Poland полностью

Yet, while it was the Poles who had been the first to breach the Soviet system, Mazowiecki’s contractual government was wedded to the compromise which had brought it to power, and still contained former members of the PZPR, including the Interior Minister General Kiszczak, the Sejm contained an overwhelming majority of them, and the President was General Jaruzelski. Moreover, since there had been no spectacular overthrow of the existing regime, as in the German Democratic Republic, Czech oslvakia or Romania, the old security apparatus was still in place. Mazowiecki and his team therefore trod warily, fearful of overstepping their self-imposed bounds. They carried on with their economic reforms, eschewing radical political change in favour of stability.

Their fears were not entirely groundless. While the PZPR had dissolved itself, it had immediately re-formed as the Social-Democratic Party of Poland (SdRP), and this was a force to be reckoned with, if only on account of its huge financial clout. The PZPR had owned thirty-six limited companies created out of state assets, which passed to the SdRP, along with huge state funds abroad (there had been no formal delineation between the Party and the state), and control of the financial mechanisms which handled the repayment of Polish foreign debt before 1989. The ranks of the new state police were filled with former militiamen, who remained under the command of people who belonged to the communist camp. The same went for the army, the legislature and the media. The militia reserve, ORMO, had also been dissolved, but it formed itself into an association and remained an ominous presence.

Mazowiecki’s fears were magnified by a sense of powerlessness. His government was hamstrung by the fact that the entire administrative apparat was still in place. His ministers were at the mercy of the personnel of their ministries. And, with the ministries of defence and the interior in communist hands, a process of burning, shredding or rewriting of secret service files in order to obscure and reinvent the past was being implemented on a massive scale.

Mazowiecki and the former opposition elites, led by Adam Michnik and the independent newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, clung to the spirit of the round table, hoping that magnanimity would lead to reconciliation, and made it clear that a ’thick line’ would be drawn under the past. This sent the message to the former members that they had nothing to fear, and to the man in the street that the government had allowed itself to be drawn into the communist camp—a reasonable suspicion, since a majority of its members were renegades from the old apparat. While they argued for stability and gradual change, a disenchanted electorate clamoured for a clean break with the past and for social justice. And while Mazowiecki represented himself and his colleagues as the only legitimate opposition to communism, many disputed this and called for free elections.

Leading this chorus were the Confederation for an Independent Poland (KPN), formed by Leszek Moczulski as far back as 1979, and the Christian National Union (ZChN) founded by the veteran anti-communist and political prisoner Wiesław Chrzanowski. But in May 1990 the cry was taken up with stridency by the twins Jarosław and Lech Kaczyński, head of the Bureau of National Security, who called for ’acceleration’ and ’decommunisation’ under the leadership of Lech Wałęsa, demanding immediate elections, at least for the post of president.

Over the next months the hitherto united front of all those who had fought for the overthrow of communist rule disintegrated, to the accompaniment of name-calling and mutual recrimination. New parties and groupings sprang up, based not on ideology or specific political programmes, but on personal factors. Mazowiecki’s decision to stand as a candidate against Wałęsa when Jaruzelski agreed to step down was at least in part dictated by emotional reactions. The level of debate between them and their supporters in the run-up to the elections so disgusted the voters that in the first round, on 25 November 1990, in which turnout was no more than 60.6 per cent, the outsider Stan Tymiński, a former emigrant to Canada who claimed to have made a fortune and promised to make every Pole a millionaire, took second place after Wałęsa, knocking Mazowiecki out of the race. This placed Mazowiecki’s supporters in the unhappy position of having to vote for their rival in the second round, in which Wałęsa won, with 74 per cent of an even lower turnout.

The election campaign had brought to the fore the worst aspects of Polish politics. The debate had been personal rather than political throughout, and all sides had resorted to populism and xenophobia. In a grotesque echo of 1968, people denounced each other as ’cosmopolitans’ or ’Jews’, epithets which bore little relation to racial origins, but were meant to suggest lack of patriotism and communist atavisms.