The shift in the Soviet approach to changes in the political and economic system and the encouragement of reforms in the Warsaw Pact countries contributed to the revival of long-suppressed revisionist trends within the ruling elites in those countries, as well as to the radicalization of the social movements from below. That was particularly evident in Poland and Hungary, the two countries that had advanced the farthest in past experimentation with liberal policies. Gorbachev’s initial strategy, between 1986 and 1988, was to encourage the liberal factions within the ruling parties to take over and initiate rapid economic reforms, open up the political system, and allow more social activism, including the formation of independent associations and groups. The first testing ground for the new strategy, radically different from Brezhnev’s stubborn rejection of any liberalization in the Soviet bloc, was Poland.
SOLIDARITY REDUX AND THE COLLAPSE OF POLISH COMMUNISM
The nonviolent exit from an authoritarian regime based on the ideological dictatorship of the communist party was possible in Poland because there were groups within both the power elite and the opposition who understood the need for compromise. The maturing of such an attitude, especially among those who had run the country without any accountability for decades, came with the understanding of the intensity of the social and economic crisis and the realization that without bringing society into the governing process the situation could only worsen. Although the Jaruzelski regime had long tried to win national legitimacy, it was identified by large strata of society with the martial law repression. In 1988, as a gesture of opening and good will, Jaruzelski appointed Mieczyslaw Rakowski, an astute politician and journalist, as Prime Minister. In 1989 Jaruzelski stepped down as party leader and ensured that Rakowski, whose Gorbachevism was beyond question, would be his successor. But it was too late for modest reforms in Poland.
Two waves of strikes in April and August 1988 compelled the Jaruzelski regime to recognize that it could not govern in defiance of society. The mounting social unrest could not be suppressed without a new recourse to force. But that was precisely what the Gorbachevites sought to avoid. The military solution had been tried in the early 1980s and had failed lamentably. All the regime’s attempts to co-opt prominent intellectuals into the power structure and to eliminate the risk of a revival of the Solidarity movement had been met with categorical refusals.
Engaging in dialogue with representatives of Solidarity and admitting the need for power sharing in times of dramatic social and economic crisis appeared to be the only alternative to prolonging the chaos. It was true that for many communist hard-liners the very idea of a compromise with those whom they had long seen as mortal enemies looked like capitulation. So strong was the resistance of the dogmatics in the party leadership to the relegalization of the independent union in January 1989, that Jaruzelski and three of his closest advisers threatened to resign if the party failed to accept a dialogue with Solidarity.20 In spite of mutual resentments, rooted in the memories of repression and the underground struggle against the police state, both sides, the government and Solidarity, admitted that only a roundtable discussion could take the country out of the stalemate. The talks began in February 1989 and resulted in a political agreement on April 5. The compromise provided for the relegalization of Solidarity, the farmers’ Rural Solidarity, the Independent Students’ Association, and other components of the Polish civil society. The institutional framework of the government was restructured, with a new state presidency enjoying limited powers; a new, freely elected Senate; and a lower house, the Sejm, that would need a two-thirds majority vote to override a Senate veto of its bills. The communist coalition (the Polish United Workers Party and its allies) was guaranteed, at least during the first elections, 65 percent of the seats in the lower house. The communists continued to hold the key ministries, Defense and Internal Affairs, but the opposition was allowed to publish its own newspapers and would have limited access to government-controlled radio and television.
Compared with the other Eastern-bloc countries, Poland had entered a new era. The once persecuted activists emerged from political hiding and were acclaimed as national figures. With regard to economic reforms and control, the agreement provided for a transition to a market economy without offering a clear indication of the strategies to be pursued. Conflicts between the government and the independent trade unions over wage indexation continued in the following months. Lech Walesa, chairman of the Solidarity union, praised the accords as the beginning of the road to a democratic and free Poland. Walesa insisted that compromise was the only solution to ensure the country’s nonviolent transition to a democratic system: “Our representatives in the Sejm and Senate can create a platform from which we will jump into freedom and independence.”21
In the first round of elections in June 1989, the Poles overwhelmingly supported Solidarity candidates and denied even unopposed communist candidates victory. The elections, the first free ones in the history of the Soviet bloc, sanctioned the historical defeat of the Polish communists and the rise of Solidarity as the country’s decisive political force. The Polish situation was indeed unprecedented in the annals of communism: a parliament in which the anticommunist opposition had 99 of the 100 seats in the upper house and an increasingly active political life that included not only Solidarity and the communists, but also the suddenly revitalized former allies of the communist party who strove to assert their autonomy and ceased to support the communists automatically. Based on those parliamentary arrangements, unthinkable only several months earlier, Solidarity ensured its domination in the legislature. While Solidarity had accepted the continuation of communist control over government, its calculation turned out to be correct: As events unfolded in Eastern Europe during the revolutionary year 1989, the Polish communists continued their political retreat. The whole approach to the compromise was based on the awareness that Polish communism had come to a political and intellectual end—it was basically exhausted, and it could not mobilize any serious social support.
In August 1989 a new threshold was passed in Poland when Jaruzelski, who had been re-elected president with the support of Solidarity, decided to appoint Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a prominent Catholic intellectual and a key Solidarity adviser, as the country’s new Prime Minister. It is known that the decision had been preceded by a phone call from Mikhail Gorbachev to the communist leader Mieczyslaw Rakowski, in which Moscow presumably expressed its readiness (or even willingness) to accept a Solidarity-run government with a communist minority.22 The communists had no other choice but to accept this deal. Otherwise, there would be a return to the previous ungovernable situation, with more social unrest, strikes, and even street violence. For the communists, a coalition government in which Solidarity representatives were responsible for economic management and social affairs could even be turned into an advantage. After all, they were placing the burden of economic recovery and the unpopular decisions associated with drastic reforms on Solidarity, while they retained the levers for controlling society through the ministries of Defense and Internal affairs. So on September 12, Tadeusz Mazowiecki became the first noncommunist Prime Minister in a Warsaw Pact country.
Poland’s revolution had taken place over ten years of heroic battles, romantic dreams, brutal repression, and miraculous resurrection of an extraordinarily imaginative and resilient society. One year earlier, no analyst anticipated the speed or the depth of the changes that were to take place in that country and that brought to power, as a result of painful negotiation, those whom Jaruzelski had jailed as public enemies after the proclamation of martial law. Now the public enemies were ruling the country’s economy and were preparing for the next round of the struggle for the complete conquest of political power. With the benefit of hindsight, and by comparison with the changes that would happen in the next months in the other bloc countries, the Polish compromise seemed too limited, too moderate, and maybe too rational. But at the moment of its achievement, in the early autumn of 1989, it was a r
evolutionary alteration in the logic of power within the communist world. One should remember that Leninism, as a doctrine, rejects power sharing and sees the communist party’s leading role, that is, its monopoly on power, as a sacrosanct dogma. What happened in Poland was the public and unequivocal recognition by the communists that they had lost the struggle with society. Later there would be many voices to reproach the Solidarity negotiators’ acceptance of a communist president and tolerance of communists in crucial government positions. That reproach, however, did not take into account the complexity of the Polish and international situation in the summer of 1989, when the Soviets were only beginning to reconsider their commitment to the existence of the GDR. The Polish communists were still ready to engage in the life-or-death struggle to preserve their positions in the army and police. Writing in May 1989, Timothy Garton Ash noted that in countries like Poland and Hungary the difficulties of peaceful transition arose from the need for the rulers to get accustomed to the sentiment of their political defeat:
Prediction is now, more than ever, impossible. The best and the brightest people on both sides in Poland and Hungary have engaged in a great and perilous adventure. “You know,” one of the most intelligent Polish Party leaders said to one of the most intelligent of the Polish opposition leaders during a coffee break at the Roundtable, “all the textbooks tell us how difficult it is to seize power. But no one has described how difficult it is to relinquish power.”23
The decision to relinquish power cannot be dissociated from the moral and ideological crisis of the communist elites. The Polish communists were forced to recognize the historical failure of the political and social model they had imposed on their society. The unreconstructed Leninists had lost the game, and the reformers desperately tried to rescue whatever could be salvaged of the leftist heritage. In January 1990, when the Polish United Workers Party held its Congress, it decided to rename itself the Party of Social Democracy, under a new leader, Aleksander Kwasniewski. A splinter group of this new party emerged bearing the name the Social Democratic Union, under the leadership of the reform communist, former Politburo member, and Gdansk party leader Tadeusz Fiszbach. To comprehend the collapse of communism in Poland, one should compare the membership of the PUWP in 1986, when it had more than 2 million members, with the combined membership of the two neocommunist formations in March 1990, which did not exceed 67,000.24 The reshaped party admitted its responsibility for the crimes perpetrated during the Stalin years and recognized its role in engineering Poland’s economic disaster. The self-criticism was, however, insufficient to restore the party’s image.
Polish communism can be considered to have ended in incurable moral and political discredit. To those who were still promising experiments with different versions of socialism, the overwhelming majority of the Poles would have responded that socialism for them had amounted to the degradation of the individual, the mistreatment of the environment, the persecution of free thought, and the spiritual impoverishment of society. There was no constituency in Poland even for a reconstructed communist party. Poles wanted not to revitalize socialism, but to get rid of it. The most important cause of the breakdown of communism in Poland was the general realization that after martial law the rulers did not have any weapon left with which to keep the system going. At the moment they started to make concessions and accepted the dialogue with society, even if initially in a self-serving and certainly Machiavellian way, the Polish communists ruined the principal underpinning of their dictatorship: the population’s sense that the system was immutable and that any form of opposition would automatically result in the marginalization and persecution of the dissenters.
The proclamation of martial law in Poland was actually the beginning of the ultimate and complete erosion of communism in Eastern Europe. The moment the communists admitted that they had to use naked violence against 10 million people organized in an independent union, they acknowledged that the real nature of their power had nothing to do with government by the working class. It was a striking exposure of the system as a bureaucratic, antiproletarian dictatorship. Because of the succession crises in the Kremlin and the already disconcerted Soviet reaction to challenges coming from Eastern Europe, there was no hope that external intervention could save the system. Jaruzelski and his associates clung to power in contempt of their own ideological pretenses and thus admitted that the whole ideology was nothing but a rhetorical mirage, a semantic usurpation meant to legitimize the control exerted by a tiny, sectarian minority over the whole of society. The long decade that started with the foundation of Solidarity in August 1980 culminated in the end of the communist monopoly on power in Poland in the summer of 1989. The strategy of the “new evolutionism” had provoked the slow but irresistible erosion of government power and the rise of a counter-power in the shape of the unofficial groups and movements that had mushroomed in the 1980s despite the regime’s repressive measures.
Poland’s failed totalitarianism had become an ailing authoritarian regime whose rulers came to the conclusion that the stalemate could not continue forever. At the same time, the Roundtable strategy required a willingness on the part of both the moderate groups within the opposition and the reformers within the government to accept a deal best described by Adam Michnik, the dissident historian, as “your president, our prime minister.” From that moment on, the transition to post-communism was a possibility, even though key positions in the government were still held by the partisans of martial law. Actually, with the benefit of hindsight, one can observe that the military regime imposed in December 1981 had almost annihilated the communist party as the center of decision-making and had transferred power to a technocratic coterie utterly devoid of ideological commitment. Of course, the party continued to exist and to perform its ritualistic functions, but it had lost the impetus that had made possible its domination over society for so many years. Mihaly Vajda, a Hungarian social philosopher, explained the collapse as the fading away of the myth about the system’s infallibility and omnipotence:
[T]he strength of the system rested on the demonstration of its omnipotence—on demonstrating that any kind of disobedience would be registered and retaliated against, that there was simply no chance of initiating anything from below. As soon as the regime proved unable to observe this principle, when it started to show a degree of responsiveness to society’s demands, its magic power was over. And, against appearances, it was already over in 1981. Martial law in Poland was actually a sort of unadmitted compromise. The “normal” solution would have been a Soviet intervention, or better the intervention of the allied armies of the Warsaw Pact. But since the Russians were no longer able to take the risk of civil war in the middle of Europe, they accepted martial law as a solution, even though it must have been clear to them that the Polish army would not suppress society with the ruthlessness and regardlessness which had always been proof of the system’s strength. So, from the point of view of the system, martial law was a failure and a fatal blow to its identity.25
To make his point even more poignant, Vajda mentioned that it was precisely on December 13, 1981, the day when Martial Law was proclaimed in Poland, that the Hungarian democratic opposition launched its samizdat journal Beszelö. “On that day it became clear that the system was vulnerable, that it was not imperishable. After 13 December 1981 there was no other way out for the regime than to follow a line which at least had something in common with European rationality—thus ceasing to be the same system.”26
The Polish opening in 1988 and 1989 had a substantial impact on the whole region: Hopes were uplifted not only in Hungary, where the political system had begun to relax in previous years, but also in Czechoslovakia, where people started to organize public protests against official repression of dissident activities. The revolutionary meaning of the changes in Poland was not lost on Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu, who tried, in a desperate way, to convince other Warsaw Pact leaders that the formation of a Solidarity-led government had to be halted by al
l means, including military intervention. There is irony in the fact that the man who in August 1968 had protested the crushing of the Prague reform movement was calling in 1989 for immediate suppression of the Polish experiment in democratization. But Ceausescu’s rabid outbursts of neo-Stalinist conservatism could not convince anyone. The movement toward radical reforms forms in Eastern Europe had acquired a dynamic of its own. As long as the Soviets refrained from direct intervention, there was no way to stop it. After having been pronounced dead in the early 1980s, at the end of the decade Solidarity emerged as a truly national movement that took upon itself the building of a pluralist society and launched dramatic reforms in the hope of solving Poland’s economic predicament rapidly.
From the moment the Solidarity-run government was formed, it was clear that the movement could not continue to deny its inherently political nature. It was also clear that it had to structure itself as an organized political party, or, even more likely, several political parties could emerge as a result of the inevitable fragmentation dictated by both ideological and personality-related factors. Solidarity had acted as a united body as long as it confronted a common enemy represented by the communist party-state with its immense repressive apparatus. Now that the state had acknowledged its failure and Solidarity was charged with the country’s social and economic recovery, the long-denied differences among the movement’s various groups and factions came to the surface. The age of undifferentiated brotherhood had to come to an end.
The saga of anticommunist resistance was succeeded by the reconstruction of a heterogeneous and extremely colorful political spectrum. Lech Walesa, who initially kept a low profile, staying away from the mainstream of the new politics, was still the towering figure within Solidarity. Meanwhile, many of his former advisers and other prominent Solidarity activists became involved in parliamentary and governmental activities and soon were perceived as a new political class.
Reinventing Politics Page 28
