Reinventing Politics

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  Factors outside the Polish crisis, in particular pressure from abroad, especially from the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic, added drama. In the autumn of 1980 Solidarity had already become a powerful social movement, incorporating into its ranks not only workers but also intellectuals, students, and peasants. The conflict between the party bureaucracy and the popular challenge represented by the independent union could not be postponed. Without directly interfering in the political struggle, the Catholic Church, with its immense prestige and influence, supported the union’s social demands. At the same time the Catholic hierarchy tried to moderate the most hotheaded Solidarity activists and sought to find a bridge between the government and the opposition. Actually, for the whole year of 1981 Polish political life was dominated by those three major actors: the communist party, the Catholic Church, and the ever expanding Solidarity movement. In a matter of months Solidarity had acquired an offensive nature: Its agenda had exceeded the self-limiting social issues and aimed at a renegotiation of the constitutional basis of the Polish state. At the same time, while the Soviets were lambasting Solidarity for its alleged conspiratorial goals, Western media focused on the movement’s innovative strategy, including its espousal of nonviolent means of political change. The special interest shown by Western media in Solidarity’s struggle for social and political emancipation provided the movement with much-needed moral support during the exacerbation of its polemic with the orthodox communists in Poland and abroad. Confrontation between the government and Solidarity seemed inevitable when, in October 1981, General Jaruzelski, who had been appointed Prime Minister in February of that year, also became the communist party’s First Secretary, a unique situation in the Soviet bloc that foreshadowed a military coup in Poland.

  Frightened by the increasingly bold demands spelled out by the Solidarity movement and perhaps genuinely seeking to avoid direct Soviet intervention, the army proclaimed martial law on December 13, 1981. Solidarity was then banned, and its leading activists were jailed. But even military action could not save the system. While the military regime did attempt to establish its patriotic credentials and to disband the popular base of Solidarity altogether, when the Soviet Union itself undertook a new de-Stalinization effort after 1985 under Mikhail Gorbachev, the rationale for Solidarity’s interdiction appeared increasingly flawed. The threat of Soviet aggression was minimal; as Gorbachev’s policies evolved, it became nonexistent. Recognizing the changes in the Soviet Union and prompted by the failure of his economic and social plans, Jaruzelski granted amnesty to political prisoners, lifted martial law, and tried to embark on a reformist course. He fully endorsed Gorbachev’s perestroika and became a close supporter of the Soviet leader in the Warsaw Pact, where Gorbachev faced an embittered coalition of the antireformist Romanian, East German, Bulgarian, and Czechoslovak leaders. All Jaruzelski’s conciliatory efforts were not enough to persuade the Polish society of his political credibility.

  The Polish government’s refusal to relegalize Solidarity and the smearing of prominent civic activists convinced the Poles that the Jaruzelski regime was not really intent upon renouncing its shameful legacy of repression. The outbreak of a new crisis was thus unavoidable, particularly in light of the nation’s persistent economic problems. The chasm between the official power and the ever growing civil society continued to widen. Before the 1989 breakup of the Polish equilibrium, that chasm was explained by J. F. Brown, a veteran observer of the East European scene:

  Indeed, the picture Poland now presented was one of two societies—the “official” and the “alternative.” The “official” consisted of the regime establishment and the large number of people who, willingly or unwillingly, cooperated with the regime to some degree. The “alternative” society, in which youth played a disproportionately large role, had its own media, literature, and cultural and educational activities. It avoided contact with the “official” society as far as was ever possible. In a sense two societies had always existed in communist Eastern Europe. But never had the chasm between the two been as wide as it was now in Poland, and never had the “alternative” society been so well-organized and so self-sufficient.5

  The imminence of a new crisis was conditioned by the very artificiality of the existing societal system. Despite the uninterrupted efforts of successive communist elites to implant Soviet-style regimes in Eastern Europe, and to make them look like home-grown products, those regimes never gained true popular approval. In Poland, more than in any other communist country, the loss of legitimacy of the communist leadership was conspicuous. In 1956 it still had been possible for certain groups within the party to believe that the solution could come from within the communist elite, from some “enlightened” wing of the apparatus, but after the crushing of the Prague Spring and the 1968 anti-intellectual repression in Poland such illusions were simply untenable. Since its beginnings in Eastern Europe, communism had been in a permanent crisis—a crisis of authority and legitimacy, a crisis of morality, and, of course, a crisis of economic effectiveness. But the distinction must be made between latent and manifest crises. Only when the ruling group loses its self-confidence and alternative political actors emerge do latent crises turn into revolutionary situations. According to classic Leninist formulation, in order for a revolution to occur it is necessary for the rulers to cease being able to rule in the old ways and for the ruled to cease accepting the old methods of domination. The spurious, unconvincing political symbolism of the old regime is abandoned, all political taboos are abolished, and the barrier against political experimentation is suddenly removed. The whole principle of political reality is turned upside down in such conditions, and those who had long been pilloried as “public enemies” emerge as the embodiment of the national hope for “salvation.” The transformation usually includes a modification of the matrix of power and permits the rise of new social and political groups into political prominence.

  Remodeling the public sphere through the restoration of civic dignity becomes the highest priority. Because Stalinist pedagogy annihilated society’s civic dimension and forcibly infantilized individuals, for such changes to take place society must reach a degree of self-awareness. The mental habits instilled by Stalinism included a fear of human beings engaged in political activities that might be labeled subversive, and for a totalitarian state any form of criticism, any form of individual self-assertion means an attack on the state’s pretense to omniscience and omnipotence. Jacek Kuron, the Polish civic activist, has pointed out that once a mass social movement has emerged in a communist country, its consequences are more powerful than the attempt of the regime to neutralize it. Such a development cannot take place without a maturing of the opposition and a weakening of the Leninist system of control and manipulation:

  It goes back to 1956. We had not yet abandoned Communism but we were already of the opinion that social movements should be independent of the Party and the government. 1968 and 1970 were crucial times for the relationship between the intellectuals and the workers. In 1968 the intellectuals realized that they must ally themselves with the workers. After 1970 the workers reached a similar conclusion about the need for an alliance with the intellectuals. KOR (the Workers’ Defense Committee) was born from this experience, and its attempts to foster the self-organization of social movements eventually bore splendid fruits in 1980.6

  Kuron, one of the KOR founders and a strategist of the Polish opposition after martial law, added:

  True, Solidarity has been crushed and driven underground, but this cannot change the fact that the foundations of the totalitarian system had been broken. We have created and sustained freedom of expression so that the authorities had to open up the official media. Because of the pressure of the Solidarity underground, even all those dummy social movements which they created now cease to be dummies. There is only one road: from totalitarianism to democracy, and we have covered a great length of it.7

  Solidarity’s survival in Poland under martial law co
nditions and its ability to create a counterculture, including publishing houses, film-making, myriad journals and newspapers, flying universities, and other forms of autonomous social activism, demonstrates how a system can lose its traditional repressive potential. In Poland’s case, it was a country ruled by an ailing dictatorship, based primarily on conformity, social inertia, and manipulation of the specter of a potential Soviet intervention. That was not the old-fashioned, brutal despotism that made even the thought of opposition sound quixotic. Even in the harshest conditions imposed by the military regime, Poles enjoyed more elbow room for autonomous activities than Romanians ever had under Ceausescu’s personalistic dictatorship. The difference between the two regimes came down to the impact of the Polish social movements on the body politic: Even if temporarily defeated, Solidarity had created a sense of political community and mutual trust that could not exist in the atomized space of a traditional totalitarian polity. Actually, it was during the martial law period that a new generation of oppositional fighters came of age and ensured the continuation of the struggle even though the historical leaders were in jail. The underground Solidarity newspaper Tygodnik Mazowsze came out uninterruptedly with a press run of about 50,000. Unofficial committees were formed to collect money for the families of imprisoned activists and other victims of repression. On the one hand, the state appeared to be in full control. On the other, society’s independent life continued and even thrived. “If martial law was a setback for the independent society, it was a disaster for the totalitarian state.”8 Thus did Adam Michnik, after his release from prison, explain this paradox of the ruling power’s failure to arouse the minimal popular support necessary for it to govern.

  For Solidarity to emerge in August 1980 and acquire prominent status in national affairs in a short period, certain conditions had to exist in Poland. Among the the most important was the presence of a politically active nucleus, primarily composed of human and civil rights activists who had long established their bona fides in the eyes of the radicalized workers. That was indeed the great achievement of of the KOR. Its main area of activity was social rather than political. The committee monitored the civil rights abuses and indicated the names of those involved in such actions. The ethos of the KOR, as Jan Josef Lipski called the normative code of this embryo of the Polish civil society, was based on categorical rejection of the official lie:

  One important ethical principle adopted by KOR was that KOR did not lie. This principle also had a pragmatic basis and justification, to a greater extent even than the principle of renouncing violence and hatred: in a struggle with authorities who had especially compromised themselves when it came to telling the truth, it was better to renounce falsehood completely and gain confidence in this manner than to lay oneself open to the possibility that every departure from the truth could be blown up by the mass media.9

  When it was formed in 1976, KOR numbered only fifty-nine members. One year later the group changed its name to the Social Self-Defense Committee and embarked on underground publishing. Jacek Kuron and other veterans of opposition struggles in Poland knew that without organization the civil society can easily be drawn into violent clashes and smashed by the sophisticated police forces of the regime. In 1970, when strikers in Gdansk tried to burn down the communist party local headquarters, Kuron told them: “Don’t burn down committees; found your own.”10

  Another element that added to the uniqueness of the Polish situation was the presence of the Catholic Church, an institution that had succeeded in resisting the Stalinist attempts at regimentation and had remained, as Leszek Kolakowski rightly pointed out, “the only independent source of moral authority in a sick society.”11 Gradually, by the end of the 1970s, as the regime showed its blatant ineptitude and failed to undertake sweeping reforms, a coalition of opposition forces began taking shape in Poland. This time, thanks to the relentless activities of the KOR as well as of those Catholic intellectual groups Michnik once described as “neopositivists,” it was possible to create a symbiotic relationship among the critical intelligentsia, the Church, and the workers. It took the extraordinary efforts of the civic activists grouped in KOR and the development of a nationwide communication network to make possible the successful eruption of 1980. The workers in Poland, as it has been so often argued, revolted not only against economic hardships but also against the whole pyramid of injustice created in the name of their own alleged “dictatorship.” Perhaps more than the intellectuals, who rationalized the moral abdications of the regime, the workers realized the colossal gap between the government’s claim to embody the interests of the proletariat and its true oligarchic-bureaucratic nature. As Kolakowski noted:

  One could see from the very beginning of the 1980 summer strikes that the workers were perfectly aware of the fact that the fight for cultural liberties was an essential part of their cause, and that this cause would be lost if they did not list among their grievances a number of specific political demands: freedom of speech and print, an end to the party’s monopoly of the mass media, abrogation of various restrictions imposed on the Church, and release of the political prisoners. It was obvious from the outset that the workers’ revolt was not only against poverty and wretched work conditions; it was essentially a revolt against the rule of lies.12

  What strategic framework ensured the success of Solidarity’s revolt? How did the political and intellectual approach adopted by Polish civic activists diminish the impact of the government crackdown? One can understand these fundamental issues through Michnik’s pathbreaking political essays, in which he articulates the values and goals of the Polish civil society. In his essay “A New Evolutionism,” written in 1976, Michnik analyzed the political traditions of the antitotalitarian struggle in Poland. According to him, all attempts to change the system that followed the denunciation of Stalinism in 1956 partook of the same illusion: that the regime could be changed from within. The revisionists were convinced that the rise of a liberal group to the party’s leadership would make possible the humanization of socialism. The “neopositivists,” in turn, who were not prisoners of the “intraparty perspective,” believed in the possibility of influencing the government through what can be termed “critical cooperation.” The revisionists challenged the party’s subservience to the Kremlin and found the source of their opposition in the original Marxist humanism. For them Soviet-style socialism was an aberration and even a betrayal of the genuine promises of historical materialism. The neopositivists, most of whom were Catholic intellectuals, distrusted any version of Marxism but considered the friendly relationship with Soviet Russia a pillar for the Polish state’s survival. In Michnik’s apt metaphor, “If one considers the state organization of the Soviet Union as the Church and the Marxist ideological doctrine as the Bible, then revisionism was faithful to the Bible while developing its own interpretations, whereas neopositivism adhered to the Church but with the hope that the Church would sooner or later disappear.”13

  The bankruptcy of revisionism, especially in the 1960s, could not and should not conceal its importance as a learning experience needed in the formation of a critical intelligentsia in Poland. In countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, the defeat of revisionism meant the end of the illusions about the reformability of the existing system. With all its tragic moments, this disenchantment was also a needed awakening. In countries where a revisionist experience was absent or severely restricted—for instance, Bulgaria and Romania—the dissolution of the power structure and the rise of alternative intellectual currents was much more difficult than in Poland or Hungary, where the revisionist humanist eschatologies inspired strong criticism of the ruling elites and contributed to the education of young activists who would later completely abandon the Marxist paradigm. At a certain historical juncture, it appears essential to challenge the system in terms of its own ambitions and promises, to show the contrast between the official ideology and the reality of socialism. With all its naïveté and inconsistencies, revisionism
irrigated the East European political culture and contributed to the formation of political and intellectual counter-elites. For instance, knowledge of the ideological battles surrounding the attempt to restore the humanist dimension of Marxism furthers an understanding of works by Milan Kundera or Kazimierz Brandys. That is not to say that those writers simply echoed the political polemics, but ultimate values were involved in the struggle between the ideological reactionaries and the exponents of revisionism. Among other things, revisionism rehabilitated the concept of man, denied by the party dogmas. More than that, revisionism showed it was possible and even necessary to engage in criticism of the status quo, that the system was not impregnable, and the ruling elite was less unified and cohesive than it appeared to an external observer.