Khviedar Skrajnovich

Exactly twenty years ago the Polish Republic started the process of parting with the Socialist heritage and with unforgettable years of “popular democracy”. “Everything began in Gdansk” – this keynote is discernible in studies of professional historians and reasonings of common people on the other side of our border with the European Union. The process which was allegedly started by workers of shipyards was going on in a not less memorable way outside of Polish borders than in the “home country”. Touching – to tears – embraces of Germans against the background of the destroyed Wall recur to the memory together with not less dramatic – also to tears – scenes with protesters from Vilnius who were crushed on asphalt.
The image of Belarusian workers who took Lenin Square or were seating on rail tracks gets lost among Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Germany, the Baltic countries and up to the revolutions of “roses” and “oranges”. Belarus does not fall into the number of Gdansk followers for the only reason that the outcome of our battles for a slice of bread which was of vital importance at that time (and also for freedom, naturally) crossed out all efforts finally. Fortunately, today not our western neighbors but domestic thinkers who reason about specificities of education, the difficult heritage of the Stalinism, the gene pool crippled by numerous wars, etc. are focused more attentively on our results.
Honestly speaking, I am rejoiced in some way of the fact that we had our own path which was different from mainstreams that were happening in other countries of the former USSR and of the Warsaw Treaty Organization. Our identity and our “otherness” worked in this particular way and not any other way at the critical moment. Is it positive or negative is a separate question which everyone resolves (or was resolving or has already resolved) differently. Meanwhile, it would be more useful not to emphasize what “they succeeded to do, and we did not do it quite right” in the very beginning of 1990s but rather what “they did in this way, and we did it in another way”. We have only to find out: why was everything done in one’s own way?

And Priest, and Worker, and Student
Standoff of Poles with the official authorities in the modern history of the country was rather constant and manifold. The eight-year experience of the Stalinism (according to a definition of Polish historians, it was the period from 1948 to 1956) was enough to demand at least a wage increase at the first wind of change – it was under this slogan that workers of Poznan held a spontaneous meeting which later escalated into the armed struggle on city streets and was put down by the Polish army with a heavy hand. During following years a rare price hike was not accompanied by protest actions in industrial Gdansk, Szczecyn, Lodz, Radom, and Plock. In 1970, 1971, 1976, and, certainly, 1980, the year when Solidarność was born, in each of these years the Polish People’s Republic was troubled by manifestations, strikes, and protest marches. Besides, the proletariat was far from being alone in its cause; thus, in 1968, students came to revolt to the monument to Mickiewicz after having been inspired by “Dziady” in the Warsaw National Theater; in 1957 students again protested against closing-down of a popular magazine “Po prostu” on the streets of Warsaw. Artistic intelligentsia was keeping pace, by writing collective letters and speaking openly in defense of the national culture and history.
Apart from workers, students and intelligentsia, another extremely important stone in the civil movement was priests, or even broader, the Catholic faith. The Church was the integral part of the Polish identity, and nobody even tried to destroy it in the socialist republic. Restriction (not a prohibition) on building new churches and abandonment of the religious education in school were, perhaps, the utmost achievements. Understanding of futility of resistance to priests came quite quickly: the celebration of the millennium anniversary of Christianity in Poland in 1966 proved that in matters of faith one would have to stand against not Primate Wyszyński but against the entire nation. What are two decades of “popular democracy” compared to the millennium Church? Later, during visits of John Paul II to his home country, the official authorities did not mind to appear on TV screens with the Pontiff himself.
The Nation of Threat
Today some Russian political analysts articulate a thought that “the main thesis of the Polish historic policy is to arouse the guilt complex vis-à-vis Poland in other nations and to exploit it further on” (Oleg Nemenskiy). One day I reacted rather skeptically to this opinion but I had to come back to it after I had familiarized myself with a book “History of Poland” written by Polish historians in the second part of 1980s. The book had such chapters as “With Poland or without Poland”, “Struggle for the State”, “Threat of Physical Annihilation”, “Threat of Loss of the National Culture”. The textbook was far from having publicist oversalting, it was reissued several times and was written by serious researchers and experts in history. After I learned about similar attitude to someone’s own past, assertions of Oleg Nemenskiy do not seem to be at least imprudent. Especially to a Belarusian whose textbooks do not consider as periods of threat of cultural and physical annihilation even the years when more than one hundred writers, scientists and civil activists were executed during one night at the internal prison of NKVD. Although, probably, it is owing to such tender and vibrant attitude to their own past, to their national tradition, to their personal memory, and, finally, to their own, that “everything began in Gdansk”. It is worth to be reminded here that Solidarność which was registered in 1980 survived interdiction, martial law, sackings, constant defamation in printed media and on TV over the entire territory of the Warsaw Treaty Organization, but what is the most important in this range is that in 1989 the independent trade union emerged again as an influential power which was able to push its matter through. It looks like a total perception of another “threat”.
The BSSR’s Dimension
It is not for nothing that I put so much historic data from the second part of the twentieth century in the beginning of this article. It seems important to me to simply imagine how different were the dimensions in which societies of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic and of the Polish People’s Republic lived in after-war decades in order to make understandable our steps after the attainment of independence. We had almost thirty years of the Stalinism against eight years in Poland; when Polish leaders personally met the Pope, there was only one Orthodox church in what is now known as the monastery of St. Mark, and there was no catholic churches in entire Viciebsk; Belarusian young communists simply did not have a magazine like “Po prostu”, the one that you may even take to the streets for, and the censorship blockade was so efficient that Viciebsk’s hippies learned about a riot of hippies in Minsk only in the perestroika’s time (while the subculture “mail” always works very actively). Owing to petrodollars and the well-tuned industrial system the Soviet State was able to pay its workers a decent salary so that they dismissed any thought about some “solidarities”. This is why, while reading yet another TASS report which were abundant in “Viciebski rabochy” newspaper, our worker was far from any problems and compassion. “On the Situation in Poland”, “Repulse to Counterrevolutionary Forces”, “On the Statement of Ronald Reagan about Events in Poland”, “Rude Pressure on Poland” – the Soviet mass media patronized very vigilantly the “brotherly” people as well as their “own” one, not calling the Solidarność trade union by its own name for months even after it had been registered and conditioning any step of just-appointed Wojciech Jaruzelski by “people’s demand”. But how did common Soviet citizen react to the “situation in Poland” and the “repulse to counterrevolution”? We had to interview them to make things clear.*
It turns out that for dwellers of Viciebsk during 1980s the image of “Poland” was associated with “economic problems” only (probably, in contrast with local stagnation). Moreover, even the persons who took interest in the life abroad (including through Radio Liberty or BBC) do not deny that during 1980s they were thinking actually in the wake of the official Soviet propaganda. Only after the beginning of perestroika attitude towards the Polish trade union movement started to change but the end of 1980s brought so many events in the expanses of Soviet republics, including the bloody ones, that one “had no time” to take interest in Poland. By the way, in local printed media of 1989 which was much freer than before, the restitution of the official status of Solidarność and even the parliamentary elections in Poland were not reflected in any way. The attention was compelled to tragic curfew in Tbilisi and statements of Eduard Shevardnadze, and if there was no amphitheater with a festival of Polish song the presence of Poland in the local information space would have been totally unnoticeable.
In everyday conversations Lech Walęsa is always compared to Zianon Pazniak with a refrain “that one was able to do it, and ours was not”. At that time nobody had courage to compare the Belarusian events of 1991 and the Polish ones of 1989, and someone said: “We had more similarity with the Baltic States’ fronts”. “As a matter of fact, here everyone was waiting how things would turn out in Moscow … And after the putsch the red flags were at once replaced by the white-red-white ones”. Some people explained the totally different outcome of those critical times in our land namely by this “eternally Belarusian” dependence and waiting position.

Afterword
As it is known, after the World War II Poland grieved about the lands which were “lost” in the east. A lesser known fact is that some Poles welcomed the Yalta system of arranging the after-war Europe. Instead of tears about Hrodna, Pinsk, and Hlybokaje the government of the Polish People’s Republic in 1945 was absolutely pragmatically happy to get additions in the west, owing to which Poland intended “to become an industrial-agrarian country … get a wide access to the Baltic Sea and from then on will be counted among maritime nations” (President of the State National Council Bolesław Bierut). Who knows, if it was not for the attached western lands, would they have had plants with trade unions, Solidarność, the “Round table”? The Belarusians may be a proof by contradiction, they have never got their western Mecca – Vilnia, and they have even lost their own ethnic lands of Bielastok region, choosing as a result another path, an “original” and “stable” one.

Essential is not the fact that in 1989 Solidarność overthrew the Socialist regime but that thereafter the Polish society had enough of self-possession, endurance, tradition, and confidence – anything! – to continue to pursue the course of respect of rights and freedoms. Even if we, in our turn, hung the white-red-white flag instead of the red one only after the putsch, we needed no less determination to do it than the Poles did in 1989. It is another matter that our self-possession and tradition drew us back to past decades, and it determined the different way of development which does not allow anybody on the continent to be bored until now.

*Questions, answers and personal data of the persons who were interviewed are kept in the author’s personal archive and may be presented on request.