The year 1989 was actually a year of miracles, an annus mirabilis. Yet the answers to the question about the cause of communism’s demise differ according to your perspective. An American will answer that it was the result of US policy. In the Vatican, on the other hand, you will hear that the collapse of communism was mainly due to John Paul II and his work, which undermined the system’s legitimacy, especially in Poland. People in Berlin say the demise of communism was the result of a rational Ostpolitik that made the Soviet Union discuss things it had never wanted to talk about before. In Moscow everyone explains it was the result of Gorbachev’s perestroika, while in Warsaw you will hear that it came about thanks to Solidarity and Lech Walesa.
In a nutshell, there is no single answer to this question. A complex accumulation of factors allowed the political elite in the Soviet Union to come to the conclusion that a certain democratic modernization was inevitable and without it socialism would not survive. I am convinced that Mikhail Gorbachev wanted to modernize socialism, but not destroy the USSR. Paradoxically, communism fell apart because Soviet elites believed they could reform it, although in fact it was unreformable. When I look back, I have four perspectives: a Polish one, because I am Polish; a Russian one, because in reality that is where the cards were dealt; a central European one, because the demise of communism was not a purely Polish phenomenon; and finally, also the perspective of the west.
The west was not at all prepared for what happened. I can remember my discussions at the time with many important US politicians who came to Warsaw. They did not assume the communist dictatorship would collapse. They couldn’t see what was happening then in the Soviet Union and they had no idea at all – incidentally, neither did we in Poland – that the USSR would completely disintegrate. Perestroika released new forces and these in turn gave impetus to more processes that developed even more momentum. For a long time neither the communist ruling elites nor the opposition in eastern central Europe believed that an important process was actually taking placing in Russia. It was not clear at all in 1989 that Gorbachev would be in a position to accept the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact and talks about the unification of Germany in order to save communism in the USSR.
Revolution without a revolution
1989 is an incredibly important date. At the beginning of that year, only two countries, namely Poland and Hungary, were attempting to go their own way. However, that changed fast, like the patterns in a kaleidoscope, and sometimes single days were incredibly important. What had been impossible in January became a reality in February and by March you could demand much more. A number of things strike me when I think back about the significance of what happened at the Round Table in Poland and what became a kind of blueprint for other countries. First, it was a great revolution without a revolution. No one went on the streets. There were no barricades and no firing squads. Everyone remembered the barricades of 1980 and under martial law. People’s historical awareness defined the framework of what we saw in the future. None of us had an inkling of what would happen. As Aleksander Kwasniewski said many years later, it is unclear how everything would have developed if both sides in Poland had realized at the time that all this would have resulted in the unification of Germany. Nevertheless, people in the opposition were aware that a united Germany was only natural. The subject may not have been openly discussed, but that is what we thought. It was obvious to me that it would be impossible to maintain the division of Germany under normal conditions of democratic competition and that the GDR was a garrison state whose survival depended on the continued presence of the Red Army. The East German opposition thought differently. It was the most left-leaning opposition of all eastern bloc countries, which meant it was striving to achieve the democratization of the GDR. The autumn demonstrations in the former GDR began with the slogan “We are the people”, before the slogan “We are one people” was coined.
In Poland, the plan for a Round Table involved the idea of achieving the Finlandization of Poland. We knew we would not win a war against Russia, so we had to rely on what concessions we could gain from Russia. That is why perestroika was our natural ally. In 1988 I wrote my article on “The Argument about Stalinism” for the weekly newspaper Tygodnik Powszechny. The censor stopped it being printed although the quotations the authorities objected to most stemmed from Soviet newspapers. That shows how much later and against how much resistance perestroika came to us. The Polish censor even deleted the word “Stalinism”. At the end of the 1980s the Soviet press was far more liberal and freer than Polish newspapers. Eventually, however, the censor let the article through. It was the first article since 1966 that officially appeared under my own name. That, too, was a sign of change.
The path to the Round Table
Paradoxically, a second factor involved the intensified German-German talks at the end of the 1980s. In my texts during that period I asked General Jaruzelski why Polish-Polish talks were impossible, while dialogue was taking place between Honecker and Kohl. After almost ten years, it became apparent that basically, as a result of martial law, the modernization project was heading towards the “Chinese model”, the only thing was that our dictatorship was not as strong as in China. The rulers realized that they would have to try something new because Poland was highly indebted and unable to solve its problems under its own steam. Quarrels continued for a long time among Poland’s ruling camp about how they should view the Round Table. The strikes of May and August 1988 led to the situation in which Zbigniew Messner’s government was removed from office. The new prime minister was Mieczyslaw F. Rakowski, long-time editor-in-chief of the weekly newspaper Polityka. He wanted to bring about a radical improvement in living conditions to gain support for his policies and thereby marginalize the Solidarity opposition.
He did not succeed. Eventually, it became the prevailing view within the ruling camp that talks should be initiated with the opposition. Decisive here was a television debate between Lech Walesa and Alfred Miodowicz, chairman of the government-backed unions. The whole of Poland sat down in front of their television sets that evening. It was the moment of truth: Walesa knocked out Miodowicz completely. Poland boiled over with enthusiasm. The path to the Round Table was open.
Adam Michnik
was an anticommunist dissident who is today the publisher of the largest Polish daily newspaper “Gazeta Wyborzca”.
The article is a shortened version of the opening address of the conference “Freedom within Sight: Europe 1989/2009”, March 2009
