The Polish journey between regimes: Ryszard Holzer provides a Polish perspective on political and social developments in Poland in the last two decades.

• Author: Holzer, Ryszard

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In the autumn of 1989, almost exactly 20 years ago, I worked for a couple of weeks as a translator and guide for two American journalists from the St Louis Post-Dispatch. I organised for them in the city of Gdansk a meeting with Lech Walesa, at the time the leader of the Solidarity trade union. It had been four months since the communists lost in the parliamentary elections. Communism had ended, but this is knowledge we only possess now. At the time, the future was still unknown, and the challenge of the day did not so much involve changes in our political system, but how to save the country from an economic breakdown.

We arrived in Gdansk in the afternoon, a day before the interview. We left our luggage at the hotel and went off into the city. One of the Americans had stomach problems, and wanted to buy a bottle of water. All he needed was a regular bottle of water; for some reason it was important to him that it not be carbonated. In ordinary shops where one could use Polish money it was impossible to find such water, a situation I tried in vain to communicate to the American, but he only believed me after trying the third or fourth shop. I remember how I looked at these shops through the eyes of my American employers: empty shelves with perhaps a couple bottles of vinegar, a few tins of fish, a few loaves of stale bread, some margarine and occasionally even a bit of strange cheese. No meat, no cold cuts, no flesh fish. Finally, we bought a bottle of water in one of those shops that required using 'hard currency'--dollars, pounds, francs or deutschmarks. These stores did not differ much from the shops all of us have seen at international airports, but at the time these places represented the epitome of luxury in Poland.

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We met Walesa the following day. After the interview, once we were on the street, one of the Americans broke out into such a fit of laughter that he had to lean against a wall. 'What a genius!' he went on screaming. 'A damn genius! The guy has been talking with us for half an hour and didn't say a thing! He did not answer any of our questions. All he said was basically one thing: The West must help Poland!'

And this was true. The Nobel Prize laureate and future president of the country, talking rapidly and with conviction, had constructed a group of elaborate sentences that at first glance seemed to create a coherent structure, but at second glance were contradictory. And he did this--I realise today--in order to avoid stepping on a mine. The first mine was in international relations. The Soviet Union was still there after all, with almost 70,000 Red Army soldiers still stationed in Poland, whereas the political border beyond which we could no longer fear Russian intervention had not been marked out yet, either. The second mine lay in the national economy. The foundation of the Solidarnosc (Solidarity) trade union, the power that had overthrown communism, was bluecollar workers in the giant national corporations. But system changes--with the introduction of a market economy and a balance sheet instead of centrally-imposed production plans as well as the total reversal of geo-political alliances that brought about the unraveling of the economic fabric of the so-called communist bloc--were soon to put many of them out of jobs. Finally, the third landmine involved relations with the Communist Party. Even though the latter had lost in the semi-free elections held in June 1989, it still exercised control over the army and the police. Nearly half of the ministers in the government formed by the first non-communist prime minister in post-war Poland were from the Communist Party and its political offshoots. The communists were prepared to share power or even hand it over completely, but they still expected a guarantee of their personal and material safety in return. In Poland, past experience attests that those pushed to the wall can start to bite.

Popular misconception

Abroad, especially in the United States, it is popular to think that Poles rejected communism for ideological reasons. Many of us Poles like to think of ourselves in that way as well: that it was due to the Polish love of freedom and refusal to remain under a foreign yoke any further that led to the victory over communism. However, the truth is more complicated. The social opposition against communism was indeed a fact. The Polish people never really accepted the system and treated the Communist Party as an alien body, a manifestation of Moscow's colonial power. But communism's collapse could have been foretold through its own intrinsic contradictions. And finally these contradictions led to the remarkable abdication of power by the communist elite, well aware that they were not able to live up to the unwritten agreement they had concluded with society.

What did that agreement consist of? Roughly, it granted social well being and the equal division of a modest pool of commodities and services in exchange for the society not actively questioning the communist government's authority. For some time, the realisation of this agreement was assured by an extensive economy with huge investments in heavy industry. Later, it was realised thanks to loans from the West. The price for these loans involved a minimum level of observance of human rights by the communist government, which, among other things, allowed for the development of a democratic opposition.

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However, at the end of the 1980s, the members of the Communist Party's central steering committee knew that Poland was in fact a bankrupt state on the verge of suspending the repayment of the interest on its foreign loans, and the failure to make these payments would set off a chain reaction that would finally affect the Soviet Union as well, food dependent as it was on the import of American, Canadian or French grain. Therefore, the lords of the Kremlin came to accept an experiment in the partial--as it seemed in the beginning--handing over of power in Poland.

Partially-free elections

This then led to the Round Table talks, which in turn resulted in the communists accepting the 'partially-free' elections in June 1989; partially free...