Jaruzelski and Poland’s Affable Revolution

“History will judge our actions,” declared Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski as he introduced martial law in Poland nearly eight years ago. One view of the elections of June 4 could be that the Polish people had handed down a judgment much earlier, and that it was one of “guilty.”

Yet objectivity demands that we examine the manner by which a situation emerged whereby single-party rule appears to be being dismantled--peacefully, affably and and as if it were the most natural attribute of Communist leaders to hand over that which they were considered to hold dearest, power.

The vast majority of the 259 opposition members freely elected to the National Assembly had been imprisoned or interned or had lost their jobs for the cause of Solidarity. They will remain living witness to Jaruzelski’s normalization and personify the difficulty he faces in obtaining the previously agreed nomination to the presidency. But the fact that they can now countenance a “grand coalition” with the party speaks volumes for what has happened over the last few years.

It is difficult to overestimate the affront to collective human dignity and societal self-confidence so stirringly resurrected by Solidarity and so brutally crushed through the mechanisms of martial law.

Yet through amnesties, consultations and committees spawned to take on board anyone who might engage in regime-sponsored dialogue, Jaruzelski showed that he wished to establish a new modus vivendi. He was compelled to do this to some extent because in the immediate aftermath of martial law, his regime was bereft of any means of communicating with its citizens, even through material inducements. Thus he reached for the one resource left to him, the rhetoric of reform. This conveniently preempted opposition demands. Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s rise to power in the Soviet Union gained Jaruzelski added credibility as a reformer and a moderate.

But was he eventually to be hoist with his own petard? For along with the rhetoric, Jaruzelski initiated a process of gradual inclusion, aimed at drawing into active participation ever wider circles of the recalcitrant and passive population. He sought to attract those opinion leaders, who occupied the proverbial middle-ground and who formed the bridge to the opposition, into various forms of consultation. To achieve this, he eventually had to make ever more far-reaching concessions gradually putting substance to the rhetoric. Now the question is: Did this incorporation strategy go one step too far?

After the debilitating strikes had been defused in September, 1988, the Polish elite embarked on their boldest ploy in co-optation. Their aim was the full-blown institutionalization of what they now termed the “constructive” Solidarity opposition into what was still a largely supine Parliament. But why? Had Jaruzelski and his aides, Premier Mieczyslaw Rakowski and Internal Affairs Minister Czeslaw Kiszczak, so come to believe their own professions of the democratic faith that they knowingly put themselves to the plebiscitary test? If so, this spoke not of a lack of imagination but of too much of one. Partially free elections agreed to at the round-table discussions with Solidarity were to lead to a partially democratic Parliament that would be evidence of the partial relinquishment of the party’s monopoly of power. This was to make room for Solidarity to share part of the burden of responsibility for the difficult decisions slated in the reform program.

However, there was nothing partial in the rejection of the party by the electorate. Jaruselski is now being driven by the logic of a process of which he is no longer in charge and is facing outcomes that were never fully intended. This, then, is democracy.

Of course, this normalization process has left an opposition that is largely held together by the powerful Solidarity symbol. Underneath there are dangerous tensions now voiced by those who lost out in the free segment of the elections and who accuse Solidarity of being the mirror image of their single-party opponents.

It was only to be expected that the gestures of assistance from the West should also be largely symbolic. Support for private entrepreneurship, making clear the private property-freedom equation, as much as the donation to the “Save Krakow” environmental campaign both point to the same problem. The Nowa Huta smokestacks eating away at the stonework of Poland’s most beautiful city epitomize the wasteful and damaging structure of state-owned industrial production--a living Stalinist legacy that must be dealt with as vigorously as any details about the massacres in Katyn Forest. Unfortunately, this will involve the long-suffering Poles in the new experiences of unemployment, factory closure and a further decline in living standards.

But what the West is most anxiously looking for is the less-tangible evidence of the rebirth of the spirit that was infused into the pores of Polish society by Solidarity in 1980. “Helping Poles to help themselves” refers to the enormous reserves of human potential to be released when the deadening hand of the party-state bureaucracy is lifted and professionals, proletarians, peasants--as well as politicians--can be themselves. However, to Solidarity’s watchwords of self-organization, self-government and self-management must be added self-discipline. The opposition may have come out of a prison with bars, but they now face the prison of responsibility where the bars are economic destitution, ecological collapse and mounting societal frustration. They will not be forgiven if they succumb once again to political fragmentation in time-honored Polish fashion.