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254, Poland Questions Czechoslovakia/Poland comparison In Poland, the revolution took ten years…perhaps in Czechoslovakia it will take ten days!” (Timothy Garton Ash). In Poland, we saw an immediate mass mobilization against the regime. There was a clear opposition party (Solidarity), a clear leader (Walesa) and clear demands that the Poles wanted to be met. Yet, it took ten years for them to completely achieve them. On the other hand, in the Czechoslovak chapter, there were a multitude of groups (artists, musicians, scholars) that acted out against the regime sometimes overtly and, at most times, subtly. When it came time to finally have the regime meet their demands, the Czechoslovaks did end up accomplishing their revolution in ten days. Is this to say that dissent is stronger at the pre-political level and at its infancy, is powerful enough to actually create the change we want instead of skipping to the last step and simply going out on the streets yelling our demands? Were the Czechoslovaks’ pens mightier than the Poles’ swords? I’ll use this question as a representative one on the Czechoslovakia/Poland comparison, and I’ll try to sum up succinctly how the situation in Czechoslovakia differed from the situation in Poland. We know that the culture of dissent in the former country was characterized by a small elite of intellectual dissidents while in the latter country we see a mass mobilization, and so we want to identify sociocultural factors that might explain the difference. These factors include: economic conditions; worker protests; the 1968 invasion; the Catholic Church; and differences between cultural spaces. In terms of the first two, I’d reiterate what nearly all of our Poland speakers have said in one way or another: the Polish economy was in dire straits for much of this period. The same is not true, as far as I know, of Czechoslovakia, which had a vibrant economy in the post-war period and is generally considered to have had the best economy of all of the Soviet Bloc countries (with an even better quality of life for its inhabitants than in the Soviet Union, the heart of the empire). Poland also experienced occasional worker unrest from 1956 onward, and as we know, this intensified in the 1970s. So we might say that in Poland there was fertile ground for a mass, anti-regime coalition that included workers as well as other “ordinary” people. In Czechoslovakia, we see a more limited movement simply because there were fewer material, everyday reasons to be disgruntled with the regime. One major difference is also the 1968 invasion, which happened to Czechoslovakia (Polish troops were part of the invading force) but not to Poland. We know that this triggered the imposition of a “normalized” regime in Czechoslovakia, which made mass mobilization against the regime much less likely. There was also an implicit deal struck between the Czechoslovak regime and the “normalized” populace: the regime would provide the populace with a higher standard of living if the populace agreed to stay out of politics. No such deal was struck in Poland, and we might even say that the deal that was eventually struck happened slightly over a decade later when Solidarity emerged as an independent trade union. Then there is the question of cultural space. After World War II, the Polish population was remarkably homogeneous: the great majority considered themselves both Poles and Catholic Poles. As we have learned, the Poles have a strong spirit of 1 nationhood that includes a history of (sometimes quixotic) resistance and sacrifice to outside oppressors who are attempting to crush the Polish nation and its Catholic faith. The Polish cultural space is, much like the American one, a hero-space. Without going into details and to simplify things, I’d add that the Czechs have none of these sociocultural factors in play. These considerations make it easier to understand why a mass movement was much more likely in Poland than in Czechoslovakia. Having highlighted some key differences, we should also emphasize that the two cultures shared a lot in common. Intellectuals understood what was happening – what the nature of the regime was and how to confront it without, ideally, overly antagonizing the Soviets – the same way. There was considerable intellectual agreement, and we also learned that there was an exchange of ideas. The differing cultural, economic, and political circumstances in each country, however, allowed for two very different kinds of movements to emerge. In both the Czechoslovakian and Polish parts of the course, we’ve talked about how Havel’s essays impacted the Polish resistance movement and Solidarity. Was the reverse also true? Did Solidarity – and in particular its visible successes in unionizing workers and creating a mass movement – have an effect on the Charter 77 group and how they carried out their dissent? We know from Matynia’s lecture that the Czechoslovak and Polish dissidents were in contact with each other and that there were channels of communication that made it possible for them to send materials back and forth as well as occasionally meet in person. Matynia’s book An Uncanny Era speaks to your question somewhat and answers in the affirmative, but without going into details of how exactly the Poles influenced the Czechoslovaks. I imagine it would be hard to tease out who influenced whom and how, but we can definitely say there was dialogue and interplay. Does Kieslowski’s use of the three different stories within Blind Chance and his participation within the so-called Cinema of Moral Anxiety echo Havel’s Theater of the Appeal that places a large emphasis on prodding the audience to come to their own interpretation? We might say that art “of the appeal” – art that didn’t just entertain, but that also provoked people to think deeply about its meaning and its relationship to their own lives – predominated in both Czechoslovakia and Poland during the culture of dissent. We might go further and say good art in general contains a strong appeal component, although how this appeal component is manifested varies greatly. We have become used to understanding the category of “art” in rather different terms: we primarily have a consumerist orientation to art in the sense that it’s something we buy (and artists sell) that we use to decorate our homes or give as gifts or, in the case of film and theatre, something that we watch to enjoy and relax, usually with friends. In an authoritarian society, however, art often becomes the main vehicle for dissent, and often dissent that is not overt but needs to be read “between the lines”: it’s not by accident, for example, that Russian poets in the Soviet Union could fill whole stadiums of people when they’d give poetry readings (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/books/03poets.html). In that sense, then, we shouldn’t be surprised to see similar kinds of art represented in Kieslowski’s film and the Czechoslovak cultural artifacts that we’ve looked at. Art of the appeal is not 2 necessarily a kind of art that we are strongly familiar with in modern America, but it is, in the grand scheme of things, not an unusual artistic approach. Lech Walesa Lech Walesa seemed to be the ringleader within the solidarity movement. This leadership was exemplified in the movie Walesa: A Man of Hope. Although there were others who had powerful positions in Solidarity, it seemed that Walesa was the key to leading the group to gain power within Poland. I was wondering if you thought Solidarity would have been just as successful without the leadership of Lech Walesa? This is an interesting – but hypothetical – question that is rather challenging to answer. We do know that there was a strong history of worker unrest in the Polish context, and we might surmise that repeated unrest laid the ground for a potential movement that would eventually need a (charismatic) leader. Whether Walesa was the right person at the right time in the right place or whether he himself was absolutely instrumental to the movement that became known as Solidarity – that’s a difficult question to answer easily and definitively. To what extent did Walesa’s self-described “dictatorial,” and rebellious, personality play an essential role in the progression of the Solidarity movement? Would all of the reform that he helped bring to Poland have been possible if he had a less outrageous personality and had been more sensitive to communist oppression? An honest question, but also a hypothetical one that is difficult to answer definitively. The film Man of Hope tries to navigate the tricky territory of this question, suggesting that, on one hand, Walesa’s personality was key to Solidarity’s success but also, on the other, that he wasn’t always easy to deal with because of it. Some have suggested that this personality served Walesa well prior to 1989, but then became a liability after 1989 in newly democratic circumstances that favored compromise and negotiation over authoritarianism. Hearing stories from my family, I know that not everyone liked Lech Walesa, even though he is viewed (and not wrongly) as the hero of Solidarity. Given that Walesa was controversial (and we know this from Man of Hope), I’m wondering if there are commonalities among those who didn’t like him? Did he have support from specific geographical areas or other demographic segments? As noted above, Walesa wasn’t uncontroversial. He had a strong personality, and not everyone was able to work well with him. His leadership style is often contrasted with Havel’s, who was self-deprecating and sometimes full of doubt and whose style was aimed at negotiation and consensus.

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