Full Circle

...He is the sort of person who is drawn to political conflict the way moths are attracted to a flame—and, as Full Circle makes abundantly clear, the conflict over Poland's future is far from over...

...Not wishing to embarrass the old man, Parys took Wawrzyniak aside and explained that NATO was now Poland's friend...

...I wanted to purify a few acres of Poland from the filth, actual and metaphorical, of their rule...

...In fact, he is currently running for parliament...

...Instead of being forced to build their glorious future, I wanted to rescue something of Poland's past...

...When Karol Wojtyla, archbishop of Cracow, became Pope John Paul II in 1978, "the church's victory in my soul became irreversible...

...Those who collaborated with the regime have not been made to answer for their deeds...

...Although restoring Chobielin was a lengthy, cost-ly undertaking, Sikorski viewed it as his last battle against the Communists: Just as previously I had fought them with a telephoto lens, a word processor, and one or two bursts from an assault rile, now I would fight their legacy with bricks, mortar and furniture polish...

...Full Circle: A Homecoming to Free Poland Radek Sikorski Simon and Schuster / 276 pages / $24 REVIEWED BY Joseph Shattan R adek Sikorski is one of those rare individuals with a knack for being wherever the action is...

...Having been "inoculated" by his government service against the temptations of politics, he would have us believe that he is gladly retiring to Chobielin —"a patch where I want to see the trees that I have planted rise tall, where I want my children to roam, where I can take pleasure in growing old...

...As Rulewski eventually confessed to Sikorski, the reason the riot policeman slugged him was that Rulewski called him a "f--ing secret policeman...

...For Sikorski, a long-time Walesa supporter, the president's behavior forced him to face the fact "that my former hero was half Mahatma Gandhi, half village yokel, and you could never be sure which side of his personality would predominate...

...In 1989, after the first semi-free Polish elections since World War II, Sikorski was finally able to return to Poland and realize a long-standing ambition: acquiring, and renovating, a broken-down manor house called Chobielin, located just outside Bydgoszcz...

...They had obviously tailored their message to what the politicians wanted to hear...

...At the very next briefing, a chastened Wawrzyniak warned of menacing Russian deployments along Poland's frontiers...

...The Church always had an upper hand in the struggle for my soul," he writes...

...Where the schoolteachers who tried to drum Communism into our heads used abstruse jargon —long words which they themselves barely understood—the priests used traditional Polish, with words that grabbed the heart rather than the brain...

...If the Americans ever learned of the deal, they reasoned, Poland's prospects for joining NATO would be ruined...

...In 1992, however, Sikorski put his plans for Chobielin on hold after agreeing to serve as deputy to Jan Parys, the newly appointed Polish defense minister...

...It was partly from that feeling of millions of people coming peacefully together and feeling their strength that Solidarity grew the very next year...

...The "Bydgoszcz provocation," as the incident became known, enraged all of Poland...

...The huge crowds that spontaneously turned out to greet the Pope suddenly became aware of their own power...

...It was universally assumed that hard-liners in the security forces had ordered Rulewski's beating to scuttle any possibility of compromise between Solidarity and the regime...

...Such a strike, in turn, would almost certainly precipitate a Soviet invasion...

...So Parys, exercising his prerogative as defense minThe American Spectator September 1997 71 We Can't Work It Out ister, refused to authorize the deal and sacked Wawrzyniak— a brave move that permanently antagonized Walesa and ultimately cost both him and Sikorski their jobs...

...Sikorski was in charge of the army's campaign to join NATO, but he soon found that many Polish officers still considered NATO the enemy...

...From today's perspective, they were just dumb...

...My greatest reward, I told myself, would be if, in a few years' time, my guests would come, look around, and think that Communism had somehow spared this remote spot...

...Admiral Wawrzyniak had assured Walesa that his scheme was "without risk...

...70 September 1997 The American Spectator call a general strike...

...Walesa's plan was to arrange for the swap on Polish territory, then have Polish troops retrieve the money once the transfer was completed...

...As a result, the teenaged Sikorski — though not especially pious—became an ardent churchgoer...

...Sikorski concludes his memoir on a note of philosophical resignation...

...What about all the men and women who sacrificed their careers because they would not collaborate—the millions of ordinary people like my parents who were never seduced by ideology and never joined the Party for the sake of a career...

...Though just 34 years old, he has been a Polish deputy defense minister, an Afghan guerrilla, a foreign correspondent, and a Solidarity activist...

...It goes without saying that Sikorski and his parents were enthusiastic Solidarity supporters from the outset...

...What made matters even worse was that there had, in fact, been no conspiracy by the security forces to provoke a violent incident at Bydgoszcz...

...They were in time to watch Rulewski being hauled off to an ambulance, his bloodstained, toothless face bearing eloquent witness to the brutality of the authorities...

...I was more depressed than gratified by the military intelligence's sudden change of mind," writes Sikorski...

...Expecting to be arrested if he returned to Poland, Sikorski asked for, and promptly received, political asylum...

...While our contemporaries in the West rebelled by joining anarchist groups or sampling dope, we rebelled by going on pilgrimages, building street altars for the Corpus Christi procession, or helping to tidy up a chapel...

...But Sikorski's disillusionment was not confined to Walesa: Polish society in general hasn't lived up to his expectations...

...Thus, when word reached them that a Solidarity delegation—led by a radical firebrand named Jan Rulewski —was locked in a tense confrontation with riot police in the center of Bydgoszcz, Sikorski and his father quickly arrived on the scene...

...Full Circle is an engaging account of his adventures, not the least of which has been his successful effort to refurbish a dilapidated manor house and establish himself as a country squire in a Poland recently liberated from Communist tyranny...

...Sikorski describes one briefing by the chief of Polish military intelligence, Admiral Wawrzyniak, warning of menacing NATO deployments along Poland's frontiers...

...Sikorski may well be in love with the idea of life in a manor house, but the daily routines of the Polish countryside are far too placid for a man of his activist temperament...

...Sikorski was born in Bydgoszcz, a city in north-central Poland, in 1963...

...Parys and Sikorski were appalled...

...He graduated from Pembroke College, Oxford, became a freelance journalist, traveled with the Afghan resistance and recorded his experiences in his first book, Dust of the Saints...

...We realized for the first time that 'we' were more numerous than `them...

...According to Sikorski, Walesa's abrupt announcement marked a turning point in Solidarity's fortunes...

...People felt disoriented, betrayed and appalled by the arbitrariness with which Walesa made the decision to suspend the strike...

...Even more galling, there has been no moral reckoning with Poland's Communist past...

...If so, their information was worse than useless...

...W hen martial law was imposed on Poland nine months after the Bydgoszcz provocation, Sikorski happened to be in London, where he had gone to perfect his English...

...In today's Poland, he writes, the old Communist elite, having successfully transformed its political power into economic clout, "is the new upper class, whereas those who made it possible for them—the workers who brought down Communism—remain the proletariat...

...A problem more serious than the army's uncertain loyalties was President Walesa's determination to acquire nuclear weapons...

...He seemed capable of anything...

...Briefly," writes Sikorski, "Bydgoszcz became the political capital of Poland, as Solidarity's top leaders and advisers, including Walesa, descended on the city, trailing the world's media ...Throughout, I was in the very eye of the storm, in our local Solidarity headquarters...

...Sikorski describes how the Pope's visit to Poland in 1979 profoundly altered the psychological balance of forces between "we" — the Polish people—and "them"—their Communist overlords...

...Solidarity's leader, Lech Walesa, announced that unless the government apologized, he would You Can Go Home Again JOSEPH SHATTAN is consulting editor of The American Spectator...

...His parents were staunch anti-Communists, and thanks to them and the Catholic Church, so was he...

...Former KGB officers had secretly offered Poland five tactical nukes for a million dollars...

...Never again was the union to muster similar enthusiasm and a sense of purpose...

...The 18-year-old Sikorski had a remarkable aptitude for the English language, and while the crisis raged, he served as Walesa's translator...

...And the reason it appeared that Rulewski's teeth had been knocked out was that he had removed his dentures...

...They should have been swine, compromised their consciences and gotten ahead, for today they would be building on their privileges with a condescending smile at the simpletons...

...The danger of a Soviet invasion only receded when Walesa —at the Pope's urging—called off the threatened general strike...