1989–2009: ‘In Poland everything is possible, even changes for the better’

Abstract

I came across my title in a book prepared for Adam Michnik's sixtieth birthday by some of his close friends and admirers. The book included many reminders of an earlier Poland, including a transcript of a telephone conversation of 1986. Michnik was in Poland, recently released from yet another stint in jail. On the other end of the line was a group in New York, celebrating the publication of the English version of his Letters from Prison. Holding the phone and relaying questions from the group in New York was Czeslaw Milosz. My title comes from the answer Michnik gave to the question how are things in at the moment? 'As my master, Antoni Slonimski used to say, Poland is a weird place where inexplicable things can happen: in everything is possible, even changes for the better.' I begin with this line for two reasons: one, because I am struck by how easy it is to forget what life in (and throughout the Communist Bloc) was like, and what was imaginable, only 20-odd years ago. The other is to remind those who have forgotten, or who never knew, how much has changed in this relatively brief period. I first visited in 1985. It was a deep experience for me, personally, morally, politically. I had followed the fortunes of Solidarnosc very closely, read everything I could, and knew a lot about communism; I was a long-time anticommunist, indeed congenitally so since I had inherited it from my parents, who were refugees from Nazism, exiles from communist Poland. I even spoke a version of Polish, albeit nurtured on Bondi Beach. I cared about what was happening in Poland, and I thought that I knew, more or less, what was going on there. I had no expectations, however, of some of the most striking things - as striking indeed as many of them were banal - that I found there. I was so affected by them that I started to write a kind of intellectual journalism - quite un-academic, baring my soul - for the first time in my life. My first article - which appeared in Australia, the United States, Italy and, I believe, in in 1986 - was called 'Stalemated in Poland. Life as if . The title comes from the discordant combination that presented of, on the one hand, almost total stalemate between what it became conventional to divide as ' spoleczenstwo' (society) and 'wladza' (the power), and on the other, of what Timothy Garton Ash called 'the principle of as if: try to live as if you live in a free country. Garton Ash captured well the extent to which Solidarity had made that principle flesh in the lives not merely of the Polish inteligencja, but of pretty well everyone. As he wrote: The Solidarity revolution was a revolution of consciousness. What it changed, lastingly, was not institutions or property relations or material circumstances, but people's minds and attitudes... millions of people across the country... suddenly found that they no longer needed to live the double life, that they could say in public what they thought in priva te... For a few months it really was as if they lived in a free country. And even when, after martial law was imposed, it no longer was possible to believe they were in such a country, people spoke without restraint even to foreigners like me. That was all exhilarating and exciting, but it was also what I had been led to expect by my reading. What I had not expected was much more mundane. It was the unrelieved pallor, the greyness of everyday life in Poland; pallid and grey and sad and hard. The greyness was real and inescapable but it was also a kind of representation, a metaphor, for the pervasive tone and texture of everyday life. I wrote at the time: The image that kept recurring to me was of a curtain, not iron any more, too full of holes; but thick, drab, shabbily patched, unrelievedly grey and draped over nearly everything one saw; everything that didn't move... it is not simply to do with specific material things. …