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Communism's Negotiated Collapse: The Polish Round Table, Ten Years Later
PANEL SIX:
Mieczysław Rakowski
...So what is weighing so heavily on my heart? Well, it's the fact that I have a swallowing problem. I cannot keep on swallowing those opinions that are being uttered here today and that were uttered here yesterday. And those opinions that state that our intentions—I've also heard that we are generously granted the right to live, because I quote, "independently of their biographies," at the Round Table, "they still did something for Poland." So we are still allowed to breathe and to take an exam on our attachment to democracy... Nobody will be surprised when I say that not once and not twice within the past ten years I've gone through a critical reckoning of my life, analyzed my attitudes, my life, my judgments and opinions, and so on. I've done it of my own will, and also based on some accusations that were being brought up against the People's Republic of Poland and the people who played key roles in that system. I admit it's not easy to talk about myself but there are some circumstances that allow us to work through our natural reservations. You know, I don't think that somebody who's not biased, somebody who is not dressing up in the armor of a saint fighting a dragon would count me among the hard-liners, the "party concrete." I'm classifying myself into the reformist wing of PZPR and I'm not sure how development of Poland would have gone without the wing that I represent. The reformist wing, I believe, deserves to be analyzed in a factual and friendly way, and not to be treated like a dog's fifth leg... It's not the most important issue that reformers constituted a minority. The most important thing is that we could not afford to say no openly and to organize ourselves within the party. Why? Well, why couldn't we afford that? Because for many years we had been prisoners of a few dogmas defining our behaviors and attitudes. There was a dogma about the detriment of fragmentation, and from that dogma another one stemmed, the one about party's unity as an absolutely crucial thing. And I have to admit that such unity did not exist. The Polish communist party gathered all kinds of attitudes from the national democrats to some really hard-headed fundamentalists. We were also prisoners of the leading role of the party dogma, the unquestioned role of the leader dogma, and finally the dogma of an absolute superiority of the socialist economy over the capitalist one. And finally, we, the members of the party who were keen on reforms, were also prisoners of that dogma that preached the absolute detriment of any criticism of the Soviet Union... Once I spoke to one of the leaders in the opposition, a man whom I respect a lot, who had been imprisoned for nine years, and I asked him, "Listen, who was right? You or I?" And he said, "We were both needed..."
"...I do not consider myself a loser; I'm a guy who was representing a party that in the first round of the ‘89 elections received four million four hundred fifty thousand votes, and that is twenty-eight percent, and Solidarity received thirty-eight percent. For the sake of comparison, in the last election AWS (Solidarity Electoral Action) received four million four hundred twenty-seven and a half thousand votes. Well, I don't believe, I'm not expecting a fair judgment, yet I believe that it would be good to perceive Polish reality of that time as a multi-
I'd like to say that I treated the Round Table as a beginning of an evolutionary change of the system. I believed that economic reforms, regardless of their range, would bring about stratification within the material sphere, and that stratification would cause emergence of political parties with diverse interests...
I simply did not accept at the time, and I still don't accept today the conclusion that we should have just chopped out everything down to the roots, the entire People's Poland system, and then we would just have a wonderful, democratic country. It seems to me that anybody who gives up on revolution and bloodshed must be in favor of more evolutionary changes.
As for the question of representativeness, at the Round Table, the representation was relatively limited. It was limited to that trend, which was not in itself uniform, the trend putting a high stake on that solution, on the negotiation solution...
I was to some extent a beneficiary of communism, because thanks to communism I've had a very interesting life, I've had a number of close friendships, I've had a sense of some common bond. Without communism, I probably wouldn't have had it. And also what I do now I owe to the fact that communism was around once upon a time. So I wouldn't overdo the victim part. When it comes to joining the Round Table, I would say that some dual responsibility was our driving force. Above all, it was responsibility for those who had been actually persecuted, who actually lost something after martial law because of their Solidarity activities. It was quite different from us. In 1989, we were pretty well fixed, we knew how to live in this system, but there were others who didn't. They really were persecuted; they lost their jobs and had no chance in life. This was one thing and the other was that thanks to communism I may have been set up pretty well, but Poland wasn't. And it was necessary to look for ways out of communism. So the Round Table seemed at that time to be the only way. And what's more, and I've mentioned this before, nobody had formulated another way.
We were not afraid so much of Solidarity itself as that Solidarity would not be able to put the genie back in the bottle...
The Polish Church was very important in reaching the compromise. It's a great, honorable page in its history, and I'm sure future generations will acknowledge it when the distance is further from that time and evaluations may be more rational. A centrally run structure, which was the party, better understood and trusted another strong structure than an unbridled Solidarity which was only in the state of emerging...
I must say definitely that the fundamental thing was the will to change and reach compromise. General Wojciech Jaruzelski had that will. He had the real power and things in Poland did not have to go the way they went. Well, it was possible to maneuver, delay, ignore the election plebiscite of the June ‘89 elections. We heard such advice. Jaruzelski, however, accepted the challenge and, I think, with full awareness of its potential consequences. Also Lech Wałęsa and his colleagues from the Solidarity leadership had enough imagination and courage. In retrospect, we can clearly say that both sides acted in good will, and the negotiations were conducted by the book...
The logic of events shows that things were intermingled, borders were liquid, and there was no black-or-
What was the important source of that power struggle, about at least a partial control over the union? Well, in my opinion, the crux of the matter here was a sizable difference in political concepts. In short, it's possible to simplify it as a debate whether Solidarity as a social movement is to have one political heir in the form of some Solidarity political party, Solidarity movement, whatever the name, and by the way, I believe the concept was constantly evolving, or whether Solidarity should have many political heirs...
I was deeply, deeply convinced that the new balance created by the Round Table, that new balance that was all about removing the party's leadership in the society but at the same time maintaining some kind of political power, that is control over the country, by the party would have to be temporary and would not be able to survive four years, as it was practically decided at the Round Table. Yet, in May before the election, I wasn't sure that it would only last a few months, but we simply believed that these contacts were worth having, because in the overall context of changes they could turn out very useful...
Within the nation at that time, the feeling was that economically we were poorly off, and that the cause of this economic misery was the communist system. And there was the great hope, incredibly dangerous, by the way, that the very change of this situation would cause improvement in people's economic situation. In general, during the entire election campaign that was the very first question: when will things get better?
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