Post by kaima on May 30, 2014 19:40:12 GMT -7
Poland’s Forgotten Dissident
by Slawomir Sierakowski
WARSAW — On June 4, many of the world’s political leaders, President Obama among them, will gather in Poland to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the historic 1989 parliamentary elections, which ended in victory by the Solidarity movement. Tadeusz Mazowiecki became the first non-Communist prime minister behind the Iron Curtain, setting off change across the Communist bloc. Several months later the Berlin Wall fell, and two years later the Soviet Union collapsed.
During the celebration, much will be said about Mr. Mazowiecki’s role, and that of other Solidarity leaders like Lech Walesa. But room must also be made for Jacek Kuron, the main organizer and leader of the democratic opposition of the 1960s and ’70s, without which Solidarity would not have come into being.
Mr. Kuron began his public career in 1965, when, as a young revisionist Marxist at Warsaw University, he joined Karol Modzelewski in writing their “Open Letter to the Party,” in which they accused Communist authorities of stealing power from the workers and creating a dictatorship of the party bureaucracy. They predicted that they would be sentenced to three years in prison for this, and they were.
Inspired by their stand, some of Mr. Kuron and Mr. Modzelewski’s students, the future dissident leader Adam Michnik chief among them, organized a group known on campus as the Commandos, after their tendency to barge in on public debates and pose uncomfortable questions to party intellectuals. In March 1968 they touched off a student strike, for which Mr. Kuron and Mr. Modzelewski received additional three-year sentences. Mr. Michnik and the Commandos also landed in prison.
The two dissident professors soon won international acclaim. Asked to give his name in court, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the leader of the Paris student revolt of 1968, answered “Kuron-Modzelewski” — a surprising statement, given how steeped in Communist rhetoric the Paris ’68ers were, but such was the power of Mr. Kuron and Mr. Modzelewski’s position.
Mr. Kuron came back in time for the enormous strikes of 1976 and the subsequent crackdown on Polish workers. The repression led Mr. Kuron to coin his famous slogan, “Instead of burning committees, set up your own,” and, together with Polish intellectuals and activists, set up the Workers’ Defense Committee, known by its Polish acronym KOR, the first overt opposition organization in the entire Communist bloc.
His apartment became the committee’s headquarters, where members gathered information on persecutions and communicated it to the foreign media and to Radio Free Europe, which then broadcast it and granted protection to the persecuted.
KOR quickly built a membership of an astonishing 3,000; dissident groups’ memberships in other countries often numbered in the dozens. This was truly a state within a state. Dissidents created the Flying University, which allowed students to study Poland’s history outside government propaganda. And a significant publishing movement arose, issuing works by Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Czeslaw Milosz and thousands of other books and texts, in print runs that reached several tens of thousands.
Mr. Kuron’s goal was to reach the workers and unite them with the intelligentsia in a joint protest. The intelligentsia possessed the theoretical knowledge, international contacts and organization, but only the workers could delegitimize the “workers’ party.” In doing so, he reached, among others, a shipyard worker named Lech Walesa.
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In August 1980, a strike broke out at the Gdansk Shipyards, organized by the KOR activist Bogdan Borusewicz, now the speaker of the Senate, who selected Mr. Walesa as the strike’s leader. Hundreds of other enterprises joined the strike. Mr. Modzelewski then coined the name “Solidarity” for Communist Poland’s first independent trade union, which soon counted 10 million members, forming the largest organized social movement in European history.
Its work done, KOR disbanded in 1981, and Mr. Kuron became an adviser to Solidarity and the best-known oppositionist after Mr. Walesa.
Later, in Mr. Mazowiecki’s government, Mr. Kuron took the difficult role of minister of labor and social policy, which was supposed to shield people from the effects of “shock therapy,” the severe neoliberal economic reforms that left millions of people without work almost overnight and that led to increasing social inequalities.
Mr. Kuron was partly responsible for that pain, having asked the economist Jeffrey Sachs to compose a reform plan, giving him one night to do so. But he was far from unaware of its consequences; in fact, he ladled out soup to the poor by day and explained the transformations Poland was undergoing on television by night. It was he, not Mr. Walesa or Mr. Mazowiecki, who became the most loved politician in Poland.
He was never elected president, however, because he was too far removed from the image of a politician. He did not want to break with opposition customs and his own modesty. He rarely if ever wore a suit. In interviews he would say, “I usually sleep in the Parliament, as indeed you can see on television.” Or: “You see, there is only room for one incompetent person in the leadership of each ministry. In my ministry that place is occupied by myself.”
Mr. Kuron died 10 years ago. In a sense, he had again become an oppositionist toward the end of his life. Somewhat neglected by his former colleagues who joined the political establishment, he warned against excessive social stratification and continued to demand justice. He urged people to be more active, and he dreamed of an educational revolution that would teach young people both nonconformism and cooperation.
For subsequent generations, his legend will be a call to rebellion, the alternative to which is accommodation, obedience and imitation. It is a message that rings true regardless of what kind of government runs the country.
Slawomir Sierakowski is a sociologist, a founder of the Krytyka Polityczna movement and the director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Warsaw. This article was translated by Maria Blackwood from the Polish.
by Slawomir Sierakowski
WARSAW — On June 4, many of the world’s political leaders, President Obama among them, will gather in Poland to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the historic 1989 parliamentary elections, which ended in victory by the Solidarity movement. Tadeusz Mazowiecki became the first non-Communist prime minister behind the Iron Curtain, setting off change across the Communist bloc. Several months later the Berlin Wall fell, and two years later the Soviet Union collapsed.
During the celebration, much will be said about Mr. Mazowiecki’s role, and that of other Solidarity leaders like Lech Walesa. But room must also be made for Jacek Kuron, the main organizer and leader of the democratic opposition of the 1960s and ’70s, without which Solidarity would not have come into being.
Mr. Kuron began his public career in 1965, when, as a young revisionist Marxist at Warsaw University, he joined Karol Modzelewski in writing their “Open Letter to the Party,” in which they accused Communist authorities of stealing power from the workers and creating a dictatorship of the party bureaucracy. They predicted that they would be sentenced to three years in prison for this, and they were.
Inspired by their stand, some of Mr. Kuron and Mr. Modzelewski’s students, the future dissident leader Adam Michnik chief among them, organized a group known on campus as the Commandos, after their tendency to barge in on public debates and pose uncomfortable questions to party intellectuals. In March 1968 they touched off a student strike, for which Mr. Kuron and Mr. Modzelewski received additional three-year sentences. Mr. Michnik and the Commandos also landed in prison.
The two dissident professors soon won international acclaim. Asked to give his name in court, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the leader of the Paris student revolt of 1968, answered “Kuron-Modzelewski” — a surprising statement, given how steeped in Communist rhetoric the Paris ’68ers were, but such was the power of Mr. Kuron and Mr. Modzelewski’s position.
Mr. Kuron came back in time for the enormous strikes of 1976 and the subsequent crackdown on Polish workers. The repression led Mr. Kuron to coin his famous slogan, “Instead of burning committees, set up your own,” and, together with Polish intellectuals and activists, set up the Workers’ Defense Committee, known by its Polish acronym KOR, the first overt opposition organization in the entire Communist bloc.
His apartment became the committee’s headquarters, where members gathered information on persecutions and communicated it to the foreign media and to Radio Free Europe, which then broadcast it and granted protection to the persecuted.
KOR quickly built a membership of an astonishing 3,000; dissident groups’ memberships in other countries often numbered in the dozens. This was truly a state within a state. Dissidents created the Flying University, which allowed students to study Poland’s history outside government propaganda. And a significant publishing movement arose, issuing works by Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Czeslaw Milosz and thousands of other books and texts, in print runs that reached several tens of thousands.
Mr. Kuron’s goal was to reach the workers and unite them with the intelligentsia in a joint protest. The intelligentsia possessed the theoretical knowledge, international contacts and organization, but only the workers could delegitimize the “workers’ party.” In doing so, he reached, among others, a shipyard worker named Lech Walesa.
Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story
Advertisement
In August 1980, a strike broke out at the Gdansk Shipyards, organized by the KOR activist Bogdan Borusewicz, now the speaker of the Senate, who selected Mr. Walesa as the strike’s leader. Hundreds of other enterprises joined the strike. Mr. Modzelewski then coined the name “Solidarity” for Communist Poland’s first independent trade union, which soon counted 10 million members, forming the largest organized social movement in European history.
Its work done, KOR disbanded in 1981, and Mr. Kuron became an adviser to Solidarity and the best-known oppositionist after Mr. Walesa.
Later, in Mr. Mazowiecki’s government, Mr. Kuron took the difficult role of minister of labor and social policy, which was supposed to shield people from the effects of “shock therapy,” the severe neoliberal economic reforms that left millions of people without work almost overnight and that led to increasing social inequalities.
Mr. Kuron was partly responsible for that pain, having asked the economist Jeffrey Sachs to compose a reform plan, giving him one night to do so. But he was far from unaware of its consequences; in fact, he ladled out soup to the poor by day and explained the transformations Poland was undergoing on television by night. It was he, not Mr. Walesa or Mr. Mazowiecki, who became the most loved politician in Poland.
He was never elected president, however, because he was too far removed from the image of a politician. He did not want to break with opposition customs and his own modesty. He rarely if ever wore a suit. In interviews he would say, “I usually sleep in the Parliament, as indeed you can see on television.” Or: “You see, there is only room for one incompetent person in the leadership of each ministry. In my ministry that place is occupied by myself.”
Mr. Kuron died 10 years ago. In a sense, he had again become an oppositionist toward the end of his life. Somewhat neglected by his former colleagues who joined the political establishment, he warned against excessive social stratification and continued to demand justice. He urged people to be more active, and he dreamed of an educational revolution that would teach young people both nonconformism and cooperation.
For subsequent generations, his legend will be a call to rebellion, the alternative to which is accommodation, obedience and imitation. It is a message that rings true regardless of what kind of government runs the country.
Slawomir Sierakowski is a sociologist, a founder of the Krytyka Polityczna movement and the director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Warsaw. This article was translated by Maria Blackwood from the Polish.