CHAPTER 11
Columbuses, go to Poland?
-- Lech Walesa (1)
I accepted Lech Walesa's open invitation to visit Poland and found that Adam Michnik's story about the revolt of the central heating was absolutely right. After fifty years of totalitarian rule imposed upon it with the complicity of the West, Poland is a shambles.
Thirsting after fifty years of neglect for paint, plaster and rebricking, the buildings are literally crumbling before one's eyes. Streets, footpaths, hospitals, schools, blocks of flats and other public amenities are all decrepit, physically hurtful to the eyes and offensive to the spirit.
The economy was pillaged by the Soviet Union and burdened with debt to keep prices down as a substitute for the generation of internal capital and wealth which were viewed by the regime as political threats to its power. That this was done deliberately, as Soviet policy, has been confirmed by the publication of a secret KGB document, which listed 45 means to be employed by the Polish Communist Party in conjunction with the Soviet-controlled Ministry of the Interior and the KGB to achieve the complete destruction of all Polish institutions and the nation's complete subordination to (and if necessary its incorporation into) the USSR. (2) Just as the Nazis chose Poland as their killing field, the Soviet totalitarians chose it as the demonstration model, the exemplar, of what happens to a nation that vigorously resisted the imposition of Soviet power. As Stalin so succinctly put it: "To turn Poles into socialists is an impossible task. It is like putting saddles on cows." Thus Poland had to be destroyed. The strength of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising had convinced Stalin that there was no other alternative. And so Poland for a second time became totalitarianism's playground.
THE RADIATORS REVOLT I have a theory ... which represents my own contribution to Marxist-Leninist thought. And I've called it the radiator revolution theory. Eighteen months ago a friend was getting married. Warsaw's heating system wasn't working, and I'd been sitting at home, wearing all my coats, freezing. The wedding party was attended by the ex-wife of a top state official, who lives in Aleja Roza. This is the smartest address for members of the "red bourgeoisie". But much to my surprise, she said that her own house was also freezing. And even her ex-husband was sitting at home shivering, in a fur cap given to him by former Soviet Premier [Alexei] Kosygin. This set me thinking. The radiators were refusing to obey the communist authorities. When people revolt, I thought to myself, Jaruzelski sends in the militia and army. But what happens when the radiators revolt? Jaruzelski calls a Central Committee meeting. And a resolution asserts that the radiators must produce heat. But the radiators refuse to accept the "leading role" of the party, and it's still cold. So he calls the interior minister, General Kiszczak: "General, the radiator strike must be broken by force!" The ZOMO riot police move in, beating the radiators with their truncheons. But the radiators still refuse to produce heat. So troops and tanks are sent in too. But the radiators still refuse to be intimidated. And so it ends. Unable to cope with the radiators, the communists announce a program of perestroika. It's a joke, of course. But this is precisely what has happened. Everything ... is in revolt: the telephones are not ringing; the trains are not running on time; the houses are falling down; the bridges are collapsing. And in this situation, what can the government and security apparatus do?" Adam Michnik (interview with John Luxmoore, |
Poland was transformed into an economic wasteland: the eighteenth century with electricity, hot-water pipes and telephones, and even they -- the only easily visible signs of modernity -- are none too reliable. Things that broke stayed broken. The only exceptions to this general rule of decay (which unquestionably represents the fulfilment of the communisl promise of equality for all) are the spick-and-span, white edifices which housed the Polish United Workers' Party (the communist party) and the Ministry of Interior (which controlled the secret police).
From 1945 until 1989, Poland was ruled by satraps of the Soviet Union who were granted a licence to exploit the land and its people to their hearts' content in return for keeping control. How they did it was their business and certainly not the people's. Thus between them, the Party and the secret police -- in local parlance "the Mafia" -- controlled just about everything and everybody. They were tax-collectors and enforcers of the Soviet "Khanate", ruling concentric circles of powerful fiefdoms.
By the nature of the system, the worst types came to the top -- and once there, had to be "canonised". Perhaps nothing better symbolises this process -- and now the dismantling of totalitarian power -- than the huge statue of Felix Dzierzynski in central Warsaw, and its demolition in January 1990. Hailing from the Polish gentry, "Iron Felix" was the first head of the Cheka, the original Soviet secret police and the ancestor of the KGB, set up by Lenin only weeks after the October revolution to destroy all opposition to the Bolshevik takeover. Dzierzynski's methods were adopted and developed by Stalin, Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria, Ceaucescu, and Pol Pot (even Hitler learnt a thing or two from Soviet terror). With Lenin he had a symbiotic relationship, the one indispensable to the other. Together, they built up and operated the Bolshevik terror machine that was indispensable in consolidating Communist Party control and in holding the USSR together, and was later extended to eastern and central Europe.
Dzierzynski boasted that as one of the "new breed" he had transcended morality and, free from guilt, could commit those acts that his more "squeamish" comrades were incapable of performing (that is, murder and torture on a massive scale). He was, he said, the successful Raskolnikov (3) -- and a true philanthropist who built orphanages for the children of the "enemies of the people" who had suffered "revolutionary annihilation" on his orders. After personally executing an "enemy of the people", Dzierzynski boasted to an eyewitness he had personally requested to witness his philanthropy, "My only pleasure is in that now. I know how to shoot so that everyone dies before my eyes in torture. I know the most painful places to hit, and I can kill whom I please without giving any account or having any questions asked. ... Revenge is the delight of the gods, and here I am a god. ..."
Such was his stature that on his death in 1926 his body was, in the words of an unofficial biographer, "laid in the throne-room of the Czars, as though he himself had been a Czar". He was held up -- both figuratively and literally in statues and street names -- as a paragon to be emulated by all "progressive" people. Lenin described him as "a true knight of the proletariat", an appraisal that still enjoys official endorsement in Moscow, for repudiation of Dzierzynski would amount to repudiation of Lenin. In Poland, as late as February 1990, the "Ethical and Moral Guidelines for Workers in the Security Service and People's Militia of the Polish People's Republic" -- still officially in use owing to the communist General Kiszczak's retention of the interior ministry -- described him as "a paragon of the ardent communist fighting for socialist ideals".
That a self-confessed, guilt-free mass murderer and sadist who refined and passed on to his successors "scientific", conveyor-belt methods of torture and murder -- the victims of which can be counted by the million -- should be ranked in the communist pantheon speaks volumes about the myths and realities of communism. Under such a rubric of rule and such a measure of "virtue", ordinary moral and ethical values and people who lived by them became the greatest threats to the "new men" of the "new order". The individual was reduced to "homo patheticus", a parody of the officially celebrated "homo sovieticus" of universal communist mythology.
When the Soviet "Khanate" finally withdrew its mandate, the regime, like the buildings and the economy, crumbled. Deprived of Soviet support, the Party split into three factions, although it is still sniping from the sidelines and fighting rearguard political battles at the local level. Hence the nationwide local government elections in May 1990 were a vital exercise in prising the Mafia from their last refuges in local administrations. True to Pavlovian form, when the last First Party Secretary of the Polish United Workers' (i.e. Communist) Party, Rakowski, announced at its last congress in February 1990 that the majority of delegates had voted to dissolve "the Party" there was a a standing ovation.
Nonetheless, the Party's legacy of destruction is mammoth and so is the task of reconstruction bequeathed to its hapless successors. There is nothing positive -- absolutely nothing -- that can be said about the achievements of communism in Poland, or elsewhere. "Respublica" was totally suppressed, everything being reduced to "res privata"! What is required is reconstruction both of the economy and of civil society, the two being mutually reinforcing. The tragedy of Poland is described by Adam Zamoyski: (4)
The Poles are the nation who really lost the Second World War. They fought continuously from the first day to the bitter end and beyond. They put more effort into the struggle than any other society; they lost over half a million fighting men and women, and six million civilians; they were left with one million war orphans and over half a million invalids. According to the Bureau of War Reparations, the country had lost 38 per cent of its national assets, compared to the 1.5 per cent and 0.8 per cent lost by France and Britain respectively. They lost vast tracts of their country and their two great cultural centres of Wilno and Lvov. They also saw the greater part of their heritage destroyed. Although they were faithful members of the victorious alliance, they were treated as a vanquished enemy: they were robbed of much of their territory and of their freedom.
Even worse than the physical wrongs done to them were the humiliations to which they were subjected. Men and women who had risked their lives for six years plotting and fighting against the German order in unspeakable conditions were dragged into jail by their Soviet masters, tortured and accused of collaborating with the Nazis. In the West, their efforts and sacrifices were belittled and ignored. Their continuing martyrdom aroused no sympathy, and their appeals only irritation. They had not only been consigned to Hell; they were supposed to enjoy it.
In Poland, one would have had to be born no later than about 1920 to have any real practical experience of an independent civic culture and a market economy. Under totalitarianism, doing anything, from posting a letter to buying a loaf of bread, was made difficult as a matter of policy. Even today, shopping is an extremely arduous task in the mainly single-purpose state shops (which still constitute the vast majority of retail outlets). Individual purchases are written out laboriously by hand on archaic stock-lists, a somewhat useless exercise since officials of the old regime pilfered at will and cooked the books to suit themselves. Modern banking and accounting methods remain practically unused. Consequently, the psychic and physical energies of the people were sapped and enervated, being channelled by the regime into the necessities and exigencies of daily subsistence.
The Poles are now coming up for air after a half century of totalitarian rule that all but suffocated everybody and everything. There was no grandeur to the tyranny. It was totally petty. Ideology cannot explain it. Psychopathology can.
Throughout the country, town squares are disfigured by Stalinesque monuments to Soviet overlordship and the "liberators" of the Red Army. The monuments -- which do not mention the way the liberators waited outside Warsaw while the Nazis put down the Warsaw Uprising at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Polish lives -- are now being outrivalled by newly constructed monuments to the Warsaw Uprising (which were banned under the communists as an insult to the Soviet Union).
So it is fitting that in Warsaw the free market which operates from the boots of cars and the backs of trucks hustles and bustles in the shadow of the infamous "Palace of Culture", Stalin's unwelcome gift to the Polish people and the symbol of Soviet imperialism and the destruction of ethical trade and cultural freedom. Such free markets are everywhere in Poland, and are helping to lower prices in a country where the average daily wage was in February 1990 worth approximately $A1.25 at the market exchange rate and a school teacher of seven years' experience earned little more than $A25 a month. Compare this with official prices such as approximately $A3 a kilo for a reasonably good cut of meat and you get some idea of Polish penury.
Poland is now a free country. Intellectual and cultural discussion and debate is in fact freer than in Australia, where intellectual recidivists control much of the "knowledge industry"; and the quality of the newly-liberated Polish press and electronic media puts the standards of our privately and publicly owned media to shame.
However, while man cannot live by bread alone, he cannot live satisfactorily without sufficient quantities of it. Once a great trading nation, the food-bowl to much of Europe and a leading manufacturer and exporter of bricks, Poland is stone, motherless broke. There is little capital in Poland. What existed had been ripped off by the "mafia" as they attempted to maintain their ascendancy, though now as capitalists rather than officials, by buying up the state enterprises that they had formerly controlled. The new government was forced to pass legislation to prevent this. Because the mafia periodically froze bank accounts and interest payments, people stopped banking and spent the precious little they had left after meeting the demands of necessity on small treasures that brought some sparkle into their miserable prison-cell-like flats heaped together in ugly piles all over the country.
With over ninety per cent of all industry, manufacturing and public services and utilities state-owned-and-run, the work of privatisation in a capital-starved nation is enormous but essential to Poland's future.
Teachers are heartbroken. Textbooks are poor quality and contain few illustrations, and are in any case hard to afford. Photocopiers, stringently restricted by the old regime, are still rare. Modern teaching aids are almost nonexistent.
Knowledge and learning were despised by the mafia as threats to both their egos and their power. They did everything possible, including splitting up the universities, to destroy genuine learning and inquiry, and to replace them with a know-nothing, poverty-stricken philosophy of power.
Yet, thanks to a Church thoroughly committed to the people and to democratic values, learning as well as morality were preserved. Thus the Polish Church was both materially and spiritually the saviour of the Polish people, a fact to which even Polish atheists have paid homage.
The deprivation was all too real at the micro level. Hospitals, schools, kindergartens, swimming pools, community centres and the like, proudly proclaimed by local mafias as first priorities decades ago remain either promises or little more than holes in the ground. The mafia's consistent failure to deliver such promises made them the laughing stock of the people but the mirth was not appreciated or reciprocated by the regime, which, instead, treated it as an act of sabotage.
Precious manpower and capital were squandered on recording the lives of those who did not offer them sufficient respect. In the weeks before the self-liquidation of the Party, the countryside was alight with small fires adding to the chronic pollution. Party and Interior Ministry officials were burning embarrassing or incriminating files. Fortunately for both justice and posterity, many of these records were retrieved by alert citizens, particularly children who acted as fire-spotters.
Despite everything, the Polish people defeated the odds by retaining their dignity and magnificently so. Throughout history the myth perpetuated by Poland's partitioners and their supporters is that the Poles are a wild, passionate and irrational people in need of a firm hand to keep them in check. That myth was perpetuated in the West to justify the Potsdam and Yalta betrayals of Poland. The preposterousness of the myth matched the preposterousness of the deed.
There is much that one could register about the civility and reasonableness of the Polish people, but I fear that it would be interpreted in our country as sentimentality and "Catholic prejudice". I have already been informed by one radio interviewer that this is the case. The civility and the rationality of the Poles is therefore perhaps best illustrated through that brilliant stroke of diplomatic and political genius -- supported by virtually the whole nation -- which made the liberation of not just Poland but also of the rest of Eastern Europe -- and even the USSR itself -- possible. However, a little background is first necessary.
In contemporary Poland Joseph Pilsudski and Ronald Reagan are honoured as national liberators. Both, albeit in different ways, defeated Soviet power through the use of arms: Pilsudski in war; Reagan in peace. Reagan was determined to undo the evil that Roosevelt had helped do at Yalta and Potsdam. Knowing that the Soviet economy was a busted flush he forced the Soviets to adopt a more rational position, enabling the rise to power of Gorbachev. Thus Reagan is the godfather to Gorbachev, glasnost and perestroika.
Within this context, the Poles seized the opportunity to break out of their Soviet-tied straitjacket. According to Solidarity's former chief spokesman and current representative of the Przemysl region in the Polish parliament, Janusz Onyszkiewicz, (5) Solidarity succeeded in convincing Gorbachev that communist rule in central Europe was not in the interests of the Soviet Union. If perestroika was to be successfully pursued, the argument went, the USSR needed stability on its borders. But ever since seizing power, the communist regimes had created instability by continually defying the wishes of their peoples. The solution was to permit the people's choice to rule. In Poland this meant Solidarity, a pluralist movement which had the broad support of almost the whole nation.
According to Onyszkiewicz, Gorbachev accepted the argument but wanted to know how Soviet interests in the region could be guaranteed (at that time, with regard to Poland this meant guaranteed lines of support to Soviet troops in East Germany). This led to the "Polish compromise", or "Polish way", by which for an interim period power would be shared between Solidarity and the local communists (in particular, Jaruzelski as President and General Kiszczak at the Interior Ministry). These arrangements will come up for review with a nation-wide free election about to be held for the office of President in the wake of Jaruzelski's recent resignation from the post. Next year, wholly democratic elections for the national parliament will be held following the proclamation of the new constitution on the 200th anniversary of Poland's first democratic constitution.
The Poles honoured their contract. Following this dramatic and historic development other Soviet-dominated nations in the area demanded from their respective leaderships adoption of the "Polish way". Local communist bosses immediately trotted off to Moscow to seek assurances of continued Soviet endorsement. Moscow refused to suport the old guard. On their return home, every one of them was soon thrown out of power. Not even Moscow's carefully-orchestrated plans to replace them with Gorbachev-style reformists succeeded in saving communism from the people, proving what those who understood the nature of communist rule in Europe had said all along: namely, that but for Soviet power there would have been no communist governments in the region.
Thus it was Polish rationality that triggered off the spell-binding events of 1989 which has brought a virtual end to communist rule in the outer rim of the Soviet empire and is now having profound effects within the inner empire.
Moreover, with regard to past violations of their human rights by their former rulers, the Poles are seeking justice and not revenge -- again the hallmark of a civilised people. Instead of putting the worst of the old guard in the dock, they initially put them on television, giving them the opportunity to justify themselves publicly before some of those whom they violated. Though there were mounting popular calls for trials the government for the time being resisted them, for the rational reason of not encouraging reactionary forces in the USSR. It is only now, in a calmer atmosphere and after painstaking investigations that criminal charges are being laid against those such as the unpunished killers of the heroic and saintly Father Jerzy Popieluszko, Solidarity's chaplain until his murder in October 1984.
In a peculiar twist of fate, the Poles have turned the tables against those who for so long oppressed them by linking their fate to the continuation of the Polish way to liberation and its exportation to eastern and central Europe, the Balkans and the USSR itself.
Though the world does not owe Poland a living the Poles owed their oppression at least in part to Western complicity. Though the Poles have forgiven us, we should not forget that. Therefore, our sympathy and aid should be directed predominantly Poland's (and the rest of central Europe's) democratic way and not, as it presently is, predominantly in favour of Mr Gorbachev's reformist but nonetheless autocratic way. In brief, what Mr Gorbachev (and the world) needs is further encouragement along the path of real, not "guided", democracy.
ENDNOTES
1. Lech Walesa, address to Radio Liberty/Radio Europe, Washington DC, 15 November 1989:
2. San, December 1989
3. The character in Dostoievsky's Crime and Punishment who commits a gratuitous murder in an (unsuccessful) attempt to prove himself free from conscience.
4. The Polish Way, Londonm, 1987, 371.
5. Recorded interview with the writer, Warsaw, February 1990.
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