Home / Press review / Archive / Magazine / Current / Dictatorships in Retrospect / Article

A curse from the past

The Poles are immersed in a dispute over different approaches to dealing with their past: Would it be better to simply consider the whole matter of the communist regime closed, or should each and every former secret service agent or functionary be called to account for their crimes.

In Poland the process of democratisation began in spring 1989 with round-table talks between representatives of the communist regime and the Solidarność movement. Since then two conflicting stances on how to come to terms with the dictatorship have collided with each other.

A woman looks at a street exhibition about the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981, Warsaw 2006.

Photo: AP/Czarek Sokolowski

On the one side initially were the central figures who led the democratic opposition as well as the architects of the transition agreements. They called for "making a clean break with the past and a new beginning”. Their goal was to guide post-communist Poland towards a democratic, pluralistic and liberal future. To achieve this, the former communist party, which in the meantime had reinvented itself as a "social democratic” party, was to be allowed to continue as a political force in the democratic game. This, however, implied neither immunity from criminal prosecution (in the sense of a general amnesty) for the functionaries of the communist regime and the state security authorities nor amnesty for former crimes and offences. Rather, these matters were to be left to the judiciary.

The quest to "settle scores”

On the other side was a political movement led by "lower-ranking” members of the anti-communist pro-democratic opposition movement and persons who were not active in the opposition. This increasingly powerful movement demanded a "settling of scores” with the dictatorship by means of public punishment of the communist old guard and above all those who had worked for the secret services. Even though the planned "law for decommunisation” under which functionaries and members of the former communist party would have been banned from public office was never actually enacted because it would have represented a blatant violation of the constitutional principle of equality before the law, functionaries of the former communist secret service were removed from office, particularly those who had had a hand in the persecution of the opposition and the Catholic Church.

In the 1990s access was given to the archives of the communist secret service for research purposes. However, access to so-called operative documents – files containing personal data on former officers, agents and collaborators as well as persons who were persecuted by the police and "recruited” as informants – remained blocked. In 1997 a special tribunal was set up by law and tasked with examining the political past of candidates for important public positions in the government or parliament – from which officers of the former secret service were excluded – and given access to these person-related files.

Handing over the files

Towards the end of the 1990s the confrontation between those who wanted to "make a clean break with the past and a new beginning" and the advocates of a radical revision of the past involving criminal prosecution as the principal goal escalated. The revisionists called for the agreements of 1989 to be rescinded. The old communists, they claimed, were betraying the cause of freedom, robbing Poland of its democracy and denouncing alleged allies from the Solidarność ranks. In order to "protect Polish freedom" from this secret conspiracy among ex-communists, secret service employees and their guardians within the democratic ex-opposition, the revisionists argued that it was necessary to remove all former collaborators from public life. In doing so the leaders of the revisionists pointed to the archives of the former secret service, which in the meantime and under new legislation had been passed on in their entirety to the Polish Institute of National Remembrance. This institute was founded to promote research into the communist era and facilitate the criminal prosecution of any crimes committed by the communist dictatorship.

The anti-revisionists held the view that the secret service archives were not absolutely credible and should not be used as a political weapon for destroying people's lives. They argued that accusations of collaboration would cause irreparable damage to the reputations of people who had been forced through threats and coercion to act as informants.

The lustration law

Nonetheless, with the passage of time and as the commission progressed with its task of ordering the contents of the archives, the documents – including lists and files containing the personal data of agents and collaborators that up to that time had been inaccessible to the public – increasingly became available to journalists and researchers. The revisionists' campaign, with its slogan "the truth will liberate us" culminated in 2006 in the passage of a lustration law (investigation law) by the Polish parliament, which at the time was dominated by the revisionists. Under the new law the personal history of nearly a million citizens – including politicians, journalists and even school teachers – was to be re-examined in order to establish any possible ties with the former secret services. As a first step in this "investigation" the law forced all the people in question to submit declarations on any connections they may have had with the communist state security authority. The law was an abject failure; Poland's Constitutional Court ruled that the text contained up to 40 violations of the constitution.

One of the advocates of the idea of a lustration procedure based on secret service archives was Jarosław Kaczyński, the Polish head of government from 2005 to 2007. He repeatedly attacked opponents of the lustration and described them as instruments and protectors of the former secret services.

The debate about Walesa

But in the media the "wild" campaign of denouncing alleged communist agents continued and was instrumentalised for political purposes with the files of many public figures being leaked to the press. Predictably, this campaign has affected above all those who were well known for criticising the politically motivated poking around in people's pasts. Its latest victim is no other than Lech Walesa, the legendary leader of the Solidarność movement, Polish national hero and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. The debate about Walesa began with the publication of a book. Two employees of the Institute of National Remembrance hoped to prove with the book that in the 1970s Walesa had worked as an informant for the secret service under the pseudonym "Bolek”. Walesa vehemently denied these allegations and contested them in a recently published autobiography.

For the authors of the campaign, for which ex-head of government Jarosław Kaczyński and his twin brother, current Polish President Lech Kaczyński have publicly drummed up support, the attacks against Lech Walesa are a means of calling the whole process of Poland's democratic transformation since 1989 into question and portraying it as treason and betrayal of the Polish people by an alliance of false elites consisting of Solidarność and the ex-communists.

Maciej Stasiński

Maciej Stasiński was born in Warsaw in 1955. From 1981 to 1995 he worked as a correspondent for La Vanguardia in Barcelona. Since 1995 he ...
» to author index

Further articles on the subject » History, » Domestic Policy, » Poland
More from the press review on the subject » History, » Domestic Policy, » Poland