Lech Wałęsa and the Politics of History
We need to set the substantive argument aside right at the start: there is no way we will ever know for sure whether Lech Wałęsa gave information to the communist security services in the early 1970s. The political stakes here are simply too high for any evidence to be persuasive for those not already predisposed to one or the other position.
People outside Poland are mystified by this whole affair. How could the man who led the movement that toppled the communists in Poland, and began the process that led ultimately to the overthrow of communism throughout Eastern Europe, be a communist agent? It seems more like a headline from The Onion than a serious news item.
But the suspicions are all too real, and therein lies the story that we should follow. The current government in Poland is hard to fit into any familiar ideological categories, as I have argued elsewhere. One can read the documents and speeches of Jarosław Kaczyński and his Law and Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, or PiS), but that will only cast a partial light on this unusual phenomenon. Holding together all those disjointed beliefs is a story about Poland’s recent history, and if you believe that story, then everything PiS is doing makes perfect sense. What follows is a summary of the PiS understanding of history—it definitely does not reflect my own interpretations (which can be found here), and its connection to what actually happened is (to be charitable) tenuous.
The tale begins about four decades ago, as the Polish People’s Republic was unravelling. The economy in the late 1970s was no longer growing, shortages were endemic, and the communist leadership had lost all legitimacy. The Solidarity Movement nearly toppled the communists in 1980-1981, only to be suppressed by a military coup carried out by enemies of the Polish nation. Afterwards the communists realized that their days were numbered, so they began planning a way to hold on to real power even as they appeared to surrender political authority. Working with collaborators highly placed within the Solidarity movement—mostly members of the intelligentsia, who never did have a genuine bond with the Polish people—the communists staged the so-called “Round Table Talks” of 1989. The arrangement that came out of these negotiations enabled the old state apparatus to seize the nation’s wealth in the name of “privatization,” allowing the creation of what seemed on the surface to be a democracy. But it was not a true democracy, because it was manipulated by unseen forces in league with foreign interests. These morally bankrupt people ensured that the state would remain weak, allowing private interests from the one side and international forces from the other to keep the Polish nation powerless and poor. Since Pope John Paul II endorsed Poland’s entrance to the European Union, that must have been a good thing. Nonetheless, the corrupt elites running Poland allowed Brussels to continue the assault on the nation, undermining Polish morality by pushing alien values like gay rights and feminism. It seemed like all this might get turned around in 2005, when PiS first rose to power, but the enemies were too strong. Simply removing Jarosław Kaczyński from the prime minister’s office in 2007 wasn’t enough for them, because his twin brother Lech Kaczyński remained the country’s president. In 2010, therefore, they plotted to eliminate the nation’s defenders once and for all. When nearly 100 of Poland’s greatest leaders, including President Kaczyński and his wife, travelled to Smolensk, Russia, to attend a ceremony commemorating a WWII massacre of Polish POWs by Stalinist forces (certainly not a coincidence!), their plane was brought down and everyone on board was killed. Donald Tusk, then the Polish Prime Minister and now the President of the European Union, is responsible (at least morally, but probably directly) for this assassination, most likely in league with Vladimir Putin and/or Angela Merkel. From those dark times, Jarosław Kaczyński led the movement of genuine Polish patriots gradually back to power, finally triumphing in 2015 by putting PiS loyalists in the offices of president and prime minister. Now the old elite that had been holding Poland back for so many decades can finally be destroyed, and the pseudo-revolution of 1989 can be replaced with a genuine revolution that will return Poland’s greatness.
Different components of this story are advocated in various combination, sometimes in vague terms that downplay the most explicit conspiratorial elements, sometimes in ways that make the plots even more byzantine. The key element throughout all these variations is a belief that the elite ruling Poland up until 2015 has its roots in the communist era, that the Third Republic (as the state created in 1989 was known) was not a genuine Polish democracy, and that all will be well if only those corrupt, cosmopolitan, anti-Polish forces can be vanquished. Crucially, that process must encompass both the present and the past, so that young Poles will understand who their genuine heroes should be.
This is the context for the most recent “revelation” that documents have been found “proving” that Lech Wałęsa was a communist agent. PiS-affiliated historians have in fact been making this case for many years, and these new developments only reinforce what they already believed. Because Wałęsa, as leader of Solidarity in the 1980s, made the key decisions leading to the 1989 Round Table negotiations, he must by definition have been either duped by Poland’s enemies, or openly collaborating with them. Given his symbolic importance, he must be discredited in order for the field to be cleared, allowing new leaders to emerge. Jarosław Kaczyński has already been arguing that his brother should be the true symbol of Solidarity, replacing Wałęsa—this despite the fact that the Kaczyński twins were marginal figures in the 1980s. Then the proper rewriting of Poland’s recent past can begin, and the work of fully discrediting the existing Polish elite (economic, cultural, academic, and political) can proceed. Recently a new commission was formed to “investigate” the Smolensk crash, made up entirely of those who have already expressed their belief that it was an assassination. Legal prosecutions are also underway, and more are sure to follow.
When those who believe in conspiracy theories take power, we have to take their conspiracy theories very seriously. If they believe that the world works through plots and deception, then it follows that these are the methods that they consider appropriate to deploy against their enemies. Under these circumstances, it is quite extraordinary that the incriminating documents against Wałęsa have emerged precisely now, right after PiS successfully asserted its control over the domestic Polish media and the courts. Maybe they are legitimate, maybe the are not, but if we get bogged down in that debate we are missing the point. The argument itself sows all the doubt necessary to tarnish Wałęsa’s legacy, and that is what matters right now. Even if Jarosław Kaczyński fails to ever lift his own popularity (he continues to have the highest negative rating of any public figure in Poland, which is why he rules behind the scenes), he can at least ensure that everyone else gets dragged down to his level.