Is Poland going Communist? Trying to avoid former Communists in Poland is like trying to avoid kielbasa
Szpak, Robert Fleet and Alina
Robert Fleet & Alina Szpak
IS POLAND GOING COMMUNIST?
Walesa's time was past
The inconceivable occurred in Poland last month: an ex-Communist won the presidential election. Aleksander Kwasniewski, a...
...The Polish public seems willing to give the winner a chance, and Americans should do the same . The Poles are evidently prepared to put the cold war behind and allow Kwasniewski the opportunity to prove that a freely elected president, even an "ex-Communist," can lead his country in a manner that respects the rights of all its citizens...
...In this context, it is worth noting that during the fall election campaign, Walesa threatened to dissolve the freely elected Polish parliament (Sejm) and consolidate its power in the presidency...
...It was an uneasy alliance from the start, one that now seems irretrievably broken...
...But Poland was never like the Soviet Union: even its Commie honchos were Poles first...
...Kwasniewski, who previously led a majority coalition of farmers, socialists, and former Communists in the Polish parliament, will now preside over the government...
...Polish history is full of beautiful martyrs...
...Certainly realpolitik dictated kowtowing to the Soviets...
...That was an empty threat...
...She was neither, but stress induced by the anti-Semitic radio campaign may have contributed to her subsequent fatal stroke...
...On the day after his defeat, Walesa claimed that he would not relinquish power to Kwasniewski...
...trade attache in Warsaw advised us: "The business environment is better than ever before...
...In 1981 Jaruzelski declared martial law in reaction to a threatened Soviet "peacekeeping" invasion and the inability of Solidarity to end strikes that were grinding the economy to a halt...
...Still, whatever the initial strength of Walesa and the Solidarity movement, one reason Solidarity was not crushed immediately by the government was that party reformists pushed first for an internal house cleaning...
...Not surprisingly, Poland's Communist governments used political freedom as a carrot or stick to reward the congenial or punish troublemakers...
...To Poland's credit, her people appear to be able to survive the buffeting, even if they are only a few years into an uneasy immersion in democracy...
...By contrast, Kwasniewski campaigned on the promise to respect the reforms of the past few years, work with the Sejm, and to accept a Walesa-backed concordat with the Vatican as long as it was negotiated openly and approved by the Sejm...
...Predictably, conservative U.S...
...Investigations revealed that Kwasniewski's wife made a small fortune in questionable stock investments and that Walesa "misplaced" at least a half million dollars to avoid taxes...
...Sound familiar...
...It was commonplace in the 1970s for students destined to become Poland's future Communist party leaders to also be self-conscious reformers...
...Traditionally Western-oriented, Poland was never as closed off by the Iron Curtain as other East bloc countries...
...press reports usually ignored that complication, along with the fact, which has recently come to light, that Solidarity received funds from the CIA, Mossad, and the KGB...
...Long before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Jaruzelski's government set up the apparatus for free elections which included a "Round Table" group in which Kwasniewski played a central role...
...Walesa's time was past The inconceivable occurred in Poland last month: an ex-Communist won the presidential election...
...Walesa, after all, is a man who boasts of never reading a book...
...When the Solidarity movement emerged from the Gdansk shipyard strike, the anti-party intelligentsia headed by Jacek Kuron organized workers behind Lech Walesa...
...In a bizarre perversion of Catholic values, Radio Maryja, headed by Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, began a campaign accusing Kwasniewski of being less than Polish because his mother was a Jew who was dead and buried in a Jewish cemetery...
...Soon- before Gorbachev-Jaruzelski's reformers began moving Poland toward Sweden-styled socialist democracy...
...Communist party leader Edward Gierek favored Western trade alliances...
...Robert Fleet & Alina Szpak IS POLAND GOING COMMUNIST...
...congressmen announced that democracy in Eastern Europe was threatened...
...She was buried in the Catholic cemetery by her parish priest...
...Both men have friends in the Polish judiciary, and were reprimanded for "unethical but legal" activities...
...Indeed, detente contributed to a rift within the party elite...
...But whether they supported the party or opposed it, most of these future leaders were friends...
...Students who seriously wanted reform saw only one direction to take: join the party...
...Bishop Roman Andrzejewski went further, sending the priests of his diocese on a door-to-door "observation" campaign on election day to intimidate pro-Kwasniewski voters...
...If anyone in the West doubts that capitalism is firmly entrenched in Poland, these disappointing revelations should set their minds at ease...
...Military men make military decisions...
...But despite Vatican advice to remain neutral, Cardinal Jozef Gemp, primate of Poland, declared Kwasniewski a "neopagan" and allowed an episcopal letter advocating a "Christian values" vote for Walesa...
...With the blessing of Solidarity's leadership, General Wojciech Jaruzelski was asked to head the government...
...Much to the Soviets' chagrin, most party members were Roman Catholics as well, including Kwasniewski...
...By 1985 our company made a movie for CBS in coproduction with a semi-privatized Polish film studio...
...Sadly, Poland does not now have a Vaclav Havel to help extend the moral horizon of public discourse...
...It was during this time that a "faithful Communist" (to quote the Los Angeles Times) such as Kwasniewski can be seen entering the picture...
...policy of detente...
...Ironically, Solidarity was considered a threat in 1980 because its workers' movement was more Marxist than the government it challenged...
...They were aided in this report by Polish correspondents Irena Szpak, Jarek Musia, and Tomasz Heller.nd Tomasz Heller...
...Known for his "clean hands," Jaruzelski had protected Polish workers in an earlier, 1972 strike...
...Robert Fleet and Alina Szpak are filmmakers who write regularly on Eastern European subjects...
...Young Communist bureaucrats, eager for change, were trying to revamp the system...
...A sizable pro-East faction within the party opposed such policies...
...Politics in a free society is a rough game and requires a solidly entrenched set of democratic values...
...Aleksander Kwasniewski, a former party official, defeated incumbent president Lech Walesa, the Nobel-prize winner, hero of the Solidarity movement, and symbol of Poland's victory over Soviet oppression...
...But such pronouncements ignore a great ironic truth about the end of communism in Poland: to a remarkable extent, the Communists gave Poland its freedom, not Solidarity...
...In 1984 the U.S...
...The final days of the presidential race resembled not so much a choice between freedom and communism as "politics as usual...
...It was only the old Polish dilemma of choosing between idealism and pragmatism that divided them...
...More worrisome was the role the Roman Catholic church played in the elections...
...Still, Poland in the 1970s was strongly influenced by the U.S...
...Walesa boasted that he was not bound by his oath to uphold the Polish constitution because he had not bothered to read it...
...John Paul II carefully distanced himself from Walesa when the presidential candidate visited Italy in October...
...At that time, the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet Union's peaceful demise were inconceivable...
Vol. 122 • December 1995 • No. 22
