Over the last few days Gazeta Wyborcza has been running an excellent series devoted to Komitet Obrony Robotników (Workers’ Defence Committee), to mark the thirtieth anniversary of this, the first open opposition movement in the Soviet bloc and the forerunner of the Solidarity movement. Authors include well known opposition figures and people still prominent in Polish public life such as Seweryn Blumsztajn, Konrad Bieliński, Bronisław Wildstein, Róża Woźniakowska Thun, Władysław Bartoszewski, Zbigniew Bujak and Lech Wałęsa. You might expect these tales of late seventies communist Poland to be ones of oppression, depression and repression but no — the most striking thing about the series is the sense of euphoria (Piotr Wierzbicki) felt by the participants in this then tiny movement. Blumsztajn, editor of the illegal and uncensored Biuletyn Informacyjny writes:

Never again did I have a greater sense of safety. I knew that every one of the people I worked with would replace me if I were put away and would go to jail in my defence. That was the most important principle of the movement.

Wildstein, a founder of Studencki Komitet Solidarnościowy (Student Solidarity Committee) says that Cracow felt free – in the late 1970s! In nearly all of the accounts the late Jacek Kuroń’s name recurs. Zbigniew Bujak tells of his surprise in learning that a simple working man like himself had only to ring Kuroń. Eugeniusz Smolar, then a journalist with the BBC, describes Kuroń ringing him and dictating to him reports on the repression of opposition figures in Poland. Maciej Kuroń describes beating off the heavy squad from a lecture given by his father in their home: “TKN” stands for Towarzystwo Kursów Naukowych (Society for Academic Courses), an organisation dedicated to teaching all comers without conforming to communist dictates. Władysław Bartoszewski was arrested for delivering a lecture in a private flat which he had delivered the week before at KUL (the Catholic University of Lublin), the only “free” university in the eastern bloc. No doubt there is a certain amount of romanticisation of the past in the reminiscences of the past. (It has been claimed that the nostalgia felt by some for communist Poland is in fact a nostalgia for lost youth.) But if you have locked arms to repel a baton charge it will all ring true. There’s no other word for it really: solidarity. Well, maybe comradeship as well.

And now, in 2006, what is left? Now we have “TKM,” “teraz kurwa my”, which loosely translates as “now it’s our fucking turn” (i.e. to get our snouts in the trough). Go to KUL now and you will notice it has been renamed. It is now the Catholic University of Lublin John Paul II and its interior is festooned with posters equating homosexuality with mental illness, child abuse and drug abuse and offering to “cure” you of it. The lecturers joke that John Paul, who once lectured there, was thrown out because he was too liberal.

Today Bronisław Wildstein is a PiS bootboy, who makes none-too veiled threats of suing to journalists impertinent enough to ask him who he works for. Antoni Macierewicz, a leading KOR activist, is now, to put it diplomatically, a divisive figure. The Kaczyński brothers – yes they were in this as well – see the round table talks of 1989 (in which they took part) as a sellout to the communists. Ludwik Dorn was also active in the democratic opposition: now look at him congratulating the police for illegally breaking up peaceful demonstrations.

Naturally, the contributors are not unaware of this. Ewa Milewicz recalls the words of Jacek Kleyff, who said that if his persecutor of today were in the future to be persectued his doors would be open to him. Where is this spirit of trust and brotherhood now? Piotr Wierzbicki writes, in quite a moving piece: “The transformation of Antoni Macierewicz from a Warsaw member of the intelligentsia into a nationalist Catholic telling fairy tales about Masons was a shock to me.” Wierzbicki was from 1993 to 2005 editor of Gazeta Polska. The following quote from that paper comes from September 6th 2006, after Wierzbicki’s editorship:

The fact of secret service talks [i.e. with Kuroń] would not be so embarassing for Kuroń’s fans if they had resulted in a normal democratic country. As it is, there is something less than normality […] We don’t know the exact decisions reached in the talks between the secret service and Kuroń and his political friends. This is precisely what this politician’s modern day defenders are most ashamed of.

The posthumous smearing of Jacek Kuroń is perhaps the hardest thing of all to take. So he had talks with the communists? We can only guess how many lives that saved in the – as it turned out – peaceful handover of power. The British for many bloody years refused to talk to what they regarded as a terrorist organisation in Northern Ireland. When they finally did, the killing abated. Leszek Kołakowski is worth quoting at some length:

Today the Polish Round Table and its participants are frequently slandered and reviled, often by people who didn’t lift a finger if it meant bringing themselves to the attention of the Polish People’s Republic authorities. They know that getting involved in talks with the communist government was a crime, that the affair should have been settled entirely differently. How? This they don’t say. Should an uprising have been started, bringing the country to its feet? If so, why didn’t they rise up? Who was stopping them? We don’t know. But we do know the terrible conditions and the immense difficulties the first government, of Mazowiecki, Balcerowicz, Skubiszewski and Kuroń, worked in while putting the country on a new track. They succeeded in the end and for this TP (True Poles) cannot forgive them, claiming they would have done it differently and a hundred times better (we still don’t know how though) and without sullying themselves with the negotiations with commies that cause TPs to react with such horror.

I leave readers to guess who the “TPs” might be.