Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics: Opposition and Reform in Poland since 1968

Postscript

Postscript On August 24, 1989, Tadeusz Mazowiecki became Prime Minister of the Polish People's Republic, ending the communists' forty-four-year monopoly on power. Sooner than anyone had expected, and sooner than Solidarity had wanted, Solidarity itself took over the reins of state. Solidarity had entered the postelection era in June-when the Epilog above was written-hoping to be a tough opposition. Why take responsibility for an economic crisis that it had not created and that it had no idea how to resolve? Solidarity wanted to take things slowly-slowly for the Party, slowly for the USSR, and, perhaps most important, slowly for itself. Opposition is what its members were used to, not power, and they wanted to learn more about power before actually taking it. But Solidarity'S electoral triumph was too overwhelming. While Party candidates suffered humiliating defeats, "Wal~sa's team" won all but one of the 262 seats it was allowed to contest. It became difficult for the two sides to abide by the provisions of the Round Table Accord, which guaranteed state power for the Party, without making a mockery of the voters. And if the goal was to get the country out of its economic crisis by persuading people to accept austerity voluntarily, who could afford to mock the electorate? Solidarity gave General Jaruzelski the crucial tacit support that enabled him to win the presidency, and it was ready to accept his nominee for prime minister, too. But the Party botched the process. Although it graciously conceded defeat in the elections, it proposed merely to reshuffle the same top leadership, among the same top posts: former Party leader Jaruzelski became President, former Prime Minister Mieczyslaw Rakowski became Party leader, and former Interior Minister Czeslaw Kiszczak was chosen to be Prime Minister. This did 217 218 / Postscript not look like the "drawing of consequences" that the Party had promised in the wake of defeat. And so, once again, people began to feel that nothing had really changed, that the rulers were still the rulers, that Solidarity had been taken for a ride, that the whole process was a sham. The Solidarity leadership did not feel that way: Kiszczak, after all, was the Party leader who had done the most to bring about an accord, the man with whom Lech WaI~sa had been meeting regularly for over a year. But it was now unable to convince society at large, and, more important , unable to stop the new wave of strikes that threatened to drive the economy farther down the road to ruin. Solidarity had entered the parliamentary path to promote a democratic order in Poland, with emphasis on both parts of the equation. Disorder threatened to undermine everything, discrediting Party and Solidarity alike. And so, on August 7, WaI~sa came to the rescue, storming into the Sejm to announce that Solidarity would not support Kiszczak's candidacy; he formed an alliance with the United Peasant Party and the Democratic Party, now desperate to gain a modicum of legitimacy, that gave Solidarity the votes needed to form a government. On August 19, President Jaruzelski formally asked Tadeusz Mazowiecki to form a cabinet. Five days later, the Sejm approved. Solidarity had come to power. Henryk Wujec, the KOR activist who became chief organizer of Solidarity's parliamentary contingent, described the days after the June elections as "surrealistic," when "virtually straight from prison, we find ourselves in the 'palaces of power.' " 1 Perhaps nothing was as surrealistic as Jacek Kuron's being named Minister ofLabor, and even the PZPR voted for him. Yet the surrealism knew no bounds-not even national ones. Not only did Adam Michnik travel to Moscow, but he spoke there before a group of reformist deputies to the Supreme Soviet, which drew up a communique calling for cooperation between Soviet and Solidarity parliamentarians. Weeks later, Michnik went again to the Soviet Union, this· time to Kiev, where he spoke at the founding conference of the Ukrainian National Movement, shouting "Long live a free Ukraine!" Komsomolskaya Pravda then ran an extensive interview with Michnik in late September, allowing him to present his views freely to the paper's few million Soviet readers. The Soviet response to East European events has been extraordinary . When Party leader Rakowski expressed reservations about cooper- Postscript / 219 ating with a Solidarity government, it was Gorbachev who called him on the phone to argue that cooperation...