Polish experience of systemic transformation. Has it really been successful?
For fifteen years, an original section of the Gdańsk Shipyard wall has been adjacent to the wall of the Reichstag, the seat of the German parliament. The bilingual inscription on the plaque attached to it reminds us of what is obvious to us Poles, but still has not taken root in the public consciousness everywhere in the world – the role played by Poland’s “Solidarity” in the struggle for freedom and democracy – in the entire bloc of Central and Eastern European countries.
It was in Gdańsk that the strike broke out in August 1980, which led to the creation of the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union “Solidarity” – a social movement of many millions that was an unprecedented break in the socialist camp.
The communist authorities bowed to the mass protest of citizens, but several months later responded by imposing martial law. “Solidarity” was suspended, then banned, and thousands of its activists were sent to internment camps and prisons. “We have won the first battle,” announced Wojciech Jaruzelski, then leader of PZPR – the Polish United Workers’ Party.
However, the ruling camp was unable to win the “war” that Jaruzelski had given himself 10 years to win. At the end of the 1980s, the economy of the Polish People’s Republic was in collapse. In 1988, two massive strike waves swept through the country. The society wanted improved living conditions, but also the re-legalisation of “Solidarity”.
The ruling party still had the illusion that the former would be enough. On New Year’s Day 1989, the so-called Wilczek Act, which strongly liberalised the rules for conducting business activity, came into force. However, this was not enough to heal the economy. In 1989, Poland recorded a massive inflation rate of over 250 per cent and a foreign debt in excess of 42 billion US dollars. The Soviet Union, itself immersed in crisis, had no intention of providing financial assistance. The rich countries of the West, on the other hand, signalled their willingness to offer support, but on condition of democratisation and further unpopular economic reforms.
In this situation, the ruling team decided on a step that Jaruzelski later called “escaping forward”. The idea, as Prime Minister Mieczysław Rakowski explained, was to allow the opposition to participate in power in a controlled manner in order to share responsibility for the disastrous state of the country. Not without significance were the concerns of Jaruzelski’s top advisors that another possible social revolt might produce leaders much less willing to compromise than Lech Wałęsa, the leader of “Solidarity” before martial law.
Thus, in February 1989, the “Round Table” was inaugurated – two months of negotiations between the government side and a part of the democratic opposition centred around Wałęsa. The agreement reached in April made it possible to re-register “Solidarity” and also to hold completely free elections to the Senate, the upper house of Parliament. In the Sejm, the Polish United Workers’ Party and its allies guaranteed themselves 65 per cent of the seats. They were, moreover, hoping for a share of the remaining pot. It was intended for formally non-partisan people, and people close to the ruling camp or even co-founders of it, such as government spokesman Jerzy Urban. At the “Round Table” it was also agreed that the office of the President would be restored, equipped with extensive powers and elected by the Parliament. The arithmetic seemed to suggest that Jaruzelski would take office.
The June elections of 1989 became a kind of plebiscite on whether to maintain or abolish the communist system. The result proved more than clear. Solidarity candidates won all possible seats in the Sejm and 99 out of 100 seats in the Senate. An additional blow for the ruling camp was the rejection by voters of almost the entire national list, which included such prominent PZPR activists as Stanisław Ciosek, Czesław Kiszczak, Mieczysław Rakowski and Florian Siwicki.
A few months later, the actress Joanna Szczepkowska uttered words that have gone down in history – that it was on 4 June 1989, the day of the first round of elections, that “communism ended in Poland”. In reality, however, June 1989, although it significantly accelerated the erosion of the regime, was merely a stage on the road to a fully sovereign and democratic Poland.
The power camp was still hoping to shake off the defeat. In July, the Parliament elected Jaruzelski as president of the People’s Republic of Poland. He received just one vote more than the required majority. This would not have been possible without the participation of Solidarity MPs and senators – some of whom voted for Jaruzelski or boycotted the vote.
Part of the democratic opposition at the time gave the impression of being frightened by the magnitude of the June victory. These people did not have the will or the courage to pursue a decisive break with communism. To a certain extent, this may have been influenced by the atmosphere of the earlier behind-the-scenes talks in Magdalenka, where some Solidarity activists became strongly aligned with their recent persecutors. Fears of a possible palace coup in Moscow that would oust Mikhail Gorbachev and return the “hardliner” communists to power, as well as of some kind of counterattack from the domestic power ministries, were also strong. Today, we know that the communist authorities were still considering the imposition of a state of emergency in 1988-1989, but such a scenario was becoming less and less feasible by the month. At the Ministry of the Interior, which would have to take on the main burden of such an operation, the mood of resignation and despondency deepened.
At the same time, PZPR’s previous satellites, the Democratic Party and the United People’s Party, disobeyed it. As a result, an attempt to form a government by Czesław Kiszczak – the long-serving interior minister of the People’s Republic of Poland and one of Jaruzelski’s closest associates – failed.
On 12 September 1989 a vote of confidence was passed in the Sejm by the cabinet of Tadeusz Mazowiecki, one of Wałęsa’s close advisors in the 1980s. The new government was mostly composed of “Solidarity” representatives, but four ministries – internal affairs, national defence, foreign economic cooperation, and transport and maritime economy – were assigned to the Polish United Workers’ Party. It was particularly significant that the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of National Defence were headed by Jaruzelski’s closest collaborators, who had planned and introduced martial law with him only a few years earlier: the aforementioned Kiszczak and Siwicki. The former also took up the post of Deputy Prime Minister.
Leaving the communists in control of the power ministries had far-reaching consequences.
Firstly, it resulted in the mass destruction (and sometimes illegal removal) of Security Service files in the last months of 1989 and at the beginning of 1990, including a large part of the documentation related to the crackdown on the opposition and the Catholic Church. We are paying the price to this day. It is not only the irretrievable loss of materials of priceless historical value. The obliteration of evidence of many communist crimes seriously hampers prosecutors’ attempts to identify and bring to justice their perpetrators. The destruction of a large part of the agency’s files later limited the possibilities of eliminating from public life those involved in collaboration with the communist security apparatus.
Secondly, Kiszczak and Siwicki’s continuance in office obviously inhibited personnel changes in the ministries they controlled. Formally, the Security Service was changing its structure in order to adapt to the implementation of the tasks facing the special services in a democratic state. In fact, it continued to keep under surveillance those democratic opposition politicians who rejected the “round table” compromise. For example, it was not until May 1990 that the investigation into “Fighting Solidarity” was concluded. Its chairman, Kornel Morawiecki, remained in hiding for even longer – until July 1990.
While in the spring and summer of 1989 Poland could be regarded as the leader of the liberation transition in Central and Eastern Europe, in the following months the death throes of the communist system seemed to progress faster in other countries. The fall of the Berlin Wall and completely free elections in the GDR, the overthrow and death of Nicolae Ceauşescu in Romania, the election of Václav Havel as president of Czechoslovakia – all this happened while Jaruzelski and his trusted associates were still in power in Poland.
The dissolution of the Security Service and the departure of Kiszczak and Siwicki from the government in July 1990 had a certain symbolic meaning, but the new ministers were by no means supporters of decisive settlements with the past, but rather of an attitude that critics to this day describe as a “thick line”. As a result, there was far-reaching personnel continuity in the secret services. The verification of the personnel of the liquidated Security Service, carried out in the summer of 1990, must be considered superficial. Of the approximately 24,000 officers employed at the end of the People’s Republic of Poland, 14,000 underwent the procedure. Almost three out of four passed it. In the newly established Office for State Protection in 1996, former Security Services officers constituted about two-thirds of the staff. Some of their colleagues found employment in the police. Verification, even such a gracious one, did not apply to military intelligence and counterintelligence, called – to use the titles of books by Sławomir Cenckiewicz and Lech Kowalski – the long and short arm of Moscow. In the early 1990s, the military services were mainly limited to rebranding and downsizing. It was not until 2006 that the Military Information Services, directly derived from the former repression apparatus, were abolished.
Although Lech Wałęsa won the presidential election in the late autumn of 1990, promising to accelerate Poland’s transition, in his role as head of state he was already talking about strengthening the “left leg”, which in the political reality of the early 1990s was tantamount to defending the post-communist elite.
At this time, a process was underway in Poland that had begun at the end of the previous decade and was known as nomenclature enfranchisement – the taking over of state-owned assets by part of the communist elite. Directors of state-owned enterprises, presidents of cooperatives, party activists, secret service people and their families set up companies which then parasitised state property. At the same time, organised crime groups were formed and developed. The gangsters who formed them – sometimes former secret collaborators of the communist security service – used the umbrella of the secret services to transform themselves over time into businessmen.
The transformation of the economy also provided an opportunity for millions of honest Poles to become richer and for the country as a whole to take a leap into modernity. At the same time, a large part of the population still associates it with the loss of jobs and social security, a temporary or longer decline in living standards. According to the Central Statistical Office, at the end of 1990 the unemployment rate reached 6.5 per cent, and a year later it was already 12.2 per cent. Apart from the state-owned farms, it was the large factories – bastions of “Solidarity” in the 1980s – that often paid the highest price for breaking with the communist system.
In his parliamentary exposé of 21 December 1991, Jan Olszewski – the first post-war prime minister to be elected as a result of fully free elections – thus spoke of the need to convince society “that the burden of reform is being distributed fairly”. The Olszewski government, although in existence for only six months, also set a clear Euro-Atlantic course and made the first attempt at vetting public figures, which was unfortunately torpedoed by the Parliament and the President. A full break with the communist system and its legacy was still a long way off. Olszewski was aware of this and in the exposé he spoke cautiously of “the beginning of the end of communism in our homeland”.
Poland’s transformation proved to be an evolutionary process. It was not until September 1993 that the last Russian soldiers left Warsaw’s East Railway Station for Moscow. Five and a half years later, Poland joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and, in 2004, the European Union.
However, there are areas where overcoming the effects of communist enslavement takes longer than the transition to a market economy and anchoring the country in the Western alliance system. It was not until the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries that the Institute of National Remembrance could begin its work – an institution sometimes compared to the former German Gauck Office, but equipped with a much broader competences, because in addition to archival, research and educational functions, it also performs investigative, vetting, research and memorial functions. The institute removes Soviet propaganda objects from public space. It finds and identifies the remains of the victims of the communist system, who had been buried in nameless pits for several decades. It presents decorations to distinguished activists of “Solidarity” and other organisations that opposed the red regime. In a word, it represents all those who were disadvantaged by communism.
This brings tangible results.
As part of the Crime Archive project, initiated two years ago, IPN’s investigative division is undertaking new investigations into high-profile crimes or unexplained deaths from the 1980s. The investigation into the 1987 death of Father Franciszek Blachnicki in Calrsberg was groundbreaking. It made it possible to prove unequivocally that the priest died as a result of poisoning. The investigation into the case of Czesław Kukuczka, fatally shot in 1974 in Berlin by an officer of the GDR Ministry of State Security, also yielded tangible results. The actions taken by the IPN prosecutor led to the suspect’s trial starting in the German capital in March this year.
The work of IPN’s Vetting Office continues. By the end of last year alone, there were 1,849 final court rulings declaring that the vetting declarations analysed were untrue, i.e. the persons submitting them concealed their work in the communist state security organs or their cooperation with them. Such persons are deprived of their public functions and are also prevented from holding them in the future for a limited period of time. This serves the purpose of transparency in public life.
However, the circles of the former security apparatus are still fighting for their lost privileges. A disturbing phenomenon is the ongoing recovery by security services officers of their multi-thousand-zloty pensions, reduced under the deubekization acts of 2009 and 2016. The courts rule en masse in favour of such people and the Ministry of the Interior and Administration does not make use of appeal possibilities. This is accompanied by announcements of full statutory restoration of pension privileges to people of the former secret services.
The examples I have mentioned show that the communist past is not a closed chapter. We are facing challenges today that could have been successfully addressed back in the 1990s. Much of the neglect from the early days of the transition can no longer be rectified.
Paper presented at the international scientific conference organized by the Institute for the Study of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile (IICCMER) and the Institute for the Study of Communist Crimes and Consequences (ISKK) from Albania, entitled „35 Years after the Fall of Totalitarian Regimes in Europe”, Bucharest, October 3-4, 2024.