The passion of Poland : from Solidarity through the state of war

by Lawrence Weschler

Traces the history of the Polish trade union, Solidarity, and describes the economic and social conditions in modern Poland

263 pages, Paperback

First published April 12, 1984

About the author

Lawrence Weschler, a graduate of Cowell College of the University of California at Santa Cruz (1974), was for over twenty years (1981-2002) a staff writer at The New Yorker, where his work shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies. He is a two-time winner of the George Polk Award (for Cultural Reporting in 1988 and Magazine Reporting in 1992) and was also a recipient of Lannan Literary Award (1998).

His books of political reportage include The Passion of Poland (1984); A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers (1990); and Calamities of Exile: Three Nonfiction Novellas (1998).

His “Passions and Wonders” series currently comprises Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin (1982); David Hockney’s Cameraworks (1984); Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (1995); A Wanderer in the Perfect City: Selected Passion Pieces (1998) Boggs: A Comedy of Values (1999); Robert Irwin: Getty Garden (2002); Vermeer in Bosnia (2004); and Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences (February 2006). Mr. Wilson was shortlisted for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Everything that Rises received the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.



Recent books include a considerably expanded edition of Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, comprising thirty years of conversations with Robert Irwin; a companion volume, True to Life: Twenty Five Years of Conversation with David Hockney; Liza Lou (a monograph out of Rizzoli); Tara Donovan, the catalog for the artist’s recent exhibition at Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art, and Deborah Butterfield, the catalog for a survey of the artist’s work at the LA Louver Gallery. His latest addition to “Passions and Wonders,” the collection Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative, came out from Counterpoint in October 2011.

Weschler has taught, variously, at Princeton, Columbia, UCSC, Bard, Vassar, Sarah Lawrence, and NYU, where he is now distinguished writer in residence at the Carter Journalism Institute.

He recently graduated to director emeritus of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, where he has been a fellow since 1991 and was director from 2001-2013, and from which base he had tried to start his own semiannual journal of writing and visual culture, Omnivore. He is also the artistic director emeritus, still actively engaged, with the Chicago Humanities Festival, and curator for New York Live Ideas, an annual body-based humanities collaboration with Bill T. Jones and his NY Live Arts. He is a contributing editor to McSweeney’s, the Threepeeny Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review; curator at large of the DVD quarterly Wholphin; (recently retired) chair of the Sundance (formerly Soros) Documentary Film Fund; and director of the Ernst Toch Society, dedicated to the promulgation of the music of his grandfather, the noted Weimar emigre composer. He recently launched “Pillow of Air,” a monthly “Amble through the worlds of the visual” column in The Believer.

(from www.lawrenceweschler.com)

Reviews

[Lukasz Pruski · Rating 4 out of 5]

"'Please abandon hope,' the voice of the police commander intones in a recent poem by the émigré Stanisław Barańczak. 'I want this square, this brain, this country cleared of hope, so it will be pure as a tear.'"

The book I am reviewing here should be required reading for all people in Poland who have not themselves experienced the exhilarating, dangerous, and often tragic times of Solidarity, one of the most important mass movements of the 20th century. In fact, the reading is even more essential now that the Great Falsification of History is happening in my native country where a gang of scumbags led by Mr. Kaczyński is trying, successfully so far, to transform the truth about the historic events into a "better truth", which would serve their political aims.

A few weeks ago I reviewed here Laurence Weschler's Solidarity. Poland in the Season of Its Passion , a chronicle and analysis of momentous events happening in Poland in 1980-1981, based on the articles the author wrote for the New York Times. That book seemed unfinished: indeed, Mr. Weschler left Poland in October of 1981 and was not able to cover the last two months of the "Solidarity freedom" and the period of martial law that followed. I am happy that I have found The Passions of Poland (1984) by the same author, which covers both the times of the revolution and the subsequent period of government repressions. This now complete work offers a comprehensive study of the Polish revolution that precipitated the fall of the Soviet empire and its ideology and expedited the eventual liberation of the entire Eastern Europe from Soviet domination.

I lived in Poland throughout the entire period that Mr. Weschler writes about and I can positively state that his chronicle of events is accurate and his observations and analysis are truthful and full of insight. In fact, being an external observer, experienced in interpreting political events, he had a much clearer view of what was happening than the understanding I had at the time. I have not found a single passage in the book that I would disagree with. The author has the facts right and, what's much more important, his diagnoses and prognoses are right on target.

The first 96 pages of the book are basically the same as the text of Solidarity that I mention above - I have found only minor changes. The new material takes two chapters, A State of War - October-December 1982 and Epilogue - September 1983, where the dates refer to the time that the author wrote his notes rather than to the dates of actual events. For the reader not familiar with the Polish history of the 1980s, here's a very brief chronology. The Solidarity revolution lasted for about 16 months, from the end of August of 1980 till December 12, 1981, when a group of generals, led by W. Jaruzelski, staged a military coup, declaring "a state of war", and placing the country under the rule of the so-called Army Council of National Salvation. (The martial law could not be called what it was because of the absence of suitable provision in the Polish constitution.) The "state of war" was suspended on December 31, 1982, but the repressions against the Solidarity resistance lasted for many years, to finally end with the so-called Round Table Talks in 1989. These talks and the eventual agreement resulted in the liberation of Poland from Soviet ideology, and the collapse of the regime, which led to similar changes in all Eastern Bloc countries.

There is so much in the book that I can focus here only on a tiny subset of topics. The hundred pages of the new material present all important events that happened in Poland just before and during the state of war (the author also includes an extremely detailed chronology of the years 1939-1983 in the Appendix). One reads about the fateful Sunday of 12/13/1981, the announcement of the state of war on the Polish nation imposed by its own generals: the mass internments and arrests of activists, elimination of almost all civil rights, shutting down the mail and telephone system in the entire country, etc. Then came the full year of nationwide resistance, at the time seemingly futile, yet sowing seeds for the eventual freedom seven years later. While several people were killed by the militarized police in the early days of the martial law, many more were arrested later and scores were beaten during demonstrations. The nation responded with the "passive resistance" - underground press and publishing houses were flourishing, people were wearing resistance signs, and most citizens boycotted the state-controlled radio and TV.

From today's - 34 years later - point of view, the book unequivocally shows who the actual leaders and heroes were: Wałęsa, Kuroń, Michnik, Bujak, Geremek, Modzelewski, Frasyniuk, Gwiazda, Wujec, Rulewski, Walentynowicz, and many others. There is not even a single mention about either one of the Kaczyński brothers: they did not have courage and certainly not the brains to be of any value to the revolution. Speaking about brains, the book shows the great depth of the political analyses that many leaders of the movement had written in prison and then managed to smuggle to the outside world. One of the most interesting passages in the book concerns the argument about the tactics of resistance between Mr. Kuroń and Mr. Bujak.

But to me personally the most resonating passages are the ones about the collapse of plans for the general strike on November 10, 1981, which signified the end of hope for millions of Polish people. The military rulers took several masterful steps like allowing the Polish Pope's visit in the following year and promising to release Wałęsa from internment. Yet the proverbial last nail in the coffin was the capitulation of the Polish church hierarchy and the agreement between the primate, Cardinal Glemp and General Jaruzelski. The beginning of November was precisely the time when I lost all hope for a better future, and these were precisely the events that led me to leave the country.

The review is already way too long so I am leaving out most of the good stuff offered by Mr. Weschler in his outstanding chronicle and analysis of the tumultuous times. It is hard not to love the very ending of the book: the author quotes the Polish graffiti of the late 1982: the famous CDN sign, that means "To be continued." And indeed it was. Solidarity had eventually won and its ideals were alive for a quarter of a century. During its over a thousand-year history Poland survived numerous wars and occupations so it will survive the regressive and populist Kaczyński regime as well, but the human cost will be staggering.

Four stars.

[Jerry · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Poland today, a person can be honest, or intelligent, or a member of the Communist Party—in fact, any two, just not all three at the same time.

This is a fascinating topic, and it appears that Weschler is very informed; the main problem is that every time he attempts to contrast Poland with the United States, he clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Should I succumb to Gell-Mann amnesia and trust the parts that I know nothing about?

For example, in May 1981 Weschler writes:

In some ways the most remarkable thing one finds in Poland these days is the breezy openness of political conversation. Indeed, Poland seems much more open politically today than does the United States—at least Poles are having a political conversation.

This was 1981, just after the first alternative to the growing bureaucratic state since, probably, Coolidge, had been elected. Ending price controls? Breaking AT&T’s government-created monopoly? Tax reform? “The most formidable domestic initiative any president has driven through since the Hundred Days of Franklin Roosevelt”? Weschler may not have liked the way the conversation was headed, but it was definitely going on. US voters had turned away from a progressive politics that earlier had seemed inevitable.

Inevitable much in the same way that socialism was inevitable. Foreign policy was also a pretty big conversation in 1980-1981. In his notes, Weschler calls the Soviet Union a pitiful giant, ridiculing Reagan for calling it a “fearsome opponent”. The thing is, I just read another book from the same period, Straight Stuff: The Reporters, the White House, and the Truth, and in it James Deakin ridicules Reagan for calling the USSR a pitiful giant that will collapse soon.

Whether the Soviet Union is a pitiful giant or a fearsome opponent changes throughout the book; when they’re staging military exercises within striking distance of Poland, they’re a fearsome opponent even to Weschler, and a few paragraphs down in his notes he ridicules the entire idea of a Soviet collapse and breakaway republics.

The idea that six years after his last item, Poland would hold popular elections and Lech Walesa would be elected president, would have been an interesting one to have asked him, just to see his response.

Now, a lot of that is hindsight, and inside Wechsler’s circle few were predicting an imminent Soviet collapse. But Weschler’s analysis of events is mostly one-dimensional. For example, he called the fair tax breaks being discussed at the time in the United States galling. By cutting everyone’s taxes by the same percentage, he writes, the rich get more money back than the middle-class and the poor. The logical extension of this, though, is that taxes can only be raised, never cut; some people pay no taxes, and so any cut means that the person getting the cut, no matter how small, gets more money back than someone else.

That’s the level of analysis throughout the book. In discussing the “vicious circle” the government found itself in because the currency was worthless,

The government has tried to entice the miners back to work on Saturdays with offers of triple pay, but they tend to ignore the offer, since the money is worthless and there’s nothing to buy in the shops anyway. Thus, the vicious circle: there’s nothing to buy because, for lack of hard currency, the state can import neither consumer goods and food nor the spare parts and equipment that could help Oland to produce its own; the only way to generate the hard currency is to get the workers to work harder, but they have no incentive to work harder, because there’s nothing they could buy with any extra money they might earn.

By “hard currency”, Weschler means western money, especially United States dollars. The thing is, he’s already described the special PEWEX shops where the government sells things only for foreign currency. The government is already dealing in hard currency and things are available for hard currency. Why could the government not offer part of that triple weekend pay in the same hard currency that the coal was going to generate? The answer, probably, is that to Weschler all money is the government’s—that’s why reducing taxes is galling—so it would never occur to him to even ask this question.

But while the analysis seems to be lacking in just about every respect, the observations are amazing. The whole idea of PEWEX shops is a detail hard to imagine. (Imagine if, in all states in the United States that manage state-run liquor stores, they only accepted Canadian and Mexican currency…)

How construction would “come to a halt” every time there was any problem in the supply chain, because all construction was centralized. There was only one company; if it couldn’t get something, it had to stop everything that something depended on. There was no alternative.

Lines are a source of excitement. “…whenever I see a line… I’m excited to find a store with anything to sell.”

The economic troubles made it harder for the government to control the news: they couldn’t afford film, and so news had to be live or it had to be canceled.

Wiktor Kulerski’s idea—as far as I know not implemented—for parallel institutions, so that “the government will be in control of empty shops but not the market; employment but not the means of livelihood; the state press but not information; printing houses but not the publishing movement; telephones and post but not communication; schooling but not education.”

The few years in Poland from the rise of Solidarity to the crackdown (or the decade from the rise of Solidarity to free elections) deserve a more rigorous case study than this. But outside of its flawed analysis, what this book does provide is a fascinating collection of anecdotes, conversations, and slices of bureaucratic life.

“Oh, the Party congress was very democratic,” a Gdansk taxi-driver assured me. “It’s a party of idiots, and they elected the biggest idiots as their leaders.”

[Alex Rossen · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a body of journalistic text, this is very high-quality. Despite some transparent challenges in infiltrating pro-government sources, and with recording this tumultuous historical event (a process the author described as ‘writing on quicksand), it is clear that Weschler had his finger on the pulse of Polish society. Where no historian may dare to predict the future, Weschler boldly and accurately foresaw that ‘the transition from the Brezhnev-Andropov era toward whatever will come next may well include a gradual loosening of the Soviet Union’s hold over its Eastern European satelites.’

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good overview of past Polish history and great look into the revolutionary movements and backlashes that occurred through the 70s and 80s with a concentration on the early 80s and the Solidarity Movement.