owner. It had twenty-four founding shareholders but, true to the idealistic collective spirit in which it had begun, their shares had no financial value. What was to be done? Finally, they came up with a solution that creates two kinds of stock: special voters’ shares, called A shares, which protect the company from hostile takeovers but cannot be traded, and B shares, which can be traded and will soon have substantial financial value. The three members of the executive board, Helena, Wanda, and the thirty-nine-year-old publisher, Piotr Niemczycki, together with one other editor and a senior manager, control the A shares. The five of them also own B shares, along with ninety-five others. In addition, there is a stock-purchase scheme for 1,700 employees, and an annual incentive plan will reward managers and journalists with further stock. “Hardly a case of heartless, cold capitalism,” comments Wanda.

  Yet however liberal, meritocratic, and broad-based they have tried to make the dividing of the cake, the fact is that in a few years some of those involved in the paper will be very much richer than the others. Seriously rich, by Polish standards. I’m told people already have plans to buy new apartments. “I worry about the day when department heads start arriving in their new BMWs,” one younger journalist told me. What will happen then to the casual, informal, still outwardly egalitarian atmosphere of the paper? And, in this capitalist multimedia giant, what place is there for the trade-union movement whose organ “The Electoral Paper” originally was? Not much, it would appear.

  I ask Helena if there is a Solidarity branch in the paper. No, there isn’t. And she is unapologetic: “I’m not going to pretend to you that it’s in my interest, as an employer, to have a Solidarity branch here.” But she says the paper is an exemplary employer, giving generous work conditions and benefits. The story is complicated by the fact that Solidarity has now become a movement of the political right. It led a coalition of right-wing parties called Solidarity Electoral Action that won the 1997 election, promising, among other things, more state help for workers. Helena, by contrast, is a vehement supporter of the free-market liberalism of the Freedom Union, itself born of the Solidarity movement of the 1980s.

  When I first sent her a note about this essay, I recalled how years ago I had described her as “the Rosa Luxemburg of Solidarity”—an allusion to the early-twentieth-century left-wing Polish-Jewish-German revolutionary. She wrote back, “I am Thatcher now, not RL any more.” Later, as we talked in Helena’s apartment, Adam Michnik teasingly remarked that what she likes about Margaret Thatcher is the “strong woman.” She retorted that what she really admires is the way the “Iron Lady” revived Britain’s moribund economy by tough, neoliberal economic policies. Just as she admires the way the Polish economy was transformed after 1989 by the neoliberal “shock therapy” of Leszek Balcerowicz, now leader of the Freedom Union. Nonetheless, she insists the paper is still true to the broader ethos of the original Solidarity, with its goals of democracy, civil liberties, and human rights.

  Meanwhile, one person who won’t have the awful problem of deciding what to do with all the money is Adam Michnik. He has flatly declined to take any shares at all. In effect, he has just turned down a million dollars. He told me that his intellectual independence and editorial judgment might be jeopardized if he was always thinking, “What might this do to the value of the shares?”

  So no one can now credibly accuse Adam of heading the paper for personal gain—which doesn’t mean they won’t still try to. As people realize just how rich and powerful Agora has become, the Jewish theme may reemerge in the right-wing press—since Adam, Helena, and Wanda are all of Jewish origin—with implicit, if not explicit, use of some classic stereotypes. Helena thinks this subject of Polish-Jewish tensions is often greatly overplayed in the West. But she is the first to accept that the relationship is still far from normal.

  The continuing tensions are illustrated by one small regular feature in the paper. In a supplement called “Supermarket,” they publish a long list of helplines: AIDS, drugs, suicide, and so on. At the end of the alphabetical list appears “Żydowski” (“Jewish”)—“telephone of the Jewish Forum for people who have problems with Jewish origins.” Ring 652-2144 on a Thursday evening.

  Normal this isn’t. But the new Poland for which the paper stands is precisely one in which people can be Jewish Poles or Catholic Poles or agnostic Poles or Protestant Poles or Ukrainian Poles; white, black, or brown Poles. Here is the great battle that runs through the Polish—and the European—twentieth century: the battle b
etween a narrowly ethnic nationalism and a broader civic patriotism. Even if Gazeta Wyborcza has not always managed to practice the tolerance that it preaches toward those who live or think differently, at least it has always preached it.

  I FIND MYSELF wondering where the paper, and Poland, will be in another ten years. Both have traveled such a vast distance toward a Western-style “normality” over the last decade and traveled it so exuberantly and so well. Yet still, at every turn, you find some Polish peculiarity. Will these peculiarities, too, gradually disappear? Will the editorial mix become more like that of any other Western paper, with more entertainment and fewer ideas? Perhaps in the new editorial building they are currently planning, to cost an estimated twenty-five million dollars, there will be large offices and desks, and men in suits and ties barking orders from the end of long conference tables. But perhaps this new Poland will also be a place where, at long last, people can be Jewish Poles as they can be Jewish Americans.

  Must the gains and losses always balance out, like entries in an accountant’s ledger? More prosperity, less equality. More freedom, less intensity. More tolerance, less solidarity.

  I would like to think that some positive singularities will remain. But if I had to lay a wager, I would bet that they will go. The pressures of a Western consumerist, entertainment model of “normality” may prove more difficult to resist than those of the Soviet-type communist “normalization” that Solidarity so roundly and unexpectedly defeated. Perhaps this is the last irony of freedom’s battle: The compulsory could be defied, but the voluntary may be irresistible.