The Convolutions of Historical Politics

Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance: A Ministry of Memory?

Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance: A Ministry of Memory? DAriuSz StolA Poland was late among the countries of Central and Eastern Europe to establish a public institution to deal with the legacy of its Communist past. As elsewhere, the main reason for its establishment, and the most burning issue the institution was to tackle, was the operation of the Communist secret police and the post-1989 careers of its former secret collaborators. It was only in 2000 that construction of such institution begun. Causes of the delay were complex but three of them played key roles at three stages of Poland’s political history of the 1990s.1 First, in the early 1990s the negotiated and peaceful transition from the dictatorship of the Communist party, combined with a widespread consensus that economic reforms were the priority, pushed the questions of lustration (i.e. vetting or screening the past of public officials and revealing former Security collaborators) and of coming to terms with the Communist past to the margins of public debates. The 1 The subject of the Communist past is regularly present in the media and there is plethora of publications on the so called history policy (polityka historyczna ) or politics of memory in contemporary Poland. Major books include: P. Śpiewak, Pamięć po komunizmie. Gdańsk 2005; L. Cichocka, A. Panecka (eds), Polityka historyczna: historycy – politycy – prasa. Warsaw, 2005; M. Cichocki, P. Kosiewski, Pamięć jako przedmiot władzy. Warsaw: Fundacja im. Stefana Batorego, 2008; M. Cichocki, Władza i pamięć: o politycznej funkcji historii. Kraków 2005; P. Kosiewski, Pamięć i polityka zagraniczna . Warszawa 2006; L.M. Nijakowski, Polska polityka pamięci: esej socjologiczny . Warsaw, 2008; S.M. Nowinowski, et al ., Pamięć i polityka historyczna : doświadczenia Polski i jej sąsiadów, Łódź, 2008; R. Stobiecki, Historiografia PRL . Ani dobra, ani mądra, ani piękna . . . ale skomplikowana . Studia i szkice. Warsaw, 2007; R. Traba, Przeszłość w teraźniejszości: polskie spory o historię na początku XXI wieku. Poznań, 2009. 46 The Convolutions of Historical Politics first non-Communist minister of interior, Krzysztof Kozłowski, having dissolved the Security Service, argued that declassifying its archives would be impractical, harmful, and cruel for victims of the past regime. Many of the former Security officers who passed the screening procedure were taken in service of the new Office for State Protection, and their new colleagues somehow absorbed the idea to keep their archival assets secret. Second, the issue came to the center of the political stage in 1992 but in a least promising way: with an ill-worded and ill-prepared report of the Minister of Interior Antoni Macierewicz on the Security files related to persons holding key public offices.2 This proved counterproductive : most of the deputies rejected the report, which listed a few dozen names of ministers, deputies and the president himself, as an attempt to destroy opponents of the unstable government, a threat to new Polish democracy and to its political elite. They promptly dismissed its author and the whole cabinet in the atmosphere of a major scandal. The events of June 1992 contributed to suspicious or openly hostile attitudes of many political and opinion leaders of the center and left towards the idea of lustration and to the idea of opening of the Security archives in general. Third, in 1993 the post-Communist Social Democrats won the elections and through the following four years they made their best to prevent or at least delay any legislation on the issue.3 Also later on, when the electoral defeat of the Social Democrats in 1997 brought a different composition of the Sejm, the birth of the institution to take charge of the Security archives was long and difficult . It was only in late 1998, after battles between its proponents on the parliamentary right and center, and adversaries on the left, after equally heated quarrels between leaders of the post-Solidarity camp, and against harsh criticism from a significant part of the media, including the major national daily Gazeta Wyborcza, that the Parliament finally voted the act on the Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej – IPN), which was immediately but 2 See for example Dudek, Historia polityczna Polski 1989–2005. 201–211. 3 For a systematic presentation of the early attempts see Grzelak, Wojna o lustrację. The Constitutional Tribunal declared that the bill which allowed Macierewicz to present his report was unlawful. 47...