Children of Communism : On Lech Walesa’s ‘The Struggle and the Triumph’

The original English use of the word “revolution”--before it was expropriated by American and French rebels--suggests a turning back, a rotation, the movement of a wheel to its earlier position. Poland’s Solidarity revolution may have been just such a shift, as conservative as it was radical. Those flushed, overalled strikers in August 1980 were not only rejecting a corrupt version of communism, they were clamoring for the rebirth of history suppressed during five decades of totalitarian rule.

That is why Lech Walesa, the leader of the Solidarity revolution that staggered from 1980 to 1989, cuts such an awkward figure. He does not fit into our usual understanding of a revolutionary hero. He is not Danton, not Lenin, not even Havel. There is nothing of the visionary about him and he has only the fuzziest of blueprints for the future. Walesa’s latest volume of memoirs, “The Struggle and the Triumph: An Autobiography” (written with Arkadiusz Rybicki, translated by Franklin Philip and Helen Mahaut; from Arcade Publishing, $24.95) was thus bound to disappoint. It depicts an ordinary man thrust into extraordinary circumstances, who now, in the more settled circumstances of Central Europe, has become ordinary again. There is no clue in these pages as to whether a revolutionary can make a successful transition to national leader, from the barricades into institutional politics.

In fact there is no indication of why this book was written at all. Since the memoirs have been ghosted, it cannot have been Walesa’s burning ambition to establish himself as a writer.

When he was sworn in as president in December, 1990, it seemed for a moment that Solidarity’s revolution was complete, that the wheel had turned its full span. Polish president-in-exile Ryszard Kaczorowski--whose “government” had been meeting in London for more than 40 years to show that Poles would never accept communist rule--came back and handed over some of his insignia of office. Walesa--his groomed, graying mustache giving him the mien of an ancient nobleman--sat on a throne in the Royal Castle. Poland, with its tradition of elected kings, had found a monarch for the post-communist era: an unruly electrician with a taste for trouble. It was a day of trumpets and great pomp. And Walesa forgot to invite to the ceremony his immediate predecessor, his former communist jailer, President Wojciech Jaruzelski.

Later Walesa blamed this oversight on one of his subordinates. It was, however, more than a social gaffe. It showed how the reign of King Lech would treat the 40 years of communist rule: not as a difficult, painful piece of history that had to be carefully sifted and understood, but as a bad tooth that had to be extracted. Take out the tooth and all would be well again. Political debate could continue where the Nazis and the communists had so rudely interrupted; the strands of the last independent Poland in the 1930s simply could be picked up again.

Would Walesa, then, take on the mantle of Josef Pilsudski, the soldier-politician who had saved the country’s independence but who rode roughshod over parliament? Or would Walesa develop the ideas of the frustrated ultra-nationalist Roman Dmowski who had so colored the politics of pre-war Poland? Certainly, misjudged comments about ethnic origin had opened Walesa to charges of Dmowski-style antisemitism. For what did the new Poland stand? The rejection of communism was not really enough to build a movement on.

It was a defining moment and Walesa fumbled it. He could not offer a vision, since he had none. There was to be a market economy, of course, and more democracy, but even his faintly sinister rival, the Canadian-Peruvian-Polish emigre Stan Tyminski, had promised as much. Having done more than any other human being to break the spine of communism, Walesa had little else to say.

Between the lines of this book you can discern the reason: Walesa is a child of communism, of the Polish People’s Republic. He was a peasant’s son who followed the siren song of the communists to abandon the countryside and transform himself into a worker. The Lenin yards were one of communism’s showpieces and Walesa was proud to be there. He was in the vanguard when the workers demonstrated in December, 1970, and was there when they were shot down. But his crude shop-floor socialism survived the experience. When the Party chief Edward Gierek came to the yards and promised a new beginning, he called out: “Will you help me?” Walesa joined with the crowd in bawling back: “We will help you!”

Nowadays Walesa is more like a Christian Democrat but he has been indelibly marked by communism. In denying its influence, he denies a part of himself. His speeches still creak with the wooden cliches of communism. He also has a habit of speaking of himself in the third person: “Walesa is unhappy . . . Walesa’s patience is running out.” When he lapses into the first person it is to claim credit for the whole revolution. That is the demotic Walesa familiar to most Poles. It is not the Walesa of this book, which, like most political memoirs, is an elaborate camouflage. Walesa’s real voice is disguised, as are his real ambitions. The book depicts him as a modest, hard-working family man who has managed to come to terms with fame, who does not want power but who, unfortunately, is condemned to wield it.

The truth is almost the exact reverse: He is a conceited man who sees his wife only at weekends, a cold man who has still not sorted out who or what he represents, a political animal craving power. The Polish version of this book flopped precisely because many Poles know, or sense, that the book is not the man. “The Struggle and the Triumph” has been tailored slightly for American readers, but they should follow the example of the Polish audience and invert the meaning of the sentences, risk ridicule by reading the book upside down. That certainly seems to be the way it was written.

Another way of approaching this memoir is to play psycho-detective. If Walesa is the child of communism, and he killed it off; if he made a father-figure out of Gierek and yet toppled him in 1980, then clearly you have to reach for your Freud. There is a sense in which all revolutionaries-turned-statesmen are working out Oedipal problems. Walesa even gives a few clues to this at the end of the book in a brief rehash of his earlier and more successful memoir, “A Path of Hope.” His father died when he was a baby. His mother then married his father’s brother. This was quite common in the Polish countryside after the war but it scarred Walesa and his older sister Izabella. They hated their stepfather and Walesa never really made his peace. The nearest he gets to forgiveness is to write: “Our stepfather wasn’t a bad man . . . he had made sacrifices for us.”

“The Struggle and the Triumph” is partly a diplomatic chronicle (prime ministers met, advice dispensed, interviews granted), partly a straightforward account of how communism crumbled during the 1980s, partly the bearing of wounds (notably his hurt at being excluded from decision-making after 1989) and a rounded portrait of his wife Danuta, the current First Lady. The bits about Danuta are the closest Walesa comes to personal intimacy and they are the best part of the book. She is a feisty working-class woman who blurts out what she thinks. Walesa lost this virtue early on. At one point Walesa takes sick leave from the shipyards in order to buy time for some underground politicking. The police pay a call. Danuta does not like it. Walesa reprints a taped record of the conversation:

Police Captain: Where is Walesa?

Danuta: They’re crawling all over the apartment . . . these gentlemen must think they own the place. The militia is here for you! Hey, just a second--look out, come on. Why are you pushing like that? My husband is coming.

Captain: You’re not the one I came for, madam.

Danuta: Look, now, just wait a minute!

Lech: Is this “People’s Power”?

Captain: Please, Mr. Walesa.

Danuta; Be quiet! Sop! Why are you forcing your way in like that? Wait for my husband to come out. You’re acting like an animal . . .

The dialogue continues in this tone for several pages. “You’re all imbeciles . . . pigs . . . cannibals . . . go on, get out your pistol and shoot . . . thugs . . . such clean-cut looking men but what bastards they are!!” At the end you feel sorry for the secret agents.

Sadly there is not much more like that in the book. Rather it reads like the Oscar acceptance speech of an obscure foreign director: He has to mouth nice words, but secretly he despises the glittering audience for their obvious ignorance of his work. Inside he is seething and saying: “I won, I beat the rotten system!” In fact, the Oscar winner has played the system, been rewarded by it and has become its captive. Is that what is happening to Walesa and his revolution? Is he becoming the kind of person he set out to destroy? In Poland, the joke is that the dictatorship of the proletariat has been replaced by the dictatorship of the proletarian. And when Poles see Solidarity dissidents-turned-ministers whisked around Warsaw in chauffeured Lancias and stuffing themselves at banquets, they are wont to remember Orwell’s “Animal Farm.” The pigs have led a four-legged revolution but now they are starting to strut around on two legs, mimicking humans. Walesa has not been corrupted in this way. He has always had a healthy interest in money and does not hide it in the book--he talks with pride of buying a villa in a leafy Gdansk suburb with the royalties of his first book--yet there is no sense of him having sold out.

But he does seem to be slipping into the shoes of Gierek, the last communist leader with genuine worker credentials. Walesa’s behavior is not that of a Pilsudski-martinet, not that of a revolutionary or a unionist, but rather of a First Secretary of the Communist Party. As president he has brought in loyalists from Gdansk--some with highly suspect biographies--just as Gierek called in his cronies from Silesia in 1971. These men (very few women) are chosen for their unflinching allegiance and they mix their advice with heavy doses of flattery. Gierek did not think much of parliament, nor does Walesa. Both men were suspicious of Warsaw cliques and intellectuals, both men made control of television a high priority, both leaders like to appeal over the heads of the political establishment directly to the people, both thought their proletarian experience (Gierek was a coal miner) had given them a special insight into, and hold on, the workers. The two leaders share the innate conservatism of industrial workers.

There are conspiracy theorists who argue that Walesa not only apes the ruling style of communists, he actually is one, a deep-cover agent since the 1970s who has now surrounded himself with other spooks. This book does not directly address the change but Walesa’s useful description of secret-police blundering (especially in the murder of Solidarity priest Father Jerzy Popieluszko) makes it clear that the conspiracy lobby is on the wrong track. To believe that Walesa was co-opted by the police and given the mission to dismantle communism peacefully and then protect ex-communists in the new democratic order, is to ascribe powers of genius to a force that was as numskulled as other parts of the Polish polit-bureaucracy. Only those committed to the Bobby Fischer school of political analysis can seriously believe that Walesa was a spy, or even an unwitting tool of the police.

It is difficult, however, to resist the idea that the revolution is coming round full circle. Of course important liberties have been won and democratic institutions are picking up strength. Poland of 1992 is incomparably better and freer than that of 1988. But the huge effort of systemic transition has taken over from the original magic. Can Poland, or any of the changing East European societies, shed communist central planning and embrace mass unemployment without a social explosion? Can they make the necessary leap without resorting to some form of benign dictatorship? And how benign is benign?

Walesa, neither the man nor the book, does little to inspire confidence in the democratic future of Poland. Walesa’s talent is for destruction, for breaking governments. That is as true now as it was in the communist days. Since becoming president in 1990, his main aim has been to accumulate and concentrate power and to that end he has sapped the authority of parliament. Perhaps that is the need of the times: Boris Yeltsin is doing something similar in Russia, and Vaclav Havel failed precisely because he did not manage to amass enough executive muscle. But what does Walesa want to do with this power? The next book may tell us. This one does not. It is merely a blurred snapshot of a man in motion, running somewhere or other, with no finishing line in sight.