Poland: Continuity and Change

Abstract

During the years of the Polish People's Republic, the secret political police occupied a prominent role. Their mandate was extensive and their influence pervasive. As a result, the transformation of the secret services became a fundamental political and constitutional task following the anti-Communist opposition's assumption of power in 1989. The fate of the secret service's archives and the problems of lustration--the identification of secret collaborators--became part and parcel of this transformation. But in Poland, as elsewhere in the former Soviet bloc, this process was not carried out consistently. Political Conditions The nature of Poland's peaceful social change was undoubtedly the major determinant of the country's future course. The activists of Solidarity had gained power with the June 1989 political victory of the Citizens' Committee bloc. However, even those partially free elections were the result of a settlement arrived at during the Roundtable talks the same year. Offering the presidency to General Wojciech Jaruzelski was also an informal part of this settlement. General Czeslaw Kiszczak, the Minister of Internal Affairs and Jaruzelski's most trusted colleague, was the initiator of the talks as well as the guarantor of the negotiated terms. Since 1956, a civilian entity known as Security Service (SB) had existed within the framework of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MSW). The SB functioned as a secret political police, simultaneously conducting intelligence and counterintelligence operations. For decades, the SB operated with broad powers, largely free of oversight or restraint. In the 1980s, however, the MSW began to scrutinize the power and reach of the civilian civil services. The result was the enactment of certain legal provisions in an attempt to regulate the SB's activities. (1) Legal rules, however, would end up playing only a minor role in deciding the future of an agency that, by the 1980s, was operating under its own supervision, beholden only to the formal oversight by the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR). (2) By 1989, the SB had become one of the most important power structures in the Polish state. Most of the SB's 24,000 functionaries were well-trained professionals with logistical support from the governmental administration. The SB's huge archival resources, accumulated throughout the decades, and its network of thousands of secret collaborators (some of them strategically placed within the ranks of the opposition), also constituted major factors in the agency's position of power. The SB's political dominance remained largely unchanged despite the tumultuous events of June 1989. This was ensured by the elevation of General Kiszczak, Jaruzelski's confidante, to a preeminent position in the new, post-Communist political order. During Kiszczak's tenure as Minister of Internal Affairs in the administration of Tadeusz Mazowiecki (July 1989-May 1990), no structural or personnel changes took place in the MSW. Indeed, of all the officials in this branch of government, only Krzysztof Kozlowski, the former deputy editor of the influential Tygodnik Powszechny Catholic weekly, had not held a Communist Party identity card earlier. (Kozlowski would be promoted to Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs in February 1990.) Nor were there any changes in the area of the military special services, which functioned as Administration II of the General Staff of the Polish People's Army (intelligence) and Military Internal Service (WSW, or counterintelligence and military police). Not many people were aware of how often the military special services were used to combat the opposition and to penetrate Polish political circles. But these elements enjoyed a special trust from General Jaruzelski, and General Kiszczak had come from their ranks. A revolution in the special services was certainly hard to accomplish. For many months, even under the new political conditions that prevailed after the summer of 1989, the special services were supervised by the same people that had led them earlier in the struggle against the anti-Communist opposition. …