Poland: the liberal renaissance

Tim Garton Ash

Cracow Cracow is Poland's Oxford. Its university was founded in 1364 by Casimir the Great, the last of the Piast Kings of Poland. From the castle of Wawel, which still dominates the city, the cavalier kings planned their campaigns against the Germanic roundheads --the Order of the Teutonic Knights. Like Oxford, Cracow was a royalist stronghold into the 17th century. On its outskirts lies the Blonia, the great meadow where two million people gathered in June to worship with the Pope. Common ground since the early middle ages, it is still defended by the common people against the encroachments of high-handed local government. The Blonia is Cracow's Port Meadow. In the city centre there is the same theatricality of the streets, the same sense of civilised decay. The Krakowiak drunks, like the Oxonian, have a style and an eloquence which must owe something to the traditions of their cities; while the intellectuals, like the dons, repose in an honourable tradition of 19th century liberalism. ('Have you read The Quiet Don?' my writer friend asked me as we sat drinking vodka on the medieval market square, the Rynek Glowny. An Oxford novel by Graham Greene? How could this literary event have passed me by, I wondered, until she mentioned the name of Sholokhov.) Their repose has sometimes the aspect of .slumber with the difference that here in Cracow there is an ungracious shrew of a state to arouse them. If one could conceive of an England under a totalitarian government, then Oxford might behave somewhat as Cracow does today.

The intellectual opposition has a nervecentre in the offices of the Catholic weekly, Tygodnik Powszechny. Here the leaders of ZNAK, the movement of Catholic intellectuals, sit ceaselessly arguing beneath pictures of four Popes, Mary Queen of Poland, and Franz-Joseph, last Emperor of Austria.

Mr Andrej Potocki is the president of the local KIK catholic discussion group, the second largest in the country, with over 500 members prepared thus openly to register their dissidence. Potocki is a tall, craggy man with the manner and uniform of a gentleman schoolmaster: shabby suede shoes, tweed jacket, pipe. His English is rich and singular, laced with the idioms of a post age. Expressions like 'Look here!', 'I say!', and 'Don't ye know!' punctuate every second sentence. He talks like a character from the pages of Decline and Fall. It is no surprise to learn that he was at school at Downside in the Thirties. He returned to Poland in 1938, the heir to one of the greatest landed estates in the country. One year later the family seat was occupied by the Nazi Governor-General, the horrible Hans Frank. Frank was fond of boasting about his work. 'In Prague', he reflected in a characteristic interview, 'big, red posters announced that seven Czechs had been shot at dawn . . . 1 thought, should I wish to do the same in the case of every seven Poles shot here, all the forests in Poland would not suffice to produce the necessary quantities of paper.'

Meanwhile Mr Potocki was in hiding in the forests. He fought against the Nazis in the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, hence AK). 'Many of my generation paid the highest price,' he observes, in the language of the Remembrance Day service. He sur vived: to see his lands expropriated, his class villified, and his past falsified. In the late Forties, he told me with a melancholy smile, there appeared on the walls of Cracow a poster depicting a red workerhero sweeping a row of nasty little black figures into the gutter with an enormous ,broom. The little figures were labelled: 'capitalists', 'landlords', 'Nazis', and, next to the Nazis, 'AK'. What did the peasantry think? I cannot know. But I had already heard in Warsaw the story of the first Party meeting on the Potocki estate. 'Comrades!', declared the hectoring Party representative, 'for the first time in the history of our country the land is divided among you. Count Potocki, in whose palace we are assembled today, exploited you mercilessly, and squandered his property into the bargain. You may not know that the Count lost a whole village in one evening at the card tables in Monte Casino. What do you say to that, comrade peasants?' An old peasant rose slowly to his feet. 'Well sir, what I say is, if you have bad cards . .

Since 1945 Mr Potocki has lived a largely private life, writing and translating into English. (He recently translated one of the Pope's philosophical works.) He is an unreconstructed paternalistic liberal, a Polish Whig. Like other members of the old ruling class who survived the decade following September 1939, he does not speak the same language as the present rulers. They are two classes divided by one tongue. It is not that he is a militant and bitter anticommunist. 'The communists,' he remarked as we parted near the fine building which was once the Potocki town house and is now a grubby cinema, 'the communists were not the worst overseers in the concentration camps'. It is simply that the gulf between his Poland and Mr Gierek's is unbridgeable. He, and many like him among the aristocracy and the intelligentsia, have lived for over 30 years in a sepa rate world, devoted to their books and their families. Their children have grown up in this world, cultured, sophisticated, unafraid.

This generation, the heirs to the disinherited, have a significance greater than their numbers. For not a few of them have decided, provoked by the behaviour of the regime and stirred by the workers' protests in December 1970 and June 1976, that the kind of inner alienation in which their parents have lived is not sufficient. To be true to the liberal values of their world, they must do more. They feel compelled to become politically active. One of them, a poet who signed a letter of protest against the 1976 amendment to the Constitution, and as a result can neither publish officially nor be mentioned in the official press, compares communism to a refrigerator. It has kept the ingredients of liberalism fresh, on ice. Now they are being taken out of the fridge, ready for use by the younger generation. He talks of a 'renaissance' of liberalism.

What form does this take? The form of lectures, for example. Adam Michnik, a leader of the left-liberal opposition KOR group (the 'Public Self-Defence Committee), was one of the speakers whom students at Cracow university invited to address them. On that evening the police broke into the lecture-room and attempted to break up the meeting, with tear-gas. The students formed a protective phalanx around Michnik, linked arms, and began to sing 'God Protect Poland'. There are two versions of this hymn, one of which mentions a free Poland and one does not. Ills not difficult to guess which one they sang. Still singing, the phalanx moved slowly out of the lecture-room and across the unnaturally deserted Rynek Glowny, past the spot where their great-grandparents' grandparents swore an oath of loyalty to the insurgent Tadeusz Kogeiuszko, past St Adalbert's church, and down the street to the flat where Michnik was staying. Once the guest speaker was safely inside, they peacefully dispersed. A few months later andther lecture was announced, subject: 'George Orwell's/ 984 and Poland Today'. This lecture, too, was broken up by the police. The organiser turned, in some distress, to his parish priest. The next evening there was a meeting in his church, with an address, subject: 'George Orwell's 1984 and Poland Today'. This meeting was not disrupted. One cannot say that the Poles enjoy freedom of speech. But speaking freely is tolerated. Indeed it sometimes seems as if there is an unwritten bargain, whereby the people can say more or less what they like and the government can do more or less what it likes. More or less. If the government raises prices too drastically, it might face a repetition of the riots in the Baltic ports in December 1970 or the strikes in Radom and Ursus in June 1976. This winter it will be walking the econotrtic tightrope once again. If the citizen becomes too openly critical, he must expect material disadvantages, probably the loss of his job, perhaps even some time in prison. Yet you can count the number of political prisoners in Poland today on the fingers of one hand. In East Germany, with half the population, there are over 5,000. The comparison is almost embarrassing for Mr Gierek's regime. It is a mistake to think that the leadership are delighted when representatives of the West buzz around at Belgrade or Helsinki, saying that of course the Poles are the best of the bunch and really not at all repressive. How they would prefer to be roundly denounced! How much easier it would make things in Moscow!

In this spirit I should point out that the government is not tolerant because it wants to be, as part of a coherent strategy such as is pursued by the Kadar regime in Hungary. It is tolerant because it has to be. If 1984 is ordered to be read in churches, there is nothing much the authorities can do about it. That 1984 is in fact discussed in church is a recent development, part of a new constellation of church and intelligentsia. Fifteen years ago the traditional anti-clericalism of the left-wing metropolitan intelligentsia was still strong. Leszek Kolakowski was still a revisionist Marxist. Today the talk of the town is a book by Adam Michnik, who was a Pupil of Kolakowski, which argues' the case for cooperation between the church and the Left in contemporary Poland. The 'talk of the town' is not mere hyperbole. A book like Michnik's, published in Paris and circulated inside Poland unofficially and in samizdat [underground], can have as great a resonance as any official publication. There is, in the best possible sense, a counterculture. Such works are discussed in the 'flying universities' in `ZNAK' meetings, in the 'KIK' groups, among students in the 'SKS' movement, and in countless private gatherings without such confusing initials. A similar flowering of public interest and Private debate occurred in the wake of October 1956, but was short-lived. The role of the church is also new, since it is not only the intellectuals who have changed their positions. The younger clergy have rediscovered in the New Testament a much broader, a more 'catholic', cnncePtion of the Church's role. The Church Should provide, as Peter Hebblethwaite has put it, 'the context in which truth can be Spoken' . This development preceded the election of the Pope. But it was Karol Wojtyla who made it possible that George Orwell should be read in that Cracow Church. As Archbishop of Cracow he was responsible for throwing open the churches to non-ecclesiastical debate. As pope he made it subtly but unambiguously clear, in a private audience in Cracow, that the liberal °I:Positional groups in the wide spectrum of organised catholicism had his blessing. Of course the other movements and factions, more ready to make common cause with the regime, have his blessing too, But some are more blessed than others. These are nuances. He will not intervene directly, let alone publicly, in the factional disputes the different Catholic organisations. y et if, as is probable, the State attemptslo divide and rule by especially favouring the collaborationist wing, they cannot expect to have the Pope behind them.

It is anyway not in the murky corridors of Church-State relations that one should look for the transformation wrought by the Pope's visit, I was warned, but in the hearts and minds of the people. No-one who stood on the Blonia on that Sunday in June can have come away unchanged. Catholic observers are convinced that there has been a change in 'mass consciousness'. The believing have received an injection of faith and hope. As important: many nonbelievers are turning again to the Church. Students from agnostic working-class families now turn up at the university chaplaincies, not declaring that they have seen the light, nor falling to their knees and asking for bread and wine, but asking questions. They are met by a Church which is prepared to try and answer them. The number of non-believers, the lost congregation, is in any case small: even among the industrial workin& class.

To see the concrete proof of this you must go to Nowa Huta, the Socialist State's model steel town 10 minutes drive from Cracow. Amidst the grey, repetitive, unfinished apartment blocks you will find the church of Mary Queen of Poland — a soaring, accomplished piece of expressionist architecture, its spire surmounted by a glittering, golden crown. Its walls are covered with some two million granite stones, each one of them brought by an individual volunteer. All the richness and beauty and grandeur which the State has never achieved are here. And the mystery. In the dark larch-wood chapel of reconciliation, I saw an old peasant woman scraping her forehead along the concrete floor as she crawled towards the Madonna, mumbling toothless devotions. The church was built by the workers. I stayed in a steel-worker's flat on the outskirts of Nowa Huta. My jovial host explained to me, with much 4usto, how he had driven a bulldozer from his workplace to the church site to help with the earth-moving operations. Every room in his.flat held some religious picture or trinket. If the official ideologists are to be believed, this is a mere 'survival' of peasant piety, a hangover from a past epoch, soon to be overwhelmed by socialist consciousness. Some survival! Some hangover!

It is true that a worker like my host is only one generation off the land, the heir to generations of peasants. But that argument cuts both ways. No subsequent generation will benefit as directly from the Socialist State. The steel-workers of Nowa Huta enjoy a standard of living undreamed of by their parents. This will not be true of their own children. The flat in which I stayed would compare favourably with a council flat in Wandsworth or Glasgow. The family had a washing-machine, a car, and a televi sion. And what does my host do? In the morning he works for the State. In the afternoon he takes the State's bulldozer to build the church. (There are two more new churches being built in the town.) And in the evening he emigrates in his imagination to America, via the State's television channel. The Western films shown on Polish television, quite apart from the thousands of Poles living in the USA, give the man on the Cracow omnibus a rose-coloured picture of the West. They raise consumer expectations which the State cannot meet. The worker's standard of living has risen dramatically. But his expectations have risen faster — led on by the wicked West. That is true throughout the Soviet bloc. In Nowa Huta, Socialist Man is squeezed out between Western consumerism and Slav Christianity.

While I was travelling in Poland I used an abbreviation in my notes: PLO. Since the government enthusiastically supports that organisation, I thought, an inquisitive policeman could only applaud my enthusiastic annotations. Actually my abbreviation stood for Polish Liberal Opposition. I believe one can accurately talk of such a thing. Liberalism is common ground between a former landowner like Mr Potocki and a worker in KOR, between a priest in ZNAK and a former Marxist like Professor Kolakowski. The label 'dissident' they themselves reject. Now in its original sense — one who 'sits apart' — it seems to me exactly right. Mr Potocki has 'sat apart' for over 30 years. But they rightly observe that the label has been debased by Western journalists who pin it on any critical voice in the Soviet bloc at the drop of a sub-editor's hat. It is silly to put Mr Potocki in the same category as Rudolf Bahro in East Germany or Roy Medvedev in the Soviet Union. There is a fundamental difference between them. Bahro and Medvedev believe that Marxism is basicallygood. It does, however, need to be saved from its practitioners. The Party must therefore be reformed from within: it must be 'democratised'. Mr Potocki believes that Marxism is basically bad. It does, however, have some humane practitioners. The Party itself is irredeemable. Most of the MOR movement — some of them former Communist Party activists — would follow Kolakowski when he says that the notion of democratic communism seems to him like fried snowballs. They have their experiences. Even those who may still believe in the theoretical possibility have drawn the practical conclusions from Hun gary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Thou shalt not attempt to reconstruct the party. That is the first commandment. In this they are a decisive step ahead of 'opposition' in, for example, East Germany. Instead of trying to transform the apparatus they will work quietly, gradually, pragmatically, winning a little more freedom of speech here, a little more freedom of movement there, within the existing structures. The Poland they are hoping for might be compared to Warsaw old town: the old facades left unchanged, the interiors completely altered. The political facades face east. For this is the second commandment, like unto the first: thou shalt not provoke the Russians.

That is one reason why the new political party proclaimed by the right wing of the traditionalist nationalist ROPCO group (not RO'TCO, as it was spelled last week) before the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on 1 September has met only with criticism from the liberal opposition. They believe they have learned from the Polish past. In the great uprisings of the 18th and 19th centuries much blood was shed. But the blood fertilised the soil of freedom and independence. The Warsaw uprising in 1944 was different. When it was over, the intelligentsia had almost ceased to exist; it bled to death while the Soviet troops waited on the other side of the Vistula. Never again. They have learnt from the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. (They are even prepared to countenance the regime's professions of loyalty to Soviet foreign policy, for they see that this can be a precondition of granting greater freedom at home. Compare Romania and Bulgaria. Romania, independent in foreign policy, is fiercely repressive on the domestic front. Bulgaria, slavishly loyal in foreign policY, can be relatively tolerant at home.) They will continue to work to preserve and enlarge the areas of freedom. They will continue to write and speak the truth, and embolden others to do the same. They believe that the Polish people have grown in political wisdom. This was demonstrated, they argue, by the restraint shown during the Pope's visit. They will bring up their children in the spirit of opposition: in both senses, `to oppose', and to form an alternative leadership. And they will remind them that no empire in history has lasted for ever. 'We reckon,' a Warsaw intellectual told me at the top of his voice, like a public announcement, over lunch in a crowded restaurant, 'we reckon with the collapse of the Russian empire in the 21st century. What'could I say? This man had survived Auschwitz. He had survived imprisonment in the Stalinist period. He was being harassed by the present regime, like many of his' colleagues. Who are we to pour the cold water of rational doubt over their dream of a free Poland? Without this romantic, irrepressible optimism they would not be Polish.

This is the second in a series of articles cfoolulonwinsga journey through the Soviet bloc countries.