Training | 2009.11.16
Solidarity under strain | Adam Michnik
We in Poland began the Berlin Wall\'s collapse. But for all the gains, people remain deeply dissatisfied
I belong to a generation that liked to repeat the words of the 19th-century Russian writer Pyotr Chaadaev . "I didn\'t learn to love my nation blindfolded, gagged and with my head lowered. I believe that a man can only be useful to his country when he can look at it clearly."
This was something we often said to ourselves when our rebellion against the dictatorship in Poland seemed hopeless. We thought we would not live to see it gone, but still we refused the blindfold and the gag. We carried on protesting, as writers and intellectuals; in student actions, workers\' strikes and demonstrations during religious festivals; and by founding the first opposition organisations. They called us troublemakers and bandits. But it turned out we were doing the right thing.
The Workers\' Defence Committee started in 1976 – after a wave of workers\' protests – with just a few hundred people, scattered across Poland. By August 1980, after the great strikes of the Baltic and Silesia , it had become Solidarity , a movement that numbered several million people from every social class, a national confederation pushing for a free, independent and just Poland. It was driven underground – but not destroyed. Solidarity survived further years of dictatorship until, in 1989, it became an open partner in the new administration.
It was in Poland that the Berlin Wall began to crumble. As 1989 dawned, the Polish people, and the Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians, Hungarians, Lithuanians, Estonians and Ukrainians – and Russians themselves – were all praying for the same thing: the collapse of the Soviet Union. This event would help not just us, but our Russian friends as well.
Early in the year negotiations between Poland\'s communist regime and the Solidarity opposition began. Talks culminated in elections – only semi-democratic – on 4 June 1989. But something genuinely historic took place. For the first time, elections in a communist state led to the crushing defeat of the Communists . The opposition\'s victory - supported by the Catholic Church and the authority of John Paul II - was complete.
But it was not this victory that made the world\'s headlines the following day. Instead it was the massacre of students demanding democracy in Tiananmen Square, in Beijing.
Thus on the same day the world saw the two faces of communism, its two possible reactions when threatened. One regime, in Beijing, used the language of tanks and executions; the other, in Poland, chose instead the language of the ballot box, opening up a road to democracy and change that would soon reach the other nations of eastern and central Europe.It was in Poland that the first stones of the Berlin Wall started to crumble. ItPoland had overcome the curse of its own history, a history marked by partitions, which wiped our country off the political map of Europe; of tragic insurrections doomed to failure, and hundreds of thousands of victims of hopeless battles for freedom.
We know that nothing in history ever has just one cause. Poland\'s change was also a result of the changes in Russia; of sensible US politics; of Pope John Paul II and the Catholic church ; of the Afghan people, who opposed the Soviet invasion. And there was also the deep economic crisis in the Soviet Union itself.
But I will never forget that it was the Poles who created the model for compromise between ruler and ruled, for a peaceful dismantling of dictatorship, and for an equally peaceful transition of power into the hands of those who had won in parliamentary elections.
How Poland has changed in two decades. It has become a democratically lawful country with a healthy economy. For Poland, the last two decades have been the best in the last 300 years. And yet so many Poles today are deeply dissatisfied. Why?
The great Russian writer Anton Chekhov wrote of his homeland: "Under the banners of education, art and free expression, a type of toad and crocodile will come to power more frightful than anything that ever came out of Spain\'s Inquisition – a narrow-minded, self-righteous, overbearingly ambitious type, totally lacking in conscience. Charlatans and wolves in sheeps\' clothing will be able to lie and dissemble to their heart\'s content." The Russian genius foresaw what happens to a nation when it acquires freedom after years of slavery. This is what has happened in the new post-communist democracies.
In Poland, it was the workers in the great factories who won change, their strikes forcing the authorities to give way. But those same factories were also the first victims of the ensuing transformation. Modernised to compete in the marketplace, they cut their workforces. Instead of a miracle of freedom, people found themselves staring redundancy in the face.
The revolutions of 1989 had not mentioned mass privatisation or social inequalities; or sudden growth in crime, corruption and mafia activity; or, worst of all, permanent unemployment. This was the reality of the post-communist period offered up to the Poles and their neighbours. Political freedom, a free-market economy, the end of censorship and the opening of borders, had not been enough to effect a balance. The destruction of a despotic regime had led not just to liberal democratic values – it had also marked the start of a wild rush for wealth. A people enslaved for decades, unable to measure the worth of their own work, instead began to seek instant miracles and gratification by applying the exigencies of brute force, cynicism and bribes.
Of course, there has been change. A new generation of politicians has been created. Those who had previously been excluded from legitimate political and economic activity are its leaders today. But at the same time we have had to deal with the growth of corruption on a massive scale, and with unfulfilled promises about social progress. The chasm dividing rich and poor has deepened – the only difference is that many of the richest people today were prominent activists.
In some post-communist countries an aggressive ethnic nationalism is on the rise. In others, religion is being used by those in power as an anti-democratic ideology, an instrument of intolerance and exclusion. Post-communist transformation creates not just winners, but many losers: those who are unemployed, rejected, pushed into poverty. The often brutally greedy new elites are slow to learn democratic habits, respect for the law of the land, pluralism or tolerance.
So our world is now one of open questions. We ask: what is the future for our democratic systems? And we are comforted to know that this same question is being asked throughout democratic Europe. Despite all the mistakes, blunders and scandals, Poland today – 20 years on – is a normal, democratic European country. It\'s the kind of country I wanted my generation to bequeath to our children. Although, to tell the truth, I wish that it was a rather better one.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]darity-poland-berlin-wall-1989
