Piotr Rudkouski

Some reminiscence is required at the beginning of my story. It was the year of 198… I don’t remember precisely, but it happened rather in the second half of the 1980-ies. I remember how my father and I were trying to “pick up” Poland with the use of our “Horizon” TV-set, produced in the USSR. Sometimes, we succeeded, due to the highly precise positioning of our aerial, placed on a four- or even five-meter pole. “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” my father started crying at certain moments of time. It meant that I could seize doing gymnastics with the pole, as “Poland” had been “picked up”. Once I ran into the house and saw some street riots in the “snowy” TV screen. “The Poles are pursuing the Communists and beating them with stones!” my father commented upon the news break. It stunned me to see the Poles pursue the Communists, as Poland and the Poles were associated exclusively with the Roman Catholic Church and the Pope of Rome in my childhood. Just the same way the Soviet Union was associated with Communism and atheism and Germany was linked in my mind to fascism and war only. It was a real surprise for me to learn that the Communists existed in Poland as well! Twenty years have passed since the moment of that “discovery”. A lot of things happened since then. Also, the image of Poland was gradually transforming and reshaping in my mind. However, the phenomenon of “pursuing the Communists” has survived in my imagination intact since then. Actually, in my opinion, it appears to be quite up-to-date in the present-day Poland as well. Sometimes, the “fight with Communism” still seems to be domineering in the current socio-political life of Poland.

1

It is possible to distinguish a range of socio-cultural contexts of the “war with Communism” in Rzeczpospolita III.

1. Clerical and Religious Context

The “religious right-wing branch” is meant here. It is led with the idea of “fidelity to God, the Roman Catholic Church and the Priest”. The discourse of this “right-wing” branch is interlaced with the religious wording. Among other, it contains a lot of references to the Bible and the term of “Truth” as basic criteria for evaluation of political life. At the same time, the political realities are quite often presented in the expiatory categories, including a fight of Good and Evil, Truth and Lie, as well as Light and Darkness.

The right-wing paradigm of “fight against Communism” is presented in the book “At the Turn of Changes” by priest Dr. Marian Szczesny from Elk. According to his findings, the left-wing movement is Satanic in nature, as it can come disguised as anything else.

2. Secular National Right-wing Context

It is not the “atheistic” right-wing movement that is mentioned here, as none of the kind can be found in Poland nowadays. The case in point is a political group, lacking the religious dramatic nature and emphasizing the national patriotic rhetoric. However, the Christian values are highly prioritized by the group and the Roman Catholic church is treated by the group representatives as an outstanding phenomenon in the social and cultural space of Poland. The right-wing group shows special sentiments to Rzeczypospolita II and abhors any ideological or pragmatic compromises with the Communists, dreaming of Rzechpospolita IV that would be completely liberated from the features, remaining from the Polish Popular Republic era. This wave of “radical refinement” didn’t spare even Lech Walesa, who used to be a symbol of fight with Communism and a catalyst of epochal transformations in Poland. Walesa’s case is highly edifying. On the eve of Presidential election 1995 he had taken a position of a radical and hard-edged anti-Communist. However, he fell a victim to this radicalism later on. The revealed verisimilar episode of his cooperation with the Polish special services (SB) during the Communist times didn’t exert much influence on the general appreciation of his political role in the history of democratic Poland. Still, the anti-Communist radical movement strived for doing away with Walesa’s symbolic image anyway. Paradoxically, it was Walesa, who used to stir up this radicalism in his time.

3. Context of Left-Wing Revisionism

Communism as ideology and regime was highly critisized by the “democratic left-wing movement” during the Socialist times. Revisionism was enormously important then, since it was this movement that exposed the entire totalitarian character of Communist regime. Large-scale prosecution of revisionists showed that even an internal dialogue between coherent political movements was completely impossible at that time. Such outstanding “left-wing” anti-Communists as Leszek Kolakowski and Adam Michnik represented the revisionist movement in Poland that hastened the time of democratic transformations in the country.

4. Liberal Democrat Context

Just like in case of “left-wing revisionists”, the liberal democrats’ anti-Communism was rather grounded on the necessity to demolish the totalitarian mechanisms that on the calls to prosecute the real and invented “collaborators” and “crypt-Communists”.

2

The fight against the Soviet rudiments is quite natural for quite a few Poles. However, it has somewhat different shades from the “Belarusian” perspective. The authoritarian epoch under Lukashenka’s rule is often opposed to the de-Communisation, economic liberalization, and national renaissance epoch under the Shushkievich’s rule (1991 – 1994) in the post-Soviet Belarus. It is interesting to compare in this respect Stanislau Shushkievich as a hero of Belarusian de-Communisation on the one hand and Aleksander Kwasniewski, whose victory at Presidential elections in Poland was treated by the “right-wing movement” as “a return of commune”. Actually, S. Shushkievich used to be much more engaged in the Communist movement in the past in comparison with A. Kwasniewski. Therefore, it is not very clear, why the great Belarusian “de-Communiser” is treated with more respect that the great Polish “re-Communiser”.
The history or as they say, the faults of our own have taught the Belarusians to value high each strive for freedom, regardless its “right-wing” or “left-wing” nature.
Having no special liking for any “left-wing” ideologies, I would like to note that the Polish “right-wing” movement quite evidently undermines the importance of moderate democratic “left-wing” movement in the Polish public life. Also, the Polish “right-wing” activists underestimate the role of “left-wing” movement in the process of overthrowing the Communist dictatorship, as the “left-wing” revisionists were similarly risking their carriers, health and even lives, fighting for human rights for freedom and welfare in Poland at those hard times.