The Warsaw Spring
Tim Garton Ash
Berlin Poland in Spring. The nation is in ferment. Discussion groups have bloomed across the country like April crocuses. On the shop floor and in Catholic intellectual clubs, in parliament and in the bread queues, in private as in public, everywhere the hubbub of political debate. Programmes are drawn up, open letters exchanged, plots hatched, resolutions voted, delegates despatched. The lot of peasant-farmers shall be improved. Corrupt officials will be brought to justice. Education will be reformed. The economy will be reformed. Poland will be reformed.
I describe of course the Spring of 1791. A constitution which the Prussian minister despairingly described as 'much better than the English' was passed by the Polish parliament (the Sejm) on 3 May that year; it is not strange that Solidarity chose to celebrate the 190th anniversary of the 3 May Constitution last Sunday, rather than the 1st May.
Solidarity is imbued with the sense of Polish history. When the regional delegate from Wroclaw, the historian Dr Harol Modzelewski, went beyond his brief at a meeting of the movement's national coordinating commission, he was rebuked by his electors in terms drawn from the 17th century. The 17th century member of the Sejm, unlike the British member of Parliament, had specific instructions as to what he should say and how he should vote. The workers of Wroclaw admonished Dr Modzelewski. He should kindly remember that this was Polish democracy they were practicirig.
More remarkable still is the fact that the communist government is honouring these traditions. On May Day, while in Moscow and Prague and East Berlin .the customary hundreds of thousands marched past the customary stand where the customary Politburo members stood ready to receive the synthetic adulation of the masses, in Warsaw the party leader, Mr Stanislaw Kania, and the prime minister, General Jaruzelski, themselves led a modest procession from the tomb of the unknown soldier to the monument to the heroes of the Warsaw uprising. A patriotic manifestation. In Gdansk, capital of Solidarity, the local party first secretary followed the example of Mr Lech Walesa by laying flowers at the base of the monument to workers killed in riots in December 1970. This extraordinary gesture recalled the moving ceremony last December when the inauguration of the monument (the erection of which was one of the striking shipyard workers' first demands in August) brought together the highest representatives of the state, the Church, and Solidarity in a season of goodwill. Easter has, by all accounts, ushered in another such season. Having stepped back from the brink of the abyss both Solidarity and the government are sparing no pains to keep the peace. Disputes which one month ago would have led to nationwide confrontation have been solved swiftly and amicably by local negotiation. Regular consultations take place at the national level.' Solidarity was careful to avoid turning 3 May into a political demonstration. Since Sunday was also the feast day of 'Mary Queen of Poland' Mr Walesa joined some 300,000 other worshippers for an open-air mass at the most sacred shrine of Polish Catholicism, the monastery ofJ asna Gora at Czesstochowa. Numerous 'cultural events' were held in Warsaw: and the proceeds will be used to buy needed agricultural machinery for the private farmers organised in. 'rural solidarity'. The communist leaders, for their part, officially celebrated the anniversary for the first time in the history of the regime. (It was an official public holiday in pre-war Poland). Symbolically, the Sejm was opened to the public. Before a festival concert in the Warsaw opera house the head of state, President Jablonski, described 'the present generation of builders of socialism' as the true heirs to the 3 May Constitution.
That description_ could indeed well be applied (though President Jablonski can hardly have meant it thus) to the opposition thinkers grouped around the 'KOR' social self-defence committee. Just as the Constitution of 1791 was prepared by a decade of intellectual debate, so the new, unwritten constitution towards which Poland seems to be moving in 1981 was foreshadowed in the writings of KOR activists like Jacek Kuron in the Seventies. The starting point of their (re)ithinking was 21 August 1968. How, they asked themselves, could a Warsaw Spring avoid the fate of the Prague Spring? All previous reformers, and they themselves previously, had hoped to change society by changing the ruling communist party. That brought Soviet tanks into Prague. Therefore, the party must be left so far as possible unchanged. Instead Polish society should organise itself to defend its own interests, through clubs, unofficial publications and 'flying universities' for the intellectuals, through independent trades unions for the workers and peasants, and — as these leftist intellectuals came to acknowledge — through the Church for the whole nation. Hence the cumbersome but telling title which KOR adopted in 1977: the Social Self-Defence Committee. Only four years later their conception has been realised beyond their greatest expectations. Polish society has not merely defended itself against the arbitrary encroachments of a totalitarian party. It has proceeded to act on the principle that the best form of defence is attack: recapturing in swift succession vast areas of social and economic life from the monopolistic control of the party. In future, if all goes according to plan, the administration of education, of justice, and of the economy will be largely taken out of the hands of the party aparat. The party leadership has apparently gone a long way towards accepting this new social contract. A real distinction is being made, as never before in Eastern Europe, between the activity of the government and of the party. Extrapolate ten years ahead and you can just conceive of a system which might be described as bastard pluralism. In such a system the government would be primarily responsible to parliament and to society, but the Politburo would remain, unquestioned and unquestioningly, Moscow's voice.
In 18th century terms, then, something between an enlightened despotism and a province of the Ottoman Empire. The party despots must be enlightened enough to live with Solidarity. But they must not be so enlightened as to question the fundamental tenets of Soviet doctrine. They must remain despots — but limited despots. The prospect, of an Ottomanisation of the Russian empire, already raised in these columns, is brought closer by Poland's peaceful revolution. This is briefly the prospect that the Russian rulers of a mighty but overextended multi-national empire will be obliged to accept, as did the Ottomans: a considerable degree of diversity and freedom in the cultural, social, economic and even domestic political life of the nations under their dominion, provided only that the vital interests of the empire (defence, foreign policy, internal security) are guaranteed, as it were by local pashas.
The greatest danger in Poland at the moment, the single development most likely to provoke a Soviet military intervention, is the impressive crusade within the communist party itself to eject the pashas from their palaces. This is the one thing which the opposition, remembering Prague, vowed never to do. There is not space here to examine in detail how the spirit of Solidarity infected the rank-and-file members of the communist party, how in the last months they have elected new, young representatives in elections sometimes even more democratic than those of Solidarity, how the police violence at Bydgoszcz, widely believed, to have been ordered by hard-liners in the party leadership, provoked an unprecedented wave of protest culminating in the almost universal participation of party members in a nation-wide warning strike organised by Solidarity, and how this grassroots movement came together with party intellectuals who had long been planning reform, rather as the workers came together with opposition intellectuals in Solidarity. The fact is that, as last week's plenary session of the central committee clearly showed, the generals are now leading from the rear in the party's helter-skelter advance towards democracy, or at best they are walking backwards in front of the columns — like Kania and Jaruzelski at the May Day parade — urging their troops in the name of Poland, Lenin and God.
Party reformers are talking blithely of ejecting three quarters of the present leadership at the party congress which is due to begin on 14 July. It is to be hoped that the delegates will somehow receive a crash course in political realism before then. The best possible teachers are to hand in the intellectuals (and particularly the distinguished historians) of the socialist and Catholic opposition. But I fear that the only thing we learn from history is indeed that people don't learn history's lessons.
Last week's central committee session began with an unprecedented interruption. Rank-and-file party members from 18 regional organisations demanded admission into the chamber. When this was refused they withdrew to reconstitute themselves as a lobby group in a nearby builing. Now I turn to the official history of Poland and read that in November 1789 'bourgeois' delegates from 141 towns assembled in Warsaw demanding admission to the Sejm. Today's rank-and-file reformers stand to the conservatives within the party leadership as the bourgeois reformers did to the conservative aristocracy in 1789. And what did the conservatives do then? The conservative opposition, I quote from the official history, sought to block reform by obstruction in the Sejm, but was unable to undertake 'counter-revolution [as it was called at the time] on their own'. In 1981 read 'central committee' for Sejm. Having failed in this attempt a few conservative magnates, fearing for their property and privileges, combined in the so-called Confederation of Targovica, and invited Russian troops into the country. These (I quote again from the same source) 'Crossed the frontier on 18 May . . two weeks after celebration in Warsaw of the . . anniversary of the constitution.' If history is not to repeat itself, the emancipated communist party must probably restrain its charge to democracy and its understandable fury at the conduct of the latter-day pashas. The time has not yet come when the pashas can be ejected from their palaces.
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