Between the Brown and the Red: Nationalism, Catholicism, and Communism in Twentieth-Century Poland—The Politics of Boleslaw Piasecki

7. The Exit of the Crusader, 1970–79

7 ||| The Exit of the Crusader, 1970–79 In 1972, while speaking to his collaborators, Piasecki acknowledged: “This is the best leadership of the party and the state we have ever had in the history of People’s Poland. But then the question is: if such a leadership does not esteem PAX and its role, then which one will?”1 Three years later, Józef Tejchma observed: “Piasecki concentrates on reforming socialism in the spirit of Catholicism rather than Catholicism in the spirit of socialism.”2 These two comments, one by Piasecki and the other by Gierek’s minister of culture, hold the key to understanding how Piasecki’s position deteriorated in the 1970s. Piasecki viewed Gierek’s government as the most PAX-friendly with which he had dealt since the end of the war. Gradually, however, he became aware that the regime did not take him seriously. As the era of ideology declined, Piasecki’s doctrinaire obsessions made him a political fossil. Józef Tejchma, one of Gierek’s most pragmatic officials, certainly viewed him this way. Piasecki had not changed: under the mask of a politician was the old militant, a revolutionary who still believed in the power of ideology. As the 1970s progressed, however, Polish communists ceased to be ideology-driven zealots. Downplaying the gospel of Marxism, opening the country to the West, and focusing on the economy, the Gierek government led society away from austerity and ideological discourse and toward a consumerist paradise. Ultimately, Gierek’s ambitious modernization exposed the weakness of the Polish economy, the corruption of the ruling elite, and the inadequacy of the sociopolitical system. But before this happened, the complex legacies of World War II, the communist takeover, and Stalinism— all historical factors that determined the course of Gomułka’s period— had faded. The Exit of the Crusader, 1970–79 | 163 The ideological decadence of communism was not the only factor in Piasecki’s transformation into a museum piece. Equally important was the birth of the democratic opposition. Although the new opposition did not pose any serious threat to the communist system in Piasecki’s lifetime, its advent signaled a new intellectual and political alternative, neither nationalistCatholic nor Marxist. Unlike Piasecki, the dissidents did not carry ideological ballast from the old era. The inception of dialogue between the Church and the noncommunist Left (which formed the backbone of the dissident movement in the 1970s) obliterated the raison d’être of PAX, the simple idea that the Church would never make peace with the Left. This paradigm had proved adequate for almost thirty years of communist rule, but in the 1970s both the Church and the party-state abandoned the tactic of confrontation . By the time Piasecki died in 1979, both he and PAX had lost all political and ideological relevance. The Fall of Gomułka In post-March Poland, Piasecki eagerly awaited Gomułka’s replacement by Edward Gierek, the powerful political boss of Silesia. Between the summer of 1968 and December 1970, the two men met several times. These conversations convinced Piasecki that the removal of Gomułka was a matter of time, but meanwhile, he still had to cope with Gomułka’s actions.3 In April 1970, for instance, Gomułka blocked Piasecki’s official visit to the Soviet Union. Piasecki also had serious doubts about the mutual recognition treaty signed between Poland and West Germany in Warsaw on December 7, 1970, which accepted Poland’s western borders and established formal diplomatic relations between Warsaw and Bonn. Piasecki’s first worry was that the Germans would manipulate the treaty in the future: the agreement bound the Federal Republic, but what would be its value in the event of German reunification? Piasecki was also afraid that West Germany intended to weaken the Polish-Soviet alliance: he warned that the Germans planned to use their normalization agreement with the Soviet Union as a “return to the old pattern of Russian-Prussian relations, symbolized by [the anti-Polish] policy of Bismarck.” He also feared that by opening its doors to the German economy, Poland could find itself in the position of Yugoslavia, a nominally socialist country that was completely dependent on Western credit.4 164 | Between the Brown and the Red As a man educated in Dmowski’s school, Piasecki was a Germanophobe: better with Russia against Germany than the other way around was the belief...