Ten Years After 1989
Michnik, Adam
ANY GREAT social change unleashes great expectations. And therefore, of course, it leads to great disappointments. In 1989, a variety of individuals and social groups pinned their varied hopes...
...In Poland there was neither a breakdown of the state on the Russian scale nor a bloody war on the Balkan model...
...800,000,000...
...Able to choose from various forms of anticommunism, Poland has chosen anticommunism with a human face, rather than a vengeful anticommunism with a Bolshevik face...
...I expected gradual changes, an evolutionary expansion of the field of freedom...
...This is why the ruling powers consented to a fully democratic election to the Senate and why the opposition, in return, agreed to reserve 65 percent of the seats in Parliament for people of the old regime...
...At the root of the Round Table compromise lay the weakness of a government that was not in a position to annihilate the opposition, but also 14 DISSENT / Fall 1999 the weakness of an opposition that was not in a position to overthrow the government...
...For the first time in its history, Poland does not have any ethnic conflicts...
...From a dictatorship, Poland has turned into a democratic country...
...And then later on, at least in Poland, a major contributing factor was a capacity to compromise that characterized the people of the anticommunist opposition as well as a part of the Communist Party...
...The factory faced bankruptcy...
...Nevertheless, the positive aspects clearly seem to outweigh all that...
...In those days there was a big market for such busts...
...The restructuring of the mining and steel industries has not yet happened...
...The workers employed there had a right to feel wronged...
...Today, none of those states exists any more...
...The great changes taking place in the Soviet empire, correctly associated with the name of Mikhail Gorbachev and his perestroika, opened room for maneuver in the satellite countries...
...I myself belong to those who subscribe to the thesis that the decade of the nineties has been marked by the most magnificent changes to have taken place in the course of the last three hundred years of Polish history...
...These circumstances, as well as the consensus of maDISSENT / Fall 1999• 15 jor political forces concerning foreign policy, have resulted in Poland finding itself among the new members of NATO...
...President Reagan's description of the "Evil Empire" gave strength and courage to the people fighting for freedom against communist dictatorships...
...In the first place, the international constellation was favorable to us...
...In that very suburb, a few hundred meters away, stands the well-known prison where leaders of the Solidarity movement were incarcerated in December 1981...
...Let us imagine a factory that produced busts of Lenin...
...The subject of the discussion was an evaluation of the past decade...
...One has to admit that Poland has managed to establish decent relations both with its own national minorities and with the neighboring countries that have Polish minorities...
...There are problems that the transformation has not resolved effectively...
...At the same time, Poland has managed to maintain political stability, to improve its image and its position in the world, and, finally, to enter NATO, making our country— which had lived for a century in the whirlwind of history—a safer place...
...This differentiates Poland from, for example, Milosevic's Serbia, Tudjman's Croatia, or Lukashenko's Belarus...
...The movement to emancipate the labor force led to the effective blossoming of private entrepreneurship...
...In this sense the Polish path became one of reconciliation and not one of reconquest...
...Poland's agricultural structure is still anachronistic...
...from a lawless state into a state of law...
...In spite of all that, we cannot help feeling tormented by a crucial disproportion between the magnitude of the changes and the plight of those people who have not benefited from them...
...I said that our daily is proof that one can achieve enormous business success through honest means, while still defending humanistic values...
...That is not a bad bottom line after one decade in a country torn apart for three hundred years by foreign forces and by its own anarchy...
...One cannot overestimate the importance of the Round Table compromise, which took place in the first months of 1989...
...In 1989, a variety of individuals and social groups pinned their varied hopes to a change of political systems...
...Of decisive significance, of course, was the fight against dictatorship, led by dissidents like Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vaclav Havel and Janos Kis, Lech Walesa and Jacek Kurori, and paid for through years of suffering and repression...
...Poland is an independent and democratic, stable and safe country, and it is thriving...
...The revolution of 1989 was a great change without a great utopia...
...This delegitimized communist rule and opened the way for the first noncommunist government in the Soviet bloc...
...How was this possible...
...This is because the very factories that produced such courageous freedom fighters were, at the same time, museum pieces from an already anachronistic communist economy...
...If someone then had predicted that eighteen years later I would be opening a modern printing house for a huge and wealthy newspaper, I would have taken it as a joke, just a bit of gallows humor...
...Every director of an enterprise or secretary of a local Party organization had to have such a bust on his desk...
...there was simply no work for them...
...Translated from the Polish by Elzbieta Matynia...
...The aim of the Round Table was to assure stability for the period of transformation...
...If in spite of the frequent changes of government one can talk of a continuation of the reform process, this means that on major issues different political forces are able to agree...
...Let's take a look at Poland...
...Among those who have not benefited are the workers from the huge factories, the old Solidarity strongholds who, through their strikes, forced concessions on behalf of freedom, and now find unemployment staring them in the face...
...At the same time, the Polish postcommunists accepted the democratic rules of the game and became active participants in politics...
...This is why many can say that at least some of their dreams have been realized...
...Privatization has not been fully accomplished...
...Health reform has not yet been completed...
...For some it meant the coming of freedom—for intellectuals and trade unions, for religion, and for the nation as a whole— after many decades of subjugation...
...I also talked about taking part in a ceremony launching the construction of a new Gazeta Wyborcza printing house in a suburb of Warsaw, Bialoleka...
...I N 1989, only a few people foresaw the precipitous collapse of the Soviet empire...
...I spoke from the perspective of the head of a big daily newspaper that started from zero in 1989 and today is valued on the London Stock Exchange at U.S...
...After all, they had not worked any less hard...
...Corruption is still a problem...
...I was not one of them...
...And the idea of worker self-government —an effective instrument in the struggle against the communist nomenklatura—turned out to be completely useless under the conditions of a market economy...
...The election to the Senate brought an overwhelming victory for the Solidarity camp, whose candidates won ninety-nine out of a hundred seats...
...This principle of compromise, though it was violated many times, has nevertheless become a durable element of Polish political life...
...The policy of the United States, inspired by President Jimmy Carter's philosophy of human rights, made it possible to push the Soviet empire into a position of axiological defense...
...In 1989 the demand for Lenin's bust disappeared...
...In all those countries we are dealing with dictatorial rule by the governing party—not democracy but "demokratura" (democracy plus nomenklatura...
...At the same time, the breakup of the Soviet empire has revived nationalist tendencies...
...OT LONG AGO I took part in a public discussion in Vienna with President _ Havel of the Czech Republic, Prime Minister Orban of Hungary, and Chancellor Klima of Austria...
...from a satellite into a sovereign state...
...Until 1989, Poland had three neighbors: the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and the German Democratic Republic...
...Communism lost because it had exhausted its capacity for development, while at the same time being unable to build mechanisms for self-correction...
...from an economy of shortages into an economy of markets and growth...
...The judicial system is functioning poorly...
...The disintegration of the Soviet empire changed the geopolitics of Central Europe...
...Most Polish problems are the typical troubles of modern democracies...
...So this is one of the paradoxes of the transformation: economic rationality may have a painful impact on working people...
...ADAM MICHNIK, a historian and political worker from Warsaw, is editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza...
...But that little coincidence is perhaps not a bad illustration of the enormous change that has taken place in Poland...
Vol. 46 • September 1999 • No. 4
