PANEL ONE:
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE POLISH ROUND TABLE

Those who favor the peaceful way of resolving conflicts are always faced with similar questions and charges. How can one think about making a pact with an enemy? How can one seek a compromise with someone who should be punished for their crimes? And usually the answers given are similar. You have got to come to terms and seek compromise with the enemy, precisely because he is an enemy. There is no need to negotiate with friends. What is the real choice here? Either a war, easy to provoke, and which can last permanently, or a difficult path towards peace based on compromise. But a compromise always leaves something to be desired. To be able to live in peace and freedom, it is necessary to replace the language of war by the language of peace, and this was the attempt that Poland undertook ten years ago...

I often hear accusations that by having chosen the logic of compromise, I have betrayed my own biography. That's why I want to start commenting about my own case....The changes in the Soviet Union produced a new situation in which the Round Table became possible. That compromise was, as usual, the result of relative weakness of both partners. The authorities were too weak to trample us, and we were too weak to topple the authorities. And out of those two weaknesses a new chance arose for a new compromise resolution...

We argued a lot. I remember another of my colleagues who explained to me that it's not the communist authorities that will legalize Solidarity, but vice versa, Solidarity will lend legitimacy to the communist authorities. I remember a long conversation with a friend of mine, involved in the underground independent cultural activity, and for her the Round Table simply meant a betrayal of ideals, giving in to censorship, and giving up on true independence. I did not share these views but I understood these friends, because this sort of compromise could discredit us. It could! And it really required some sort of violation to one's self, of one's emotions and one's memory. I remember how hard it was for me to overcome my own internal resistance and fears. I remember how much effort it took me to try to understand the reasons of our yesterday's enemies, who now were to become adversaries and partners...

I remember the inauguration of the Round Table very well, when I was forced by Professor Geremek to put on a suit and a necktie, and when, listening to snide comments of Wałęsa and others, I went to the Viceroy Palace in Warsaw. To get into the debate room, one had to go upstairs, and at the top there were General Kiszczak and Secretary Stanisław Ciosek welcoming the guests. I managed to hide in the bathroom so as not to be seen by anybody to shake hands with the chief of police. I was simply afraid my wife will kick me out of the house. So I found a hiding place in the bathroom, waited for several minutes there, but as I emerged, Mr. Kiszczak was still there offering his hand in a handshake. You know, lights, cameras...and this was the way I lost my virginity! We had a sense of strangeness of our situation. Only two-and-a-half years before I had been released from prison, and there were my colleagues, friends from the underground...But at the same time, I was aware that some sort of historic shift was taking place which I was unable to define at that time. I understood one thing: the democratic opposition was finally taking a step over the threshold of legality. From that Viceroy's Palace our path could only lead either to the Rakowiecka Street prison or to the end of the communist system...

There were no secret agreements. We went ahead to the elections and we won in a manner that simply frightened us by its scale. We didn't know what to do with our victory, but what matters the most is that in those elections the communist system was rejected by the Polish nation...

The Round Table compromise was possible because on both sides there were people who risked accusations of betrayal by their own communities. And that's a reformer's fate, that they go at a snail's pace and they get banged on the head by their own extremists. But it's only thanks to such reformers that we can trust that the philosophy of agreement has a future and that one can build that future on the conviction that only a Poland shared by those who fought against the People's Republic and those who served the People's Republic can be a truly democratic Poland. If we exclude anybody, we will have to accept discrimination of some sort, which in the final analysis always results in lies and injustice. Thank God Poland has chosen another path.

...Among those who criticize the Round Table most violently are young right-wing activists who think...that the Round Table was, as Adam Michnik has said, "a transaction between the reds and the pinks." Well, at that time, when the leadership of the opposition, Lech Wałęsa, Mazowiecki, Geremek, Kuroń, Frasyniuk, Michnik of course, Bujak, and others...When these leaders had mustered their courage to trust us, although they had reasons not to do so, well today's young critics of the Round Table were in high school, or they were freshmen at universities. They have nothing in their resumes to prove heroic struggle against the communist regime, so they just write new resumes, trying to make up for that gap. Criticizing the Round Table, they present themselves as the ones who, had they been there then, would have really defeated those "commies" and they would have sent them where they belong, to detention camps somewhere, maybe not in Siberia, but they would have found a place. Well, this group, that is simply writing its own resume, thinks that "the reds" and "the pinks" have created a myth about the great importance of the Round Table negotiations, while the meetings at Magdalenka were actually cannibals' feasts. That's what I heard on one of the TV shows in Poland. Well, it's important to note that sometimes it's frightening to hear such opinions, because they demonstrate a completely ahistorical mode of thinking of some part of the Polish intelligentsia, mostly in the right-wing camp today.

...It is my opinion that during the first period, the communist party authorities, to whom I belonged and that's why I often say "we" and not "they," that regime was not politically or psychologically ready to accept the opposition as something that might exist in the socialist system, and even less ready to share power with it. And accepting trade unions independent of the state administration and really the state as such, no, that was not part of the very concept of socialism...after martial law was imposed, we in the party still believed that we faced a crisis, we were fully aware of that, but we thought we could weather the crisis on our own, without the opposition...

We believed, we were convinced that we could cope without the opposition and this conviction, as a matter of fact, lasted until the mid-1980's, but it was also related to our fear of the Soviet Union. Because the generation of Jaruzelski and, in general, the generation that went through the gulags, Polish communists, or those who later became communists, those who were cutting trees in Siberia, this generation came back to Poland with a sense of helplessness towards power. It wasn't any kind of servility but it was sheer fear and respect for the power east of the Bug river. That was one of the lessons that Jaruzelski learned, and in my opinion, there's no doubt that it had an impact on his attitude toward the opposition in the 1980's...

Now there is an opinion that the collapse of communism began with the fall of the Berlin Wall. I must say that, well, with all my admiration for the Germans, they are cheating us again. They've convinced the world. The Berlin Wall and that's it, the beginning of the fall. No, the Round Table was the beginning and others followed us.

...I am totally opposed and my view is negative when it comes to any attempts to build up a legend of the Round Table, in connection with its tenth anniversary. History from ten years back is not yet history; it is history in action, and in this regard, the legend has its own role to play...

The Round Table did not cause decomposition in the imperial structure of the Soviet Union; it was rather the consequence of that decomposition. It wasn't what sealed the collapse of communism as a socio-economic system. The end of the system was already perceived by Prime Minister Rakowski's government, which undertook steps in a new direction. It did accelerate, however, accelerated by a few months only changing the guard of power in Poland, and it did influence significantly, but not decisively, the manner of transferring the power...

Beyond its legend, the Round Table negotiations have been significant in the Polish political arena. Within this scope, undoubtedly, they have significance. However, those negotiations haven't had a universal caliber. It would be an illusion to seek analogies with the Spanish, Portuguese, or Chilean decline of the authoritarian system. In our country, it was a system that was imposed from outside, and it could survive only with outside support. In these other countries, the systems were indigenous and so were their declines. This is the reason why it's hard to imagine, unfortunately, that our formula could be helpful in solving the tragic events in the former Yugoslavia, that is, the present conflict in Kosovo.

Next Panel Two: The Political Contest, 1986-89

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