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3(IV) / 12 - - - - - Orange Timothy Garton Ash, was fortunate enough to I , May 18th 2012. 18th , May another Velvet Revolution ans who say “yes” but mean between the horrible mess that would launch Ukraine ernments,both left and right, ed Ukraine’s path to Europe. on a trajectory towards the ful lot of Western Europe have consistently support in Ukraine itself, with the Kyiv hoped that it would be worst enemies, and an aw witness part of the Revolution; the people on Maidan Nezalezhnosti in British historian. Ukrainians being their own West. All of the Polish gov The responsibility is split “no”. “no”. - - - , Belaru , Neue Zürcher Zeitung ublic support for the P the death penalty is ties per of the government, but nouncing a moratorium on measure any longer, and an - sian journalist. death penalty in Belarus for the last 15 years. There fectly within the capabili- per cent to 40 per cent. It is public support” for the death penalty is the argument the has dropped from almost 80 government has been us ing to maintain capital punishment in the legal system is no public support for this it still doesn’t happen. Why? Katerina Barushka worth mentioning that “high - - - , BBC John Sweeney here here is a political edge “[New Eastern Europe] includes reviews of new books from Eastern Europe, of which English-whichEastern books fromof Europe,new reviews includesof Eastern Europe] “[New T ans who are keen to distance to Kharkhiv’s attachment to the Soviet past. Many of the they don’t have much truck themselves from the Krem lin. people seem Here, to look stillhauntsLenin of statue the the city. sian-speaking, not Ukrainian, spect and affection, which is street names that much and people in the town are Rus on on the Soviet ways with - re investigative journalist. with the western Ukraini why why theychanged haven’t the Orthodox, not Catholic, and -speaking wouldreaders otherwise likely never a chancehave to know … The magazine weaves threadscommon a sharedhistory,mutual of whicha story arecomposedtogetherof experienc es and a vibrant culture.” Gerhard Gnauck Acclaim Eastern New for Europe Gdansk_tancerka_165x235_ANG.pdf 1 11/21/11 4:47 PM

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Dear Reader, As much as we all want to believe that in 2012 we are analysing a region which we have agreed to call “New Eastern Europe” we are also aware that there will be moments when reading this issue you may have a moment of déjà vu. In- deed, we have already had over two decades of system changes in many of the countries in Eastern Europe and yet some of our authors are telling us that, in the summer of 2012, “old habits die hard” and many of the things so commonly seen in the past are to be found there today. BBC investigative journalist, John Sweeney, notes on his recent trip to Ukraine writing that in Kharkiv, “People seem to look on the Soviet ways with respect and affection.” Grzegorz Gromadzki, a Polish analyst, compares the Putin power structure in today’s Russia with previous regimes noting that, “Many of those who have been protesting, fear that the country is facing an era of standstill under Putin, which to some extent resembles the times of Leonid Brezhnev.” In addition, British researcher and writer, Kelly Hignett, provides a picture of the Cold War style diplomatic-espionage games that are taking place between the United Kingdom and Russia even today. Yegor Vasylyev puts Viktor Yanukovych under the microscope with a detailed account of the origins of the Ukrainian president’s power and how he has rebuilt the system to serve him as its ultimate patron. Interestingly, Ukrainian poet and journalist, Natalia Sniad- anko, reveals the controversy of language in Ukraine and how the introduction of Russian as an official language has divided the country. Adam Bodnar and Irmina Pacho from the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights in Warsaw provide a new perspective on Poland’s participation with the American CIA in the imprisonment of terror suspects on Polish soil. As a country that is still dealing with its authoritarian past, Bodnar and Pacho warn that Po- land “should not forget about those painful experiences, which created a moral underpinning of the current constitutional structure.” Considering other angles of this vastly diverse region, however, British historian, Timothy Garton Ash, tries to convince us “that we cannot talk about a new Iron Curtain. The lines are both more fluid and more complex.” They are revealed, at least partially, in the reports from Moscow and Baku which wrap up the issue, along with reviews of the latest books and films from or about the region. As always, we welcome you to join us in the dialogue and share your views online at www.neweasterneurope.eu, on Facebook or Twitter. The Editors 4 Contents

Opinion and Analysis

John Sweeney Ghosts of Famine ...... 7 Grzegorz Gromadzki Fear of a Usurper’s Stigma ...... 11 Kelly Hignett Spy Game Diplomacy ...... 18 Marcin Mączka The Propaganda Machine ...... 27 Jacek Borkowicz Pussy Riot and Cyber-Orthodoxy ...... 37 Katerina Barushka A Matter of Life and Death ...... 45 Paweł Kowal Time to Treat Lukashenko Seriously ...... 57 Yegor Vasylyev The Rise of Viktor Yanukovych ...... 63 Natalia Sniadanko Culture Caught in a Political Mess ...... 72 Adam Bodnar and Irmina Pacho CIA Prisons on Polish Soil – A new perspective . . . . 78 Pavol Szalai Gorilla in the Mist ...... 84 Basil Kerski East of Berlin ...... 91

Interviews

A conversation with Timothy Garton Ash A Historian of the Present ...... 99 A conversation with Tad Taube Building a Jewish Future ...... 104

Reports

Małgorzata Nocuń We Won’t Disappear ...... 112 Wojciech Górecki Baku Shedding its Skin ...... 118

History

Brian R. Banks A European from Drohobycz: Discoveries in the life of Bruno Schulz . . . 129 5

People, Ideas, Inspiration

Mayhill Fowler What is Unusual about the Borderland? ...... 136 Ludwika Włodek The Woman who Foresaw the Collapse of the Soviet Union ...... 142 Sławomira Walczewska From A to Zadra ...... 149

Books and Reviews

Ewa Maria Kaźmierczak Who Can Fathom Such a Crime? ...... 156 On the film directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev Elena Oleksandr Zinchenko Greatest Triumph or Mistake? ...... 159 On David Stahel’s Kiev 1941: Hitler’s Battle for Supremacy in the East Bartosz Cichocki A Wiseman’s Voice ...... 162 On Adam Daniel Rotfeld’s Myśli o Rosji… i nie tylko (Thoughts about Russia…and not only) and W cieniu. 12 rozmów z Marcinem Wojciechowskim (In the Shadow. 12 Conversations with Marcin Wojciechowski) Łukasz Wojtusik The Northern Path ...... 164 On Mariusz Wilk’s Lotem gęsi (Following the Path of Geese) Edyta Gawron Everything is almost Too True… ...... 166 On Baruch Milch’s Testament Jakub Halcewicz-Pleskaczewski Sharing Turowicz ...... 168 On Joanna Podsadecka’s Gen ryzyka w sobie miał… (He Had the Risk Gene…) Wojciech Wilczyk Photography is a Worthy Profession ...... 170 On exhibition Poland and Palestine: Two Lands and Two Skies EDITOR AND PUBLISHER The Jan Nowak-Jeziorański College of Eastern Europe pl. Biskupa Nankiera 17, 50-140 Wrocław, POLAND tel.: +48 71 341 71 97; +48 71 342 16 81 fax: +48 71 718 19 56 www.kew.org.pl [email protected] Jan Andrzej Dąbrowski, Director

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Circulation: 3700 Copyright © by the Jan Nowak-Jeziorański College of Eastern Europe (Kolegium Europy Wschodniej im. Jana Nowaka-Jeziorańskiego), 2012 Printing: Drukarnia Colonel International Distribution: www.pineapple-media.com Ghosts of Famine John Sweeney

When you travel to eastern Ukraine, not far from the Russian border, you enter another time and another world. The mood is grey and the horror of the past still lingers in the air.

When you travel to Kharkiv, in eastern Ukraine, not far from the Russian border, you enter another time, another world. After all these years, the statue of Lenin running after the bus still dominates the big square in town, one of the largest public spaces in the world. The mood is grey, an overcastness of the mind, the manners, Soviet. During Stalin’s mad collectivisation in the 1930s, famine stalked this land. During the Second World War, the Nazis and the Russians fought four battles over Kharkiv – in 1943 it was the yo-yo that told you who was winning and who losing the war – and the horrors of those times still seem to linger in the air, in the bleakness of human interaction. Blackpool, it is not. The train station looks like an emperor’s amphitheatre, an enormous, gilded monstrosity, exuding Soviet power. My fixer, Roman and I take a slow local train east to enter what was, back in 1933, the famine zone. He queues for ten minutes for two tickets, which cost something like 20 cents each. The queue is made up of the old, the swollen and people with immense shopping bags. They shuffle mo- rosely. Eventually, he gets to the top of the line to be told he is in the wrong queue and that the local station ticket office is in another building. Slava Stalinu (Long Live Stalin) becomes our catch phrase. A few glum western advertising hoardings aside, nothing very much seems to have changed since 1953 when the cunning Os- setian finally closed his eyes for good. There is a political edge to Kharkhiv’s attachment to the Soviet past. Many of the people in the town are Russian-speaking, not Ukrainian, Orthodox, not Catholic, and they don’t have much truck with the western Ukrainians who are keen to distance themselves from the Kremlin. Here, people seem to look on the Soviet ways with respect and affection, which is why they haven’t changed the street names that much and the Lenin statue still haunts the city. That past includes mass famine and 8 Opinion and Analysis John Sweeney, Ghosts of Famine Photo: Andrzej Brzeziecki

A statue of Lenin is a bleak reminder of the Soviet times in Kharkiv. John Sweeney, Ghosts of Famine Opinion and Analysis 9 a war so stupidly conducted that the Nazis almost took Moscow against a Soviet army which should have been immensely stronger, had it not been for the mad, paranoid purges of Joseph Stalin.

* * *

Another queue, and Roman bags the tickets. We search for somewhere to have a quick bite to eat. There are a few pubs, offering what feels like grim liver-damage rather than a throne of human happiness. We walk on, and finally are seduced by the great yellow M of McDonalds. I haven’t been to a McDonalds in years, but there is something so unpleasantly Soviet about the Kharkiv train station, we trot- ted towards the uber-symbol of western capitalism with a song in our hearts and a spring in our steps. We fed the pigeons our chips. They seemed to enjoy them. The train itself was pure Brezhnev Rail, a clunking fist of metal and diesel, enor- mously long, packed to the gunnels with ordinary Ukrainians going home after a morning’s The memorial to Holodomor, shopping in town. The platforms are at street the great hunger of 1933, level, so you have to haul yourself up three feet or so to gain entrance to the train. Alright for seems pitifully inadequate. us, almost too much for an old babushka who I have to give a hand to get her on board. The mass of humanity generates a cab- bagey pong. “Come to Kharkiv – and clog your nostrils!” is not the stuff of tourist brochures. At least, not yet. Before the train clunked out of the station, we find a place to stand, jumbled between great boxes of stuff, in the connecting bit between two carriages. A lad lights up next to a “no smoking sign”. A policeman passes through the carriage, and tells him off, and he steps down to put the cigarette out. There is something profoundly deferential in the manner the lad obeys the policeman. He offers no gesture or word of irritation. Here, you obey. It is a little scene that you would not see in London, ever.

* * *

The train slumbers off, with tortoise-like sloth, and rattles through the countryside: generally flat, treed with birch, more grey than silver, past rotting concrete and steel hulks of half-dead factories, and lines of timber homes, the horizon a smudge of green-grey in the distance. The memorial to the Holodomor – the great hunger of 1933 in which as many as ten million may have died – was, you may say, satisfactory. An Eastern Orthodox cross, two wooden beams across, the lower one diagonal, a few words in Ukrainian, 10 Opinion and Analysis John Sweeney, Ghosts of Famine

standing by a level crossing. Blink, and you would have missed it. Compared to the great heft of the Lenin statue in pride of place in town, it seems a pitifully inadequate memorial to the suffering of so many ordinary people. The very politest thing you can say about eastern Ukraine is that here they’ve got the size and placing of statues the wrong way round.

John Sweeney is an award-winning investigative journalist for the BBC programme Panorama. He sent this commentary and reflections to New Eastern Europe during his recent trip to Kharkiv in Ukraine.

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Advertisement Fear of a Usurper’s Stigma Grzegorz Gromadzki

The greatest challenge for the rulers of today’s Russia is legitimising their power in the eyes of the public.

It would seem that those in power in Russia shouldn’t have many problems as the Russian people generally accept their rulers regardless of what they do. We recently had an example of this during the March presidential elections won by Vladimir Putin, the man who has ruled Russia for 12 years. Russians are passive and don’t believe in change at the highest levels of power, while the minority actively opposed to the authoritarianism of the regime is easy to suppress. This is a widespread cliché, and as is sometimes the case with clichés, despite being false, it does contain a grain of truth. In the last century, Russians or at least some part of them, constituting a critical mass, twice proved that they did not accept the rule of people whom they regarded as usurpers. The history of Russia shows that the loss of legitimacy is a mortal threat to an authoritarian regime, as was observed during the two revolutions – in 1917, in the case of the Tsardom of Russia, and during perestroika from 1985 to 1991, in the case of communism. What has been happening on the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg in recent months, when thousands of people have been telling those in power they are usurpers, must be a serious warning for Vladimir Putin and his entourage. Compared to tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union, however, the current residents of the Kremlin are in a much more difficult situation.

Legitimacy “from above”

During tsarist times, power was divinely ordained. In 1488 Ivan III, grandfather of Ivan the Terrible, and the first ruler to place the two-headed eagle of the Byz- antine Empire in the coat-of-arms of Muscovy, said about himself: “We are by the grace of God the rulers of our land since the very beginning, since our first ancestors, and the right to this land was bestowed upon us by God himself.” This belief was shared by successive rulers of Russia up to Nicholas II, the last tsar. Since it was God himself who appointed the tsar, subjects had no other 12 Opinion and Analysis Grzegorz Gromadzki, Fear of a Usurper’s Stigma

choice but to accept it. A tsar anointed by God could not be evil. Only his help- ers could be evil. In Soviet times, God was replaced by ideology, proclaiming the inevitability of the laws of history, the progress of mankind from feudalism through capitalism to socialism and communism. Many people, not just in the USSR but also in western countries, believed in this pattern. The natural leadership of the Communist Party followed on from it. Those who opposed it were acting against the laws of history and common sense. In both eras rulers consolidated their power through coercion and, in some periods, through terror. The seemingly eternal Russian regime could only be over- turned by questioning its legitimacy. Many Russians ceased to believe in the glo- rious future of the USSR governed by the communists. It turned out that the laws of history were an illusion, and the demise of the Tsardom was, to a large extent, made possible through denying its anointment by God. The tsar simply became an ordinary man and a bad ruler. Compared to its past, contemporary Russia has no religious or ideological justification for the regime to remain in power. Its legitimacy can only be confirmed through elections; although the elections in Russia have nothing to do with elections in countries which have a liberal democracy. It is always a kind of plebiscite, which the government is keen to have under its complete control. Every presidential poll since the early 1990s can be called “Operation Election” as the rulers go to extraordinary lengths, including undisguised pressure and fraud, to prove that they enjoy the support of the majority, and Since it was God himself who that they are the only force capable of gov- appointed the tsar, Russians erning Russia. This was particularly true in 1996 when the had no choice but to accept it. very unpopular Boris Yeltsin fought for re- election, and in 2000 when the rulers wanted to elevate the little known Vladimir Putin to the presidential office. The March presidential elections were of a similar nature, with Putin enjoying a relatively easy win in the first round (for the third time). The rulers in the Kremlin must persuade Russians that they are in power “because the nation wants us, it chooses us”. This is a completely new situation in the history of Russia and represents a revolution- ary change in relations between the authorities and society compared to past regimes in tsarist and Soviet times. It seems that Boris Yeltsin and his associates were aware of that, and they therefore tried to, at least, keep up some appearance of fairness so that Russians had the sense that they were not only able to elect incumbents. A real opposition existed under Yeltsin in the 1990s, which had its place in official political Grzegorz Gromadzki, Fear of a Usurper’s Stigma Opinion and Analysis 13 life. Its representatives were present in the Russian parliament and were made up of democratic parties, such as Grigory Yavlinsky’s Yabloko, or the Communist Party. The presidential elections in 1996 were a real political contest. Gennady Zyuganov, the communist candidate, got to the second round and won 40 per cent of the vote. But Yeltsin and his associates made efficient use of the fact that the majority of Russians were afraid of the restoration of the old system, and won over the majority of support. The political system under Yeltsin, however, only offered limited support, and proved that regime change was, in fact, impossible. Compared to the opposition, the power and influence of the government was enormous, and this has been one of the most important features of the Russian political system since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, the rulers at least tried to give the impression that normal political competition was taking place in Russia, just like in countries which had a liberal democracy.

Putin’s biggest mistake

Putin did not intend to continue this game when he became president in 2000. His aim was to destroy the real, although in fact harmless, opposition and to create a government-controlled opposition which could be fully manipulated by the Kremlin. Putin achieved his goal in only a few years, ejecting the democratic opposition of the 1990s from the political scene and subordinating the communists. This strategy laid bare the mentality of Putin and his associates, most of whom like him, started their career in the special forces. They believe in the necessity of full control: allowing any leeway is an unnecessary sign of weakness. They couldn’t understand that their actions destroyed the illusion about democracy, which existed under Yeltsin and legitimised the regime in the eyes of society. Many Russians, as well as many in the West, hoped (or perhaps deluded themselves?) that the presidency of Dmitry Medvedev would bring modernisation to Russia, and at least a partial liberalisation of the political system. And so the disap- pointment was even greater when it turned out that his presidency was just a small element of the stage on which Putin plays the leading role. This became evident for even the most persistent self-deluders in September 2011, when Medvedev backed Putin’s candidacy in the approaching presidential elections. It was obvious that the junior president was simply a descendant of Simeon Bekbulatovich, whom Ivan the Terrible made tsar for a year, playing the role of his deferential servant during this time. When this year had passed, the whim of the true tsar ended and Simeon was removed, luckily for him, only from the tsarist throne. Ivan the Terrible proved merciful enough to make him Grand Prince of Tver. Is this not reminiscent of 14 Opinion and Analysis Grzegorz Gromadzki, Fear of a Usurper’s Stigma

the announcement that after the presidential elections, Medvedev would become prime minister under Putin? Driving the real opposition out of parliament, stopping its candidates from running in presidential elections and the arrogant The collapse of the USSR announcement of the “transfer of power”, proved to be Putin’s biggest mistake, as recent social was possible because protests have shown. the communist ideology The political system built by Putin turned out to be unacceptable for a significant part went bankrupt. of Russian society, especially for active people wanting to have a say in decisions important for the future of their country. There has been a tacit contract made between the regime and society over the last ten years, particularly its active part. The rulers made it very clear: you can get rich but do not meddle in politics. Putin has been helped by the global demand for raw materials, especially the high prices of oil and natural gas which appeared soon after he assumed power in 2000. He had the resources to finance this social contract without the necessity of carrying out painful reforms and modernising the Russian economy, and most importantly, he could afford to suppress any expressions of democracy. But this method of governing the country has proven inefficient. What tipped the scales was the announcement that Putin would reassume the presidency. Then came the December elections to the Duma, replete with undisguised fraud. This political show was a slap in the face for active citizens, the relatively affluent Rus- sians belonging to the emerging middle class, who have just realised that they have been cheated by a regime which does not care about maintaining appearances any more. Many of those who have been protesting, both in the streets and online, fear that the country is facing an “era of standstill” under Putin, which to some extent resembles the times of Leonid Brezhnev. Their protest does not regard social matters and is not focused on demanding the improvement in living standards. They question the legitimacy of the regime and want a change of political system and democratisation.

Too little and too much freedom

The social unrest we are now observing in Russia has been possible despite the lack of democracy and rampant violations of human rights. The last 20 years, including Putin’s rule, has been a period of unprecedented freedom in Russia’s history. Citizens are allowed to travel abroad without any restrictions, which previously, especially in Soviet times, was a privilege for the select few. There is no coercion, Grzegorz Gromadzki, Fear of a Usurper’s Stigma Opinion and Analysis 15 let alone terror, compared to what happened in the Soviet Union and tsarist Russia. This is even acknowledged by people who can hardly be accused of supporting Pu- tin, such as the well-known columnist of The Economist, Edward Lucas, who wrote that “never before have so many Russians had such a prosperous and free life”. The main reason we often forget this is because we take the countries of the democratic West as our point of reference, rather than the centuries-long history of Russia. This relative freedom is proving very dangerous for Putin because Russian society wants more and more of it and (what is worse for the regime) is no longer afraid. This overcoming of fear is particularly evident online. Despite an authoritarian regime needing to be perceived by society as “serious”, the government is not only criticised on the internet but also openly ridiculed. The Russian government, just like many other authoritarian regimes, does not cope very well with new technology. In the past, even during the 1990s, it was enough to control television to be able to shape public opinion. Today, the attitude of citizens to the government is, to a growing extent, shaped by the internet, which cannot be as easily controlled as a handful of television channels could. Putin and his people are incapable of changing their way of thinking and operating. Therefore, they are muddling through. Only government-approved opposition candidates were allowed to run in the March presidential election and Yavlinsky

Vladimir Putin returned to the Russian presidency for a third term. He was inaugurated on May 7th 2012.

Photo: Russian Presidential Press and Information Office (CC) www.kremlin.ru 16 Opinion and Analysis Grzegorz Gromadzki, Fear of a Usurper’s Stigma

was denied this privilege. Even though he didn’t stand a chance of winning, he would have been an authentic voice of protest against Putin. Such a strategy of the regime alienates itself even more from the active part of Russian society. Despite the desired election result, carefully planned and executed by the government, today’s Putin is very different from the head of state during his first two terms. He is no longer the young leader rescuing his country from the chaos created by the geriatric Yeltsin and his administration, The objective of the but has himself become an anachronistic ruler, demonstrations is not an who may at best provide Russia with “stability” equalling stagnation. The Russian elite immediate takeover of power. is trying to persuade the public that anarchy and disorder would rule in its place. Such was the message when Putin said that the opposition has many goals and is unable to lead the country in the desired direction. This is an extremely defensive strategy, in which the regime unwittingly promotes the theory of Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century English thinker who believed that strong political power is a necessary condition of avoiding the war of all against all. It seems that the Russian regime has limited possibilities of putting pressure on society, especially its active part. Mass repressions are hard to imagine and a return to Soviet or tsarist times simply seems impossible. And there is no enemy, such as the Chechens in 1999, to help rally the citizens around the government. The regime may try to intimidate the public using “administrative resources” but the experience of recent months shows that it does not produce the desired result. What unites the opposition, encompassing groups from the extreme right to extreme left, is not a common idea for a new Russia after Putin, but simply a protest against him. It is natural, but insufficient, for effective governing. Old opposition leaders are a spent force, while the refugees of the regime, such as former prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, will not carry the majority with them as they have no charisma. There are, however, new leaders who have entered politics from the world of the internet, the most important being Alexei Navalny, who has been building his political status with remarkable persistence for more than ten years. Navalny began as an activist of the democratic Yabloko party, but, in fact, was much closer to the nationalists. It is difficult to assess what kind of Russia he envi- sions after Putin. Some protesters fear that, as a leader, Navalny would have little to do with democracy. It seems that many of Putin’s opponents have no confidence in the possibility of a regime change in Russia. The aim of the demonstrators in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other Russian cities is not an immediate takeover of power but to prove that Putin is a usurper. This is the reason why some protest leaders created the Russian Grzegorz Gromadzki, Fear of a Usurper’s Stigma Opinion and Analysis 17

Voters’ League, which monitored the recent elections. The League’s founders include celebrities such as Boris Akunin and Doctor Liza, that is Elizaveta Glinka, who was behind the creation of the first hospices in Russia. The Voters’ League is more of a social movement demanding the right to co-decide their fate using the ballot card rather than the beginnings of a future political party. It is likely that the Voters’ League and other organisations monitoring elections will give us more and more examples of irregularities during the March poll in the coming months. They will also perhaps rally citizens to vote against representatives of the current regime in local elections, although they will probably wait a few years until the next parliamentary elections for the next big battle against the government – as the one factor which unites the various groups of protesters is electoral fraud. This is good news for Putin and his acolytes as this gives them some breathing space. In today’s Russia the main source of the government’s strength is the weakness of the opposition. But this is an illusory strength. During his third term, Putin will probably have to face not only the frustrations of a part of the public, but also internal opposition within the regime. He will live in constant fear that many Rus- sians regard him as a usurper. Social protests may last a long time and assume various forms because they are organised by a network which creates new social bonds and makes mobilisation easier. The people protesting against the regime are slowly turning from a shapeless mass into a Russian civil society aware of its rights. When we look for a historical parallel to recent events, what comes to mind, despite all its obvious differences, is the revolution in 1905, which greatly weakened the empire of the tsars but did not break it. We must remember that 1917 came after it. There are many reasons to believe that the turning point of 2012, despite Putin’s impressive win in the March elections, constitutes a prelude to great changes in Russia. Translated by Tomasz Bieroń

Grzegorz Gromadzki is an independent expert on eastern issues. He has worked for the Batory Foundation, the Centre for Eastern Studies and Gazeta Wyborcza. Spy Game Diplomacy Kelly Hignett

Relations between the United Kingdom and Russia remain cordial with growing economic ties. A look underneath the surface, however, reveals an intricate game of spying and tit-for-tat diplomacy.

The evolution of Anglo-Russian relations during the decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union has proven to be an extremely complicated and even controversial process. Economic ties between Russia and the United Kingdom have flourished, with the UK consistently ranked as one of the largest foreign investors in the Rus- sian economy. Trade and investment figures indicate that Anglo-Russian trade has grown by an average of 21 per cent annually since 2001. In foreign policy terms, UK and Russian officials continue to emphasise their mutual respect and stress the -im portance of establishing a secure partnership on the world stage. Scratch the surface, however, and the development of Anglo-Russian diplomacy has proven to be a much more fractious affair. Anglo-Russian diplomatic relations has a complicated, contradictory and somewhat chequered history. Since bilateral relations were first established between the Kingdom of England and Tsarist Russia in 1553, mutual relations have largely been characterised by disagreement, distrust, rivalry and suspicion, punctuated by necessary periods of alliance, cooperation and friendship. During the Cold War, attempts to develop and maintain détente were periodically interrupted by instances of increased tension and hostility. In the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev’s accession to the Soviet leadership led to warmer relations between the two states, with UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously stating that she thought she “could do business with Mr Gorbachev” in 1984. This “thaw” continued after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and during Boris Yeltsin’s time in the Kremlin both countries generally perceived Anglo-Russian relations in a positive light. Kelly Hignett, Spy Game Diplomacy Opinion and Analysis 19

Troublesome expatriates and outspoken exiles

More recently, however, Vladimir Putin’s tenure has heralded a dramatic cooling in relations, which has threatened to spill over into outright hostility. Bilateral relations between Russia and the UK have become increasingly strained as a series of disputes relating to troublesome expatriates, unresolved extradition arrangements and espionage scandals have triggered a number of public spats, fuelling the escalation of political tensions between London and Moscow. Today around 250,000 Russians live in the UK. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the UK quickly became a popular destination for members of the Russian elite, who were keen to invest their newly acquired wealth in a variety of businesses ranging from football clubs to media outlets, with many also choosing to establish a more permanent residence in the UK. However, the UK has also become a popular destination for “political refugees”, serving as something of a safe haven for Russians who are fleeing persecution and prosecution. The Russian expatriate community in London hosts an active dissident circle, dominated by high-profile individuals including wealthy Russian oligarchs, Boris Berezovsky and Yevgeny Chichvarkin, and Chechen separatist Akhmed Zakayev, all of whom have fled Russia, successfully claiming political asylum and settling in the UK. Their outspoken criticism of Vladimir Putin and his siloviki, the “men of power” who dominate the political landscape in Russia today, means that many who walk the Russian corridors of power today believe London acts as an irritating and potentially dangerous overseas centre of dissent and opposition. In many instances, the willingness of UK authorities to assist and protect such individuals has inflamed tensions between the two countries. The repeated refusal by UK authorities to bow to Russian pressure to extradite Berezovsky, Zakayev and Chichvarkin to face outstand- ing criminal charges in recent years has fuelled friction between the two countries.

The case of Boris Berezovsky

The controversial case of Boris Berezovsky provides a particularly illuminating example. Berezovsky is a Russian businessman and leading member of the Yeltsin- era “oligarchy”, with an estimated fortune of over 850 million British pounds (1.3 billion dollars). Also, formerly a media magnate, government official and elected deputy of the Russian Duma, Berezovsky exerted great financial and political sway in Russia during the 1990s but became increasingly critical of Vladimir Putin after his election to the presidency in 2000. Following attempts to bring criminal charges against him, Berezovsky fled to the UK, where he was granted political asylum in September 2003. Today, Berezovsky remains wanted by the Russian authorities and Anglo-Russian relations are characterised by a considerable degree of mutual suspicion. Kelly Hignett, Spy Game Diplomacy Opinion and Analysis 21 faces charges of fraud, embezzlement and political corruption if he returns home. In 2007 and 2009 Russian courts sentenced him to long prison terms in absentia. However, attempts by the Russian authorities to push for Berezovsky’s extradition have been persistently blocked by the UK government, who argue that the criminal charges against him are “politically motivated”. Berezovsky remains an outspoken critic of Anglo-Russian relations are Vladimir Putin’s regime, and has openly stated his commitment to ensuring Putin’s removal characterised by distrust, from power. In a particularly provocative inter- rivalry and suspicion, with view published by the Guardian newspaper in April 2007, Berezovsky claimed he was actively periods of cooperation. financing a “revolution” in Russia from his base in London, referring to his plans for a coup to forcibly remove Putin from power. This provoked outrage from the Kremlin, who demanded Berezovsky’s status in the UK be reviewed in light of his claims. Although a UK investigation resulted in a warning, the UK Crown Prosecution Service confirmed in July 2008 that Berezovsky would not face any criminal charges and that his status as a political refugee in the UK remained unaffected. This outcome was condemned by Kremlin officials, who described it as a “disturbing moment” in Anglo-Russian relations. Despite attempts to downplay Berezovsky’s influence, his continued high-profile presence in the UK clearly acts as an irritant to Vladimir Putin. Berezovsky has frequently claimed that the Russian authorities are plotting to silence him and British intelligence sources confirm they have uncovered evidence of two failed assassination attempts, in 2003 and 2007, which Berezovsky has accused Putin of authoris- ing. Officers at MI5 (the UK’s internal national security service – editor’s note) have claimed that Russian attempts to target Berezovsky highlight broader concerns, demonstrating the worrying willingness of the Russian Security Services to conduct operations to silence troublesome elements overseas.

The Litvinenko case

In November 2006 the world was rocked by the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko. A former agent of the KGB and FSB (the successor to the KGB, the Fed- eral Security Services – editor’s note), Litvinenko fled Russia for the UK in 2000, and settled in London, having close links with both Boris Berezovsky and Akhmed Za- kayev. Litvinenko played an active role in the resistance to Vladimir Putin, making a number of controversial allegations including his famous claim that it was Putin who authorised the 1999 bombing of Russian apartment blocks to pave the way for the second Russian invasion of Chechnya. 22 Opinion and Analysis Kelly Hignett, Spy Game Diplomacy

While a resident in the UK, Litvinenko was also employed as a consultant by British intelligence organisations MI5 and MI6 (MI6 is the UK’s foreign intelligence agency – editor’s note). In November 2006 Litvinenko died an agonising death in a London hospital, suffering from radioactive poisoning after ingesting polonium-210. Many aspects of Litvinenko’s death remain shrouded in mystery and controversy, provok- ing numerous conspiracy theories including some highly probable as well as some more outlandish allegations. The evidence available to date suggests that Alexander Litvinenko almost certainly fell ill after drinking polonium-laced tea at a meeting he had with some Russian “contacts” at a West London hotel on November 1st 2006. Three men are suspected of involvement in Litvinenko’s death – Andrei UK officials worry about Lugovoi, Dmitry Kvtun and Vyacheslav So- Russia’s willingness to conduct lenko – all of whom are former FSB agents. Most analysts believe that Litvinenko’s assassination operations overseas. was conducted with the knowledge and active involvement of the Russian Security Services, on high-level orders which came directly from the Kremlin. In a statement released from his hospital bed shortly before his death, Litvinenko personally accused Putin of poisoning him and senior British intelligence officials also suggested there were “very strong indications” of high level Russian involvement, although this has been denied by the Kremlin. Chief suspect Andrei Lugovoi has also publicly denied any involvement in Litvinenko’s death, claiming that MI6 are employing a “dirty-tricks campaign” against him; while Russian sources have alleged that Litvinenko’s former patron, Berezovsky, may actually have been behind the assassination. However, in January 2010 Berezovsky won a litigation battle against these allegations and was awarded £150,000 ($230,000) in damages by the UK Court of Appeal, who ruled they had found no evidence that he was involved in Litvinenko’s death. Certainly, the Kremlin appeared reluctant to assist British investigations into Litvinenko’s death. Instead they offered support and protection to those suspected of involvement in the murder. In May 2007 British intelligence revealed they had clear evidence linking former FSB agent Andrei Lugovoi to Litvinenko’s assassination and requested his extradition to the UK to face murder charges. However, their requests were rebuffed by Russian officials who argued that their constitution guaranteed Lugovoi – recently elected as a member of the Russian Duma – immunity from prosecution. Russian offers to place Lugovoi on trial in Russia were deemed unacceptable and inappropriate by UK authorities, who believed that not only would a Russian trial lack transparency, but would also threaten the safety of any witnesses called to give evidence. British officials have accused Russia of deliberately obstruct- ing their attempts to investigate Litvinenko’s death. In 2007, former British Foreign Kelly Hignett, Spy Game Diplomacy Opinion and Analysis 23

Secretary David Miliband called the Russian refusal to comply with the extradition request “extremely disappointing”. As things currently stand, conclusive answers about Litvinenko’s death are unlikely to emerge any time soon.

Diplomatic deadlock

Litvinenko’s assassination, conducted in broad daylight in the heart of London, at the suspected hands of Russian secret agents acting with seeming impunity on British soil also triggered the biggest crisis in diplomatic relations between Russia and the UK since the end of the Cold War. The Litvinenko case quickly snowballed, triggering an escalation of political posturing and a standoff which threatened to create a state of diplomatic deadlock between Russia and the UK. In July 2007, in response to the perceived lack of Russian cooperation over Lugovoi’s extradition, British authorities announced the expulsion of four Russian diplomats from London and a freeze on plans to discuss the possibility of easing Russian visa requirements to the UK. Moscow quickly responded in kind, by expelling four British diplomats from Mos- cow, suspending their visa facilitation process for UK officials and threatening to halt all future bilateral cooperation on counter-terrorism and security measures. At the time, Vladimir Putin personally referred to the diplomatic deadlock as a “mini-crisis”, but also said he remained confident that the two countries could resolve the situation. In October 2007 when Britain honoured former KGB defector, Oleg Gordievsky, in the Queen’s Birthday Honours, Russia quickly responded by awarding MI6 defector George Blake the prestigious Russian Order of Friendship. In January 2008 Russian authorities targeted the British Council – a government-funded overseas charity – ordering two of their largest offices in St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg to cease operations due to alleged tax violations. These charges were strongly denied by British Council Representatives. Chief Executive Martin Davison spoke of a “campaign of intimidation” with British Council staff members being interviewed by the FSB and subjected to late night home visits from the tax police. The director of the St. Petersburg branch was detained by Russian authorities on spurious charges. While the operation against the British Council was part of a more general Russian policy of restricting non-governmental organisations in Russia – with Vladimir Pu- tin previously accusing foreign governments of secretly funding NGOs in Russia for political purposes – the timing of this particular crackdown was clearly connected to the Litvinenko stand-off. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov admitted that Russian actions against the British Council were intended as a “retaliatory move against the British government”. Indeed, later in 2008, after the initial furore surrounding the Litvinenko murder had abated, the Moscow Arbitration Court ruled that the tax claims filed against the British Council had been “invalid”. 24 Opinion and Analysis Kelly Hignett, Spy Game Diplomacy

Espionage: A new “red scare”?

Fears about anonymous Russian agents committing murder on British soil and evidence of assassination plots targeting troublesome Russian émigrés in the UK also highlight broader concerns about contemporary Anglo-Russian espionage. The end of the Cold War did not herald the end of intelligence operations between the UK and Russia. Within Russia there have been allegations of State Security Services in- timidating British diplomatic staff, activists at NGOs and journalists in recent years, employing a range of intrusive techniques including harassment, apartment break- ins, phone bugging, email interception and physical surveillance, something which Mafia State author, Luke Harding, claims has become a “normal and accepted part of Embassy life” in Moscow today. Growing concern has also been expressed about levels of espionage beyond Rus- sian borders. In November 2007, Jonathan Evans, Deputy Director of British Security Service MI5, claimed that “since the end of the Cold War we have seen no decrease in the numbers of undeclared Russian intelligence officers in the UK … conducting covert activity in this country”. More recently, an intelligence report compiled by MI5 in 2010 warned that the threat of Russian espionage “did not end with communism” and that Russian intelligence activity on British soil today actually exceeds Cold War levels, with around 50 Russian intelligence officers operating in the UK (30-35 in London), gathering information relating to politics, military defence, engi- neering, energy developments, information technology, scientific advances and commercial enterprises. Earlier this year, KGB defector Boris Karpichkov also claimed that “Britain remains a prime target for the Russian Intelligence Services”, a view which is borne out in a new book by Edward Lucas, Deception: Spies Lies and How Russia Dupes the West, where Lucas argues that Russian espionage activities in the West remain as busy and as aggressive as ever today. A number of Russian “spy scandals” have been exposed amidst high levels of pub- licity in the UK in recent years. In June 2007 four diplomats were expelled from the Russian Embassy in London after they were linked to a plot to assassinate Boris Be- rezovsky at the Hilton Hotel in Park Lane. In July 2010, it was revealed that Anna Chapman, one of the 10 Russian “sleeper agents” in the spy ring deported from the US, had previously spent five years living in London, gaining a UK passport following her marriage to a UK citizen. In December 2010 two more “spy scandals” made the UK news, as Katia Zatuliveter, a 26-year old parliamentary aide working for Liberal Democrat MP Mike Hancock was arrested and served with a deportation order after she was accused of supplying sensitive political information to the SVP (Russian Foreign Intelligence Agency – editor’s note). Zatuliveter was later acquitted of all espionage charges. In the same month, a Russian Embassy employee (later named as Kelly Hignett, Spy Game Diplomacy Opinion and Analysis 25

Mikhail Rupin in the UK press) was also expelled from the UK after he was caught attempting to recruit a number of security and intelligence officials. On March 23rd 2012, Russian banker and London Resident German Gorbuntsov was gunned down outside his home, surviving the attack. Gorbuntsov is wanted in Russia in connection to another banker’s murder, Alexander Antonov. Authorities suspect this Despite diplomatic rows, was a revenge for Antonov. Finally, on March economic trade remains 31st 2012, MI5 officials announced evidence of a plot to assassinate Akhmed Zakayev, with a strong element of the belief that it had been ordered by Ramzan bilateral relations. Kadyrov, the (Kremlin backed) president of Chechnya. The suspect listed in the official complaint, known only as E1, was meant to be expelled from UK soil to Russia, but E1 is fighting the charges and expulsion attempting to stay in the UK. Anglo-Russian espionage is not a one-sided affair however, with clear evidence that UK intelligence operations also continue to be actively established in Russia. In 2006, in a plot that could have come straight out of a James Bond film, the Russian media published evidence, including video footage, claiming that British spies had been using electronic equipment concealed within a fake “spy rock” to exchange and transmit information. At the time, British authorities expressed “concern and surprise” at the allegations, and the UK Foreign Office issued a statement “rejecting any suggestion of improper conduct”. However, in a BBC documentary broadcast in 2011, former Chief of Staff, Jonathan Powell, admitted that the Russian claims of espionage were true, which lead to an “embarrassing exposé” for British intelligence.

Exceptionally important element

Today, Anglo-Russian relations remain anything but candid. Following the diplomatic standoff that developed in the aftermath of Litvinenko’s assassination, attempts have been made to place Anglo-Russian relations on a more secure footing. After the change of government following the UK general election in May 2010, incom- ing Foreign Secretary William Hague spoke of his desire to repair Anglo-Russian relations, even visiting Moscow in November 2010. This was followed by a meeting between UK Prime Minister David Cameron and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in Moscow early in 2011, where both parties spoke of their commitment to setting relations on a new footing based on “a dialogue of mutual respect”. The recent re-election of Vladimir Putin to the Russian presidency in April 2012 is unlikely to change British attitudes towards Russia, with Cameron quick to state that he “looks forward to working with Putin” and of his “desire to overcome obstacles 26 Opinion and Analysis Kelly Hignett, Spy Game Diplomacy

and areas of concern” in Anglo-Russian relations, despite the widespread allegations of electoral fraud that accompanied Putin’s victory. There are a number of reasons for this seemingly contradictory approach. Despite their problematic diplomatic relationship, the UK and Russia view one another as valuable allies in terms of economic development and foreign policy initiatives. Even during the diplomatic crisis following Litvinenko’s death, both Russian and UK officials were careful to stress the separation of diplomatic disputes from economic agreements. In 2011 UK exports to Russia totalled £4.78 billion ($7.6 billion), an increase of 39 per cent from 2010. Furthering Anglo-Russian trade links is considered particularly important during the current global financial crisis. This emphasis on economic engagement was further illustrated by the fact that in September 2011, when Prime Minister David Cameron visited Moscow, he was accompanied by 24 British business leaders as part of a drive to further increase Anglo-Russian trade, leading Dmitry Medvedev to state that British-Russian collaboration in trade and investment was “an exceptionally important element” of their bilateral relationship. With regards to foreign policy initiatives, the UK also continues to view Russia as a valuable ally and a necessary partner on the world stage. Despite some “bumps in the road” (UK leaders were openly critical of the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, for example) in recent years, the UK and Russia have signed bilateral agreements over a number of important issues relating to nuclear non-proliferation, counter- terrorism and operations in Afghanistan and the Middle East. The complicated history of Anglo-Russian relations means that plenty of scope for mutual suspicion, disagreement and distrust remains today. In the future, while we are likely to see the continuation of a certain degree of political posturing and tit-for- tat diplomatic sanctions, both countries remain keen to ensure that any diplomatic disputes are contained within “acceptable limits”, so that they do not spill over and adversely impact other, potentially productive aspects of the Anglo-Russian relationship. Desire for further engagement, particularly in terms of economic investment, therefore, acts as an effective brake on the escalation of diplomatic tensions.

Kelly Hignett is a historian and a lecturer in the School of History and Clas- sics at Swansea University in the United Kingdom. She specialises in crime and social deviance in the Central and East European region and the former USSR. She also writes a popular blog, The View East, at http://thevieweast.wordpress.com/. The Propaganda Machine Marcin Mączka

Promoted by the slogan “Question More”, Russia Today is the greatest Russian media project since 1991, and was designed to be competition to BBC World and CNN International.

In 2005 the Kremlin-sponsored news channel, Russia Today (RT), went on air. Supporting the creation of the channel, the head of the Federal Agency for Print and Mass Communication at the time, Mikhail Seslavinsky, complained that the English-language world should know more about Russia due to the fact that its image in the global media was distorted. In some respects, he was right: Russia is often shown in a bad light, using only superficial and selective information. Since the rapid development of the media market in the 1990s, Russian television stations started to reach foreign viewers through satellite providers (and less commonly through cable networks). But no Russian-language channel ever had a mass audience, and the Russian diaspora dispersed across the globe made up their main audience. This all changed when the English-language 24-hour channel was created. Its editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, claims that RT’s intended target is a specific type of viewer, who is “a person capable of critical thinking, for whom one or two sources of information are not sufficient to create a complete picture. Who wants to know the truth rather than passively accept clichés.”

Entering the fray

In the first years of the channel’s existence many wondered whether Russia To- day could actually become a global player, especially considering that in the previous decade many other foreign English-language stations targeted at audiences abroad had been created. In 2004 the Chinese CCTV News went on air, while the Venezuelan Telesur began broadcasting in 2005. Al-Jazeera launched its English version from Qatar in 2006, and France began broadcasting the English version of France 24 in the same year. They were all ready for their piece of the “media pie” 28 Opinion and Analysis Marcin Mączka, The Propaganda Machine

which had been traditionally dominated by western stations. Russia Today proved that it could have a piece of this pie and continued to expand its reach throughout the international media market. Western producers, however, were less happy about the emergence of RT (and others) on the world market as the process of undermining their information monopoly had begun. The concept of global media pluralism slowly materialised: with unprecedented ease, the viewer really can “Question More” and get to know various points The target of Russia Today of view, simply by using the remote control to is a specific type of viewer: switch channels. The story of RT begins with the desire of “a person capable of the Russian elite to counteract the depiction critical thinking”. of their country in the American and Brit- ish media. And so they decided to enter the fray. In 2005 the government assigned 700 million roubles (around $23 million) to launch the channel and gave it a 1.4 billion ($47 million) budget in the first year. In successive years the Kremlin invested increasing sums of money in Russia To- day: 2.4 billion ($80 million) in 2007, and 3.6 billion ($120 million) in 2008. In 2011 the budget reached 11.4 billion roubles ($380 million), and in 2012 the channel will receive 9.1 billion roubles ($300 million). Officially, the entire project was established as an independent, non-commercial organisation by the state-owned TV-Novosti. Since the funders who sponsor the channel are state institutions, the Kremlin has nearly full control over the station. Russia Today doesn’t even have any commercial adverts and the only source of outside revenue are news materials which are sometimes sold to other television stations.

Constantly expanding

Assigning such large sums of money to RT can be explained not only by the desire to change Russia’s image in the world, but also the impressive development of the channel itself. In December 2005 the nascent channel only broadcasted a few hours a day and employed three hundred reporters, presenters, editors, producers and translators. By 2007 the English version was broadcasting around the clock and had added an Arab language version: Rusiya Al-Yaum. This “sister” channel, with its programming adapted to an Arab audience, employed more than 500 people, including 100 correspondents from countries in the Middle East and Northern Africa. In late 2009 the Russia Today “family” grew to include a Spanish language channel. According to a RT press announcement, the Spanish section recruited a staff of 200 people, including 35 local journalists from Argentina, Spain, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, USA and Bolivia. Marcin Mączka, The Propaganda Machine Opinion and Analysis 29

The next stage of RT’s development was a partial change of profile: the channel not only broadcasted information about current events but also started to explain history from a Russian point of view. In mid-2011 an English language RT Docu- mentary Channel was created which presents programmes and reports on Russian history, culture and traditions. The channel was launched symbolically by President Dmitry Medvedev from the Moscow RT headquarters (the offices are housed in the building RT aims to improve the image of the state information agency RIA Novosti). of Russia abroad and present Russia Today currently has over 2,000 employees in 16 countries, more than the second a Russian point of view. largest American channel, Fox News, and half the staffing of the media giant CNN. Making use of its financial resources, RT is constantly expanding: the various different language versions can be received on cable platforms in over 100 countries, transmitted from more than 20 satellites covering almost the entire planet. And even if you finds yourself in a place where you don’t “catch” a satellite and none of the four RT channels are present in your hotel’s cable offer, have no fear: all three language versions and the documentary channel can be watched live and for free on the station’s website. In 2009 RT commissioned audience surveys in France, Germany, Italy, Great Britain, Serbia and Poland, where, as the market research agency Synovate claims, the channel is watched by seven million viewers. In the autumn of 2010 Kantar Media presented the results of another poll, putting the number of RT viewers in Great Britain at around two million, five times more than the ratings of the Eng- lish version of Deutsche Welle (Germany) and one and a half times more than France 24. A survey conducted in 2009 by Nielsen Media Research showed that the RT’s audience in Washington DC and New York was six times higher than in the United Kingdom and five times higher than that of Deutsche Welle. It is too early to assess RT’s popularity on a global scale as only the number of potential viewers, that is those with access to broadcasts, is known. According to RT’s data, the channel reached 120 million people all over the world through satellite and cable networks in 2008; a year later this figure was estimated at around 150 million. Now the number of potential RT viewers is put at approximately 430 million.

Distracting viewers’ attention

Some Russian journalists cautiously criticise the level of expenditure of the RT “family” channels, but it can hardly be denied that the reporters and producers of these channels are highly qualified. The station has attracted experienced journalists, the reports are competent and dynamic, and the latest technology is being used. 30 Opinion and Analysis Marcin Mączka, The Propaganda Machine

Despite the official aim of rectifying the image of Russia in the West, the main area of the RT family interest is not Russian domestic matters: the attention of reporters and editors is almost exclusively focused on events outside Russia. Com- mentaries are focused on human rights, curtailing armaments and the arms trade, environmental protection, social inequities, famines and natural disasters. RT reporters examine issues such as the instability of the financial markets, fiscal crises, the impact of corporations on the global economy, scandals surrounding the financial and banking establishment, and demonstrations of the “outraged”. Commentators and “experts” with little chance of making an appearance on any other television station are invited to speak on RT. These often include anarchists, anti-globalists and representatives of various left-wing movements. The stars an- choring their own programmes are journalists with openly anti-American views (Peter Lavelle) or specialising in uncovering financial scandals (Max Kaiser). A series of programmes hosted by the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, began broadcasting in April 2012. The first episode was an interview with Hassan Nas- rallah, the leader of Hezbollah. News about Russia itself is of secondary importance. If it appears at all, it is usually related to the progress of Russia’s “modernisation”, economic achievements and the growth of foreign investment. Lightweight programmes are often shown about the beauty of the Russian natural landscape, cultural achievements, interesting museums and exhibitions, as well as the most trendy restaurants and night clubs Photo: Russia Today Marcin Mączka, The Propaganda Machine Opinion and Analysis 31 in Moscow or St. Petersburg. Embarrassing information about Russia is usually omitted and RT never broadcasts programmes showing Russia’s social problems, condemning corruption or administrative incompetence. The staff of Russia Today In tune with the old Soviet saying, “and you consists of over 2,000 beat the blacks in the US”, the channel often employs this same method of distracting the employees with 21 offices viewer’s attention from anything that could in 16 countries. adversely affect Russia’s image. It is a pity that instead of explaining the complexities of the world, the catchy slogan “Question More” is reduced to focusing and commenting on the world’s failures. For an issue to make it on air, these failures must fulfil two fundamental criteria. Firstly, they absolutely cannot concern Russia or hurt its interests. Secondly, they should appear in a Western country (preferably the US), or if they concern other parts of the world, they must originate from the postcolonial legacy or the “imperialist” urges of the West.

An alternative view?

Describing the activities of the channel in 2009, Margarita Simonyan, RT’s editor-in-chief, said: “What we see as black and white may not be black and white. It’s making people question their own stereotypes … We offer an alternative to the mainstream view.” It is true that the world of politics is rarely black and white and all mass media could be accused of presenting a simplified picture of the world, but does Simonyan’s alternative view also mean an objective view? Was Andrey Illarionov, the former advisor to Vladimir Putin and today an oppositionist, right when in 2007 he called Russia Today “the best Russian propaganda machine targeted at the outside world”? Anyone can easily find an answer to this question by watching RT and comparing it with other news channels. There is nothing wrong with the fact that RT shows a different picture of the world than CNN and the BCC (or other televisions of the “Western” and “non- Western” world). Let them do it. It is perhaps easier to understand the world and find answers when we “Question More”. The drawback of the RT project is that it does not promote objectivity of the reporters and does not attempt to find the truth. Plurality of information sources, which in principle is very much desired, is also increasingly bringing about some negative consequences. Although presenting the same events in different ways by various channels may confuse the viewer, the main reason for these negative consequences is not the emergence of new sources of information, but their lack of objectivism. 32 Opinion and Analysis Marcin Mączka, The Propaganda Machine

What is striking about the Kremlin’s information campaign and the attempts to create a positive image of Russia abroad is the scope of the project, of which the ever-growing RT “family” is just one element. Promotional campaigns have been commissioned from global public relations leaders, such as Ketchum, GPlus and dozens of other smaller agencies in various countries. The budget of state-owned information agencies ITAR-Tass and Ria-Novosti is growing year by year and internet magazines such as Russia Beyond The Headlines and Russia Profile flour- ish. The radio station, the Voice of Russia, is experiencing a revival and currently broadcasts to 80 countries in 40 languages including the US, Armenia, Turkey, Brazil, India, Ukraine and even Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite the huge scale of these operations, improving Russia’s image abroad is still hampered by a lack of objectivism. It is obvious that image has a lot to do with advertising and every advert must promote positive aspects of the product. But even the best advert which tries to sell a poor product may only make one impression. The new image of Russia which has been created in recent years can be likened to that of a matryoshka (a set of nested wooden Russian dolls – editor’s note). Despite being hollow, every matryoshka looks pretty and requires a lot of effort to put together and take apart. If the media matryoshka made in Russia starts to crack, it will not be because of the internal or external forces trying to destroy it (as Kremlin political technologists would like to think), but because the impressive form is completely empty of any significant content. Translated by Tomasz Bieroń

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ADVERTISEMENT Pussy Riot and Cyber-Orthodoxy

Jacek Borkowicz

Traditionally, Russian Orthodoxy has been associated with being a rigid structure. Today, however, its members are far from what we could call a monolith.

What really happened in early 2012 at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Sav- iour? Was it an anti-Christian demonstration or an unconventional protest against the political regime? This question cannot be answered with a simple “yes” or “no” answer. A group of young women from a punk band called Pussy Riot dressed-up in masks and gaudy clothes tricked their way into the most important church in Russian Eastern Orthodoxy, Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. They got in when there were no churchgoers in the church, although it wasn’t the churchgoers that the band cared about most; it was the cameraman, who accompanied them into the church. The members of the band danced and sang a song in front of the altar, which they call punk moleben, a punk intersession prayer. The song by no means resembled a religious hymn, although its chorus did consist of a call to the Virgin Mary to “chase” the prime minister, Vladimir Putin, who at the time was getting ready for the final stage of the presidential elections, away from the Kremlin. A major scandal erupted. The three participants of the event were arrested and are now facing seven years imprisonment for religious insult and hooliganism.

A seemingly trivial blunder

The slogans which were shouted in front of the altar, despite their anti-Putin elements, were typical postulates of modern Western feminism discourse: a woman’s freedom to choose abortion and equal treatment of the sexes. All of this has been heard many times in the West where anti-church feminist events are nothing new. In Russia, however, they carry very different associations which are additionally 38 Opinion and Analysis Jacek Borkowicz, Pussy Riot and Cyber-Orthodoxy

reinforced by historical memories. In the 1920s similar “events”, although called something different back then, combined with parodies of Orthodox rituals were quite common in Eastern Orthodox churches. They were organised by the Union of Belligerent Atheists, a social organisation, strongly supported by the communist regime in power. For the Bolsheviks, Eastern Orthodoxy was the central front in its war against religion as it wasn’t only the denomination of the majority of Russians, but also the ideological base of the old tsarist system. The victim of this war was Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour itself: in 1931 it was blown up on Stalin’s order. Its reconstruction after the collapse of the Soviet Union entailed a great deal of resources and today it is regarded as a symbol of a revived and tri- umphing Russian Eastern Orthodoxy. And this is where the similarities end. Indeed, the members of the band did storm into the church and did use swear words while suggestively dancing in front of the altar. This, in itself, could be regarded as blasphemy. But the intention of their performance was not blasphemy. The message they were trying to convey was a radical rejection of Putin’s system of power and the hierarchy of the Church. “Gundyay, you bitch (Gundyayev is the birth surname of the Orthodox patriarch, Kirill – author’s note), you’d better believe in God, not Putin!” Pussy Riot shouted. It is worth noting that the rebuilt Moscow church is not a religious destination for many Russian Orthodox, but rather a place of official celebrations attended not only by the patriarch but also by both presidents: Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin. The choice of the termpunk moleben was also not a coincidence: February 21st 2011 was the Orthodox Shrove Tuesday, a day when, based on the old tradition, crazy horseplay is allowed in churches. This seemingly trivial blunder has, in a tense political situation, become a mirror reflecting Russian society today. The first reactions of the Church were quite moderate in their tone. “If they came across me, I would have fed them, touched their heads and explained to them that they had gone too far,” said Father Andrey Kuraev, an Orthodox deacon. However, distraught churchgoers and representatives of the church hierarchy quite quickly called Kuraev back to order. Vsevolod Chaplin, who is responsible for the Church’s relations with society in the patriarchate, even suggested that the band members should be charged with hate crimes. It did not take long before action was taken: the main suspects participating in the event were arrested. Chaplin, the grey eminence and the main ideologue of the Russian Eastern Orthodox Church, is perceived as a political hard-liner. This believer in strong Russia (he became famous for prais- ing Joseph Stalin and his public support of the government’s military programme) is against the liberal tendencies of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and is distrust- ful of the Russian intelligentsia whose members he considers to be Russophobic. Unquestionably, his influence on Patriarch Kirill is quite strong. Jacek Borkowicz, Pussy Riot and Cyber-Orthodoxy Opinion and Analysis 39 Patriarch Kirill I of Moscow is seen as a supporter of moderate, self-limiting reforms within the Eastern Orthodox Church. Photo: Serge Serebro (CC) commons.wikimedia.org 40 Opinion and Analysis Jacek Borkowicz, Pussy Riot and Cyber-Orthodoxy

Moderate reformer

And what about the patriarch himself? He is, without a doubt, an interesting personality. Three years after he had become head of the Eastern Orthodox Church, it was in a state of political stagnation. One could even say that under the leadership of his predecessor, Alexy II, Russia’s Eastern Orthodox Church fell victim to its own delusions of grandeur. In addition, the lack of flexibility in external relations, and hence conflict not only with Rome but also with Constantinople and Kyiv, meaning the sister capitals of Eastern Orthodoxy, led it to international isolation. In relations with society, the position of the Eastern Orthodox Church has been significantly weakened by a lack of serious interest in the missionary work and an overt dependence on the corrupt system of state power. In this context, Kirill has visibly supported the line of moderate, self-limiting reforms within the Eastern Orthodox Church. His first trip abroad was a visit to the patriarch of Constantinople. In relations with the Vatican and Pope Benedict XVI, after the openly cold relations between his predecessor and John Paul II, the Russian patriarch declares to be a supporter The message of Pussy Riot fighting for the protection of common values in an increasingly secular world. At the same was the rejection of Putin’s time, he is a steadfast defender of the principle system and the hierarchy of the canonical territory of Eastern Orthodoxy. Also equally interesting are his relations of the Church. with Kyiv, the capital of independent Ukraine and the centre of divisions within Eastern Orthodoxy of the Byzantine observance. Kyiv is host to two competing centres of Eastern Orthodoxy (one, pro-Moscow and the other, independent Ukrainian and “autocephalous”) as well as Ukrainian Greek Catholics. Kirill did not scold the disobedient metropolis, like Alexy II did, but rather implements the unusual idea of showing appreciation and respect towards Kyiv (Mother of Russian Churches) while trying to tie it to Moscow. In the three years of his rule, he has managed to win over the ecumenical initiative of the Greek Catholics and initiate talks that will yoke together the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and Moscow’s patriarchate. With respect to internal politics, since the increase in tensions before the last elections to the Duma and the presidential election, the patriarch supports the “correction” of the government’s line, which includes some of the opposition’s ideas (abandoning political repression and fighting corruption). In December 2011 Kirill said at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour: “We have no title to one more division. We don’t have such a title because of the blood that was sacrificed in the 20th Jacek Borkowicz, Pussy Riot and Cyber-Orthodoxy Opinion and Analysis 41 century.” A similar tone characterised the patriarch’s Christmas speech delivered in January 2012. However, at the key moment of the anti-Putin demonstrations, Kirill criticised the demonstrators for being led by “a human and not a divine law”. In the very same speech he referred to the last 20 years of Putin’s rule as a “miracle”. This speech was, in part, finally received as support for the government. It is more probable that the patriarch is searching for a golden middle which would allow him to take on the role of mediator between Putin’s power system and the opposition in the future, balancing the Kremlin and demonstrators on the streets. Putin himself seems quite pleased with Kirill’s pro-government gestures. There is seemingly more to it than a Byzantine-like flair for complements. For Putin, the former KGB operative, security is and always will be a very highly ranked value on the list of political priorities. Russia’s president genuinely appreciates the political style of the patriarch whose main guidance is ensuring social order. Kirill’s limited reformism is most noticeable in the way he manages the Church. The patriarch is a supporter of the moderate reform of the liturgy (which will strengthen the position of the Russian language and culture in the Byzantine liturgy) and proposes strengthening the role of laymen in church councils and the religious media. Kirill’s vision is undoubtedly a strong church in a strong state. However, he also seems to be aware that too much dependence on the government would push the Rus- sian Eastern Orthodoxy into the trap of caesaropapism, just like before 1917. A few months after becoming patriarch, Kirill criticised the strong social inequalities which characterise Russia and claimed that one of the reasons for the Church’s fall in Bolshevik times was its indifference to social issues. Today’s state-church relations in Russia are governed by the “Chaplin doctrine”; some time ago Chap- lin said that although the Church is separate from the state it cannot be separated from society. On a different occasion, he said that social morale is of lesser importance today than full churches. These are all new elements of the official language of Russian Eastern Orthodoxy. There are even some signals that the Eastern Orthodox Church is testing the waters with the Kremlin about the possibility of establishing an Eastern Ortho- dox party, an equivalent to the Western Christian Democrats. Such a party would include wide groups of believers with the exception of extremists, from both the left and right.

The 1943 syndrome

It is quite clear that all these liberalising moves, however moderate and selective, are meant to serve a higher purpose: to strengthen the position of the Eastern Or- thodox Church in a strong state. In Kirill’s view and in the view of his ideologue, 42 Opinion and Analysis Jacek Borkowicz, Pussy Riot and Cyber-Orthodoxy

Chaplin, there is little room for any influential liberal ideas to emerge. Let alone a radical social movement. This mental barrier that exists in the minds of the leaders of today’s Orthodox Church is deeply rooted in events from the past and related to the September 1943 syndrome. This refers to the time when Patriarch Kirill is searching Joseph Stalin ordered a gathering of all living Orthodox bishops. After over a decade for a golden middle between of intense fighting with religion and the Putin and the opposition. shutting down of churches, and quarter of a century of physical extermination of the clergy and believers, the Russian Orthodox Church was drawing its last breath. This barrier was actually built from within by actions of a movement called the Living Church (whose supporters are commonly known as “restorers”; obnov- lentsy in Russian). In fact, the Living Church movement was supported by the communist non-canonical Eastern Orthodox community, whose activities were primarily aimed at undermining the position of the real church hierarchy. Stalin, who desperately needed cannon fodder on the German front, was aware of how strongly attached to the Eastern Orthodox Church the Russian peasants, his future recruits, were. Hence, when he met the bishops in 1943, he put forward the idea of an armistice with the Eastern Orthodox Church, in exchange for the clergy’s support of the fight for a common homeland. An agreement between the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Russian state was then concluded, and with the exception of the period of Nikita Khrushchev’s rule, the provisions of this agreement have remained in place ever since. This agreement meant the end of the Living Church with Stalin chasing away his former favourites. However, the memory of the Living Church is vivid today. The “restorers” are, hence, seen as a repellent and a label which can be used against an enemy when needed. Any voice within the Eastern Orthodox Church which brings up social or moral issues in any sort of way, is subject to the accusation of being a “restorer”. Such allegations were made against Father Aleksandr Men, a pi- ous theologian and martyr. And today they are even being directed towards Kirill, the moderate patriarch. Together with the fear of being labelled a restorer, the patriarch seems to have another “historical” complex: the patriarch himself feels disappointed with the Russian intelligentsia, just like those who surround him. By the early 1920s, people within the émigré “white” Russian Eastern Orthodox Church were already making plans for a strong Eastern Orthodox intelligentsia which, back in Russia, could op- pose the Bolsheviks. However, things turned out differently. The communists got the intelligentsia onto their side, while those in the intelligentsia who identified Jacek Borkowicz, Pussy Riot and Cyber-Orthodoxy Opinion and Analysis 43

themselves with Eastern Orthodoxy seemed vulnerable to succumb to the influence of the “restorers”. Considering that the majority of today’s protesters against Putin’s regime are educated and hold some religious beliefs, Archpriest Maxim Kozlov, Rec- tor of the Church of the Holy Martyr Tatiana at Moscow State University, said: “Admit that you fight for truth, freedom and justice, but if you were given any power, you would have spoilt everything, just like in 1917.” People thinking like Father Kozlov who remember past experiences, are scared that the radicalisa- tion of ideas among the Eastern Orthodox could even destroy this tiny social achievement which the religious Russians have managed to achieve since the collapse of communism.

Orthodox cyber-intelligentsia

And yet, a completely new model of the Russian intelligentsia has emerged right in front of our eyes: the internet-using middle class. Many of its members question the direction their country is taking. The demonstrations on December 10th 2011 against the election fraud was the first mass protest organised in Russia through social media like Twitter, Facebook and VK (a Russian social network service – editor’s note). LiveJournal, the most anti-government of social media, which calls itself a “global community of friends”, contains four million blogs and 20 million users a month. Its most popular blogger, Alexei Navalny, is the unquestionable leader of the social protest against Vladimir Putin. This wide and still difficult to grasp move- A new model of the Russian ment encompasses people and groups who intelligentsia has emerged. declare themselves as Eastern Orthodox or Christian in general. Their vast influence can be proved by the fact that the movement is also supported by Sergei Chapnin, lay editor of The Journal of Moscow’s Patriarchate, an official paper of the patriarchate. However, the opposition of the “new Orthodox” is directed not only against Putin’s government, but also against the entire Church establishment and its connections with the corrupt system. The representatives of the “cyber Orthodox” generation use their blogs to combat the old, Soviet-like, thinking which can still be seen among their brothers in faith. Some websites don’t only include material touting opposition and combat. An- drei Desnitsky, one of the most widely-read leaders of the online protests not only ridicules the idea of homo sovieticus christianus, but also effectively promotes a new model of social engagement that has been emerging in Russia. On his blog (www.pravmir.ru), readers can find a combination of civic values (called “bourgeois” values until recently), family values and an enlightened religion, open to 44 Opinion and Analysis Jacek Borkowicz, Pussy Riot and Cyber-Orthodoxy

the world; a religion which would also have friendly relations with the Catholic Church, something that would be strikingly unusual in Russia. These were the groups which showed their support for the arrested members of Pussy Riot. The readers of political blogs who despite being Orthodox, agree that this behaviour in church was unacceptable, also expressed their opposition to the way the singers were treated. The patriarch received a petition letter asking him to intervene. The petition was signed by 2,000 Orthodox Russians, as well as many Catholics. In addition, Navalny himself got involved in the case by calling the arrest of the band members a “pointless cruelty”. On March 10th 2012, less than a week after Putin’s victory in the presidential elections, street protesters in the centre of Moscow demanded the release of the members of Pussy Riot. The protesters were carrying Orthodox icons and a cross. Translated by Iwona Reichardt

Jacek Borkowicz is a Polish historian and analyst who specialises in issues relating to Eastern Europe, religion and the Caucasus. He is a regular contributor to the Polish weekly Tygodnik Poweszechny and the bimonthly Nowa Europa Wschodnia. A Matter of Life and Death Katerina Barushka

On March 17th 2012, the world learned of the execution of two young men convicted in the April 2011 bombing of a Minsk metro station. The investigations, arrests and hearings were swift. Yet many doubted the guilt of the accused. Since their execution, public support for the death penalty in Belarus has dropped from almost 80 to 40 per cent.

The year 2011 wasn’t particularly easy for the Belarusian government: harsh international reaction to the violent dispersal of peaceful protests after the presidential election in December 2010, continuous pressure in connection with political prisoners, Russia’s reluctance to provide economic support, and above all a dramatic drop in the quality of life with extreme inflation and dissatisfaction with the regime. After the pre-election salary increase to 500 dollars per month, this drop was especially painful: the Belarusian economy was pushed back to the level of the early 1990s – a period in Belarusian history after the end of the Soviet Union which Alexander Lukashenko often referred to as the dark times of devastation, and which Belarus was only able to overcome thanks to his wise management. This comparison stresses the contrast between the horrors of wild liberalisation and the convenience and stability under his strong management. This metaphor, however, is no longer useful. The reality of early 2011 was people fighting and queuing for goods and foreign currency, as well as the emergence of a black market. After 17 years of being told that the president is in charge of every little thing, Belarusians were unwilling to be tricked into believing that this time it was the fault and responsibility of other people in the government. People knew that the crisis was the result of President Alexander Lukashenko’s politics, and there was no convenient war anniversary or harvest celebration to distract them. 46 Opinion and Analysis Katerina Barushka, A Matter of Life and Death

Atrocity and horror

And then on April 11th 2011, a homemade bomb exploded at the main metro station in Minsk, killing 15 people and leaving over 300 wounded. In a country which practically did not know terrorist groups or violent disputes, a terrorist act took place. The aggression came out of nowhere and Belarusian society succumbed to the atrocity and horror. Everyone was on alert. Developments in the case were all over the news and the Belarusian security services arrested suspects 27 hours after the explosion. Dzmitry Kanavalau and Uladzislau Kavaliou spent eight hours behind the walls of the Belarusian KGB, and confessed. During the press conference on the morning of April 13th, the president announced that those responsible for the terrorist attack had been captured and described the operation as exemplary. It wasn’t very convincing. The metro stations were silent and deserted even during rush hour. People didn’t talk about it, they whispered. How was it possible? The president, whose word had always been presented as a life-time guarantee, said that the criminals were under arrest, and that Belarus, under his rule, was safe again. So why were there so few people at the metro stations? What were people afraid of? Were they afraid that Belarus was now one of those countries which had terrorist attacks? Or that the government was not able to protect its citizens? Two weeks after the bombing I went shopping in a small shop near the metro station and could still smell the smoke in the air. It is important to emphasise that this part of Minsk is the bastion of support for Alexander Lukashenko: pensioners, war veterans and retired Soviet nomenklatura. People don’t complain here. They don’t reveal their political views publicly, as they gen- On April 11th 2011 a bomb erally don’t have many. exploded at a metro station in But even two weeks after the explosion, the shop was full of people talking: “Why is it so Minsk killing 15 people. expensive?” someone would ask. “Take two packs, we have instructions to double the price by tomorrow,” a shop attendant would say. “In this country you no longer know,” and: “Exactly, the president claims one thing, and does another,” was another reply. And then there was the sentence: “Since the bombing, I don’t trust a word of what they say, after I saw the ambulances waiting by the corner over there, ten minutes before the explosion.” There was no awkward silence following this blunt accusation and nobody went out of the shop outraged. It seemed that it was nothing new. Even if it wasn’t what anyone had seen, it was what many had heard. And it seemed that what people were afraid of was the answer to the question of how far Lukashenko would go to distract the population of Belarus from the country’s economic problems. Katerina Barushka, A Matter of Life and Death Opinion and Analysis 47

The investigation

It has been over a year since the tragedy. How has the perception of the case changed? What do people think about the bombing now? And what has happened this year which has caused public support for capital punishment to drop from almost 80 per cent to less than 40 per cent? Let’s go back over some of the events. April 11th 2011, 5:56 pm. A bomb explodes at the central Oktyabrskaya metro station in Minsk. Two hours after the explosion, Lukashenko and his 6-year-old son visit the site of this great national tragedy. Let me put this differently. Just two hours after the explosion, when bodies are still lying on the platform, when they should still be checking for other explosives, the president of the country, who otherwise never appears in public without a squad of guards, arrives at the location of the explosion with his young son. The station is large. How many more bombs could still be hidden? Only two hours have passed since the explosion, the first of which was spent evacuating people and providing primary medical help. The search for other explosives had just begun. How could one possibly visit this place, bringing along a child, without the complete confidence that there were no other bombs? Around nine o’clock in the evening, a phone conversation between Lukashenko and the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, takes place. Russia offers all the necessary support to find the perpetrators of this terrorist act, and within a further three hours, other offers of help have also been given by the governments of Israel and Great Britain. These turn out to be unnecessary, however, as the Belarusian authorities seem to be able to manage everything on their own. All the investigation had, was a tape from the security cameras in the metro. Naturally, the video of the entire day must be analysed as the bomb might have been put under a bench at some point during the morning. It can take days for the material to be analysed, theories to be derived, a suspect defined, his photo sketch created, and compared with the hundreds of photos of known criminals, and then finally distributed amongst the militia. And nobody knows how long it might take to find a person resembling the photo sketch in a city of two million (or even the entire country). Yet, the Belarusian secret services managed all of the above and captured the suspects within 27 hours. Eight hours of intensive interrogation and the suspects confessed to organising and carrying out the bombing. Who were the men who were arrested? Dzmitry Kanavalau and Uladzislau Kav- aliou both come from Vitebst, a city in the north of Belarus. They used to live in the same neighbourhood and attended the same school. Both were 25 years old. Dzmitry lived in Vitebst while Uladzislau had moved to Minsk half a year previously. They had not kept in touch. A day before the explosion Dzmitry arrived in Minsk, informing 48 Opinion and Analysis Katerina Barushka, A Matter of Life and Death

Uladzislau about his arrival, while on the train. Uladzislau helped him rent an apartment, where they, and a friend Dzmitry had met online, Yana Pachytskaya, stayed for the next three days – until their arrest.

The trial

The hearings of the case began on September 15th 2011. Yana Pachytskaya was a witness. Dzmitry Kanavalau had a lawyer appointed by the state, while the mother of Uladzislau Kavaliou managed to hire an independent lawyer from Vitebsk – Sta- nislau Abrazei. She had also been granted an earlier opportunity to meet her son in prison in June 2011. When she requested another meeting with Uladzislau before the hearings began, the deputy of the prosecutor general determined her request to be “ungrounded”. She travelled from Vitebsk to Minsk to every hearing and stayed with the families of the victims. The parents of Dzmitry Kanavalau had not requested a single meeting with their son. The father and brother of Dzmitry also spent several weeks under arrest after the explosion, supposedly under suspicion of assisting in the preparation of the bombing. The Kanavalau family had only been The Belarusian secret services in court once, and all attempts to talk to them managed to identify failed as they were guarded by representatives of special forces at all times. and capture the suspects The witnesses for the defence didn’t have the within 27 hours. possibility of speaking during the hearings, as some two hundred victims of the bombing had previously been approached by the Belarusian security services with a request to sign a statement that they would not appear in court. The court used their statements, recorded right after the explosions on April 11th, and read them out from a computer screen during the hearings. Liubou Kavaliova, the mother of Uladzislau, recalled that they heard the statements of several victims during the hearings and was amazed that only a few of them wanted financial compensation from the accused. One of the guards escorting her explained the reason for such little financial interest was due to the fact that the victims were told that the accused would be shot anyway, so there was no point in demanding any financial compensation. According to the prosecution, Kanavalau could be seen on the video recorded by the security cameras in the metro, but the prosecution disregarded the conclusions of the Russian Federal Security Services (FSB), which held that Kanavalau bore no resemblance to the person seen on the tapes. The prosecution also didn’t take into consideration the fact that even although Kanavalau was supposed to have been in the metro during the explosion, only a couple of hundred metres away from the actual Katerina Barushka, A Matter of Life and Death Opinion and Analysis 49 spot, there were no traces of explosives and ash on his clothes and body, despite the fact that smoke could be seen outside the metro station. Kanavalau appeared confused and gave one word descriptions of his actions. He kept silent during the course of the entire case. The main evidence used by the prosecution was Kanavalau’s statement made during detention after the intensive eight- hour interrogation inside the Belarusian KGB. On the basis of Kanavalau’s and his own confession after the arrest, Kavaliou was considered an accessory to the crime. He was claimed to have helped by renting an apartment and carrying Kanavalau’s bag with the supposed explosive materials from a taxi to the apartment. The questions of whether he knew about the explosives in the bag, and whether, in fact, there were any, remained unanswered in the trial. The other incriminating piece of evidence was “the failure to report the crime”. According to the prosecution, Kanavalau told Kavaliou about the proposed terrorist act the day before during a drinking session. There is no proof of this, other than the “confessions”. During the court hearings Kavaliou denied his initial confession, claiming that it was forced out of him under pressure. The next day, the Prosecutor General was fired. During a later psychological examination, Kavaliou also denied his earlier statements. Within a matter of days, the Minister of Justice was also fired. A coincidence?

The verdict

Two and a half months after the hearings, the court announced the verdict. Kana- valau was found guilty of terrorism, with Kavaliou guilty of being his accomplice and failing to report the crime. The judge characterised Kanavalau and Kavaliou as people who “represented an exceptional danger to society” and sentenced them to death by firing squad without their property being confiscated. After the announcement of the verdict, many in the audience shouted “shame”. On December 9th 2011 Kavaliou submitted a request for a presidential pardon, which allowed him to meet with his lawyer and family. After numerous previous attempts, Liubou Kavaliova made another call to the KGB requesting a meeting on January 20th. She was told that they would notify her once such a meeting was possible. The next day she left for Strasbourg to speak to the Council of Europe. This became known publicly and she suddenly received a call from the KGB notifying her that the meeting had suddenly become possible and could only take place within 24 hours, and couldn’t be postponed. Take a moment to think about the kind of decision a woman has to make to see her son, perhaps for the last time in her life, or to speak in front of an international body in the hope that they might help save his life; and the kind of system that would deliberately make a mother face such a choice. In the end, Tatsiana, the younger sister of Ulad, attended the meeting. 50 Opinion and Analysis Katerina Barushka, A Matter of Life and Death

The second meeting took place on March 11th 2012. Here is how Liubou Kavaliova described it to me: “Me and Tanya left for Minsk. Surprisingly, we did not have to wait for the meeting at all, unlike before, when we would spend hours in the waiting room. The investi- gators were unusually friendly, offering to give Ulad books and vitamins. We tried to cheer Ulad up, but he would only look at us and the investigator standing behind us. I would tell him, ‘please, Ulad, don’t cry’, but Public support for the death he kept looking at us and asking ‘why not?’. He penalty in Belarus has already knew something we didn’t.” In the meantime, Uladzislau Kavaliou’s law- dropped to 40 per cent. yer was preparing a procedural complaint on the case. He attempted to arrange a meeting with his client on March 13th and 14th to finalise the documentation, but wasn’t granted such a possibility. On March 14th 2012, Belarusian State Television announced that Alexander Lu- kashenko had refused to pardon Kavaliou. Not wasting any time, the lawyer submitted a complaint the very next day. According to Belarusian legislation, and common sense, the sentence cannot be carried out when there is a formal complaint on the conduct of the hearings. On March 16th Liubou Kavaliova, Uladzislau’s mother, appealed directly to the president to postpone the execution of the sentence for a year, until the Human Rights Committee of the United Nations could review her complaint on the violation of the right for life of her son. According to international agreements, which Belarus is a part of, the sentence of capital punishment cannot be executed until the UN has finished considering the case.

The execution

On March 17th, Liubou Kavaliova received notification from the Supreme Court that her son had been executed. It stated the date of the execution as March 15th. The authorities later announced that Dzmitry Kanavalau had also been executed. Thus, the tragedy that happened in the Minsk metro took away the lives of two more people. This time, by legal means. Two young men were executed; one of them, by direct decision of the president. Alexander Lukashenko didn’t have to make such a decision. And he didn’t need to make the decision so quickly. All the cards were in play. Maybe, their lives could have been traded in for something with the European Union? A life spared, and dramatically bad relations with the West would surely have improved after a year of stagnation. According to a survey conducted by the Independent Institute for Socio-Economic and Political Studies in March 2012, public support for the death penalty in Belarus Katerina Barushka, A Matter of Life and Death Opinion and Analysis 51

has dropped from almost 80 per cent to 40 per cent. It is worth mentioning that “high public support” for the death penalty is the argument the government has been using to maintain capital punishment in the legal system for the last 15 years. There is no public support for this measure any longer, and announcing a moratorium on the death penalty is perfectly within the capabilities of the government, but it still doesn’t happen. Why? Was Lukashenko trying to maintain his “tough guy” image? Or was the system getting rid of the remaining witnesses of the bombing? The terrible truth is that we might never learn the answer. According to the Belarusian government, most of the materials from a capital punishment case are destroyed after the execution. No additional checks, no further investigation, nothing. No surprising evidence, no new facts. The case is closed. In recent interviews, Liubou Kavaliova often asks what has changed now that the boys are gone. Her life has changed forever. But society has also changed. And there is no possibility of going back. People were not convinced by the court proceedings. They could see that Uladzislau’s participation in the case was an exaggeration, to say the least. And Dzmitry could not have done it by himself. People have seen that the system makes mistakes, fatal mistakes. And people have reacted. Perhaps there haven’t been many public protests against the death penalty, but the petition of Liubou Kavaliova, prepared before the announcement of the verdict, which called on the government to save the life of her son, was signed by almost 300,000 people. Three hundred thousand people were not afraid to claim that they didn’t believe in the official version of the case. The official propaganda employed all its resources to convince Belarusians that these two young men were killed for justice; that they were terrorists. However, it didn’t prevent the number of supporters of the death penalty decreasing by half. People want their country to be different. The reason why Lukashenko didn’t pardon Kanavalau and Kavaliou is that for the past 18 years the government has enjoyed absolute power, claiming to have absolute support for its actions. And here was an obvious sign that the people could no longer be fooled, and that they had decided to think contrary to the official “right” way. The state has been telling Belarusians that it knows what’s best for them. But, all of a sudden, in the matter of a year, society has suddenly woken up and seems to know what’s best for itself on its own. This was the change that happened during 2011. What will be the change during 2012?

Katerina Barushka works for the independent Belarusian TV channel, Belsat, covering political and social issues in Belarus, and international affairs. She has also been working in the Belarusian NGO sector for the past ten years, dealing with international affairs and youth activism in Belarus. Advertisement ADVERTISEMENT www.littman.co.uk

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ADVERTISEMENT Time to Treat Lukashenko Seriously

Paweł Kowal

Belarus needs a new approach. EU policy towards Belarus should be working out the power system around Lukashenko and getting through to people who are most interested in change.

Looking for weak points in Alexander Lukashenko’s camp and establishing communication channels inside his system makes much more sense than the staring contest currently taking place between Europe and Belarus. At best, the spiteful commentary coming out of Europe against the Belarusian president pushes Lu- kashenko to denounce those who criticise him, as he did, not long ago with Guido Westerwelle and Radosław Sikorski (the German and Polish Ministers of Foreign Affairs), or even worse, fuels internal propaganda messages like the almost cli- chéd: “Belarus is under attack”. The worst case scenario is that Lukashenko will use western criticism against him to further repress the opposition. Despite his idiosyncratic behaviour, however, the reaction to his policies should not take the form of mockery. Just like when the American president, Ronald Reagan, and Secretary of State, George Shultz, derided Poland’s leader during the 1980s, Wojciech Jaruzelski, by saying “the answer is no”, they stood their ground and made a few strongly worded comments. This particularly important decisiveness with communist Poland was expressed by concrete acts rather than public bickering and the issuing of endless statements. Lukashenko must also be treated seriously as there is the possibility that political prisoners are being tortured in Belarus, and a large part of the opposition is in danger. 58 Opinion and Analysis Paweł Kowal, Time to Treat Lukashenko Seriously

Let’s build a coalition

Surprisingly, Poland is more successful in influencing the European Union’s policy towards Ukraine than it is towards Belarus. Since 2007 Poland itself has been under the influence of European illusions about Minsk. However, this is really surprising given the fact that the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, is well-informed on the situation in Minsk and had kept in contact with Andżelika Borys, the head of the Union of Poles in Belarus (UPB), for a number of years (until her departure from the UPB). Indeed, some politicians from Tusk’s political party, Platforma Obywa- telska (Civic Platform), are also fairly well-informed on the situation in Belarus, including Robert Tyszkiewicz, Jacek Saryusz-Wolski and Jacek Protasiewicz. And yet the balance of Polish and EU policy towards Belarus since 2007, and especially after the staged elections in December 2010, Poland needs partners to seems to be negative. pursue an effective policy This policy has unknowingly contributed to additional divisions within the Belarusian towards Belarus. opposition movement and preserves Lukash- enko’s power. The UPB, the largest social organisation in Belarus that is not related to the Lukashenko regime, was put under pressure by the regime and Borys left in 2007. As a result of the recalling of EU ambassadors from Belarus in March 2012, relations between the EU and Minsk became significantly worse at the moment when many European capitals were getting ready to ease relations with Belarus. This again proves the lack of cohe- sion. The joint European retaliations seemed to be much more driven by the fact that Minsk expelled the EU Ambassador, Maira Mora. Minsk also expelled the Polish Ambassador, Leszek Szerepka, whose level of competence is unquestionably higher – but Europe was seemingly less concerned about Szerepka’s expulsion. There were no real discussions about serious sanctions and the subsequent entry bans only served to end a months’ long cool down of relations with the EU. West- ern diplomats openly discussed the possibility of convincing Minsk to undertake talks with one of the segments of the opposition in order to justify yet another change of course in EU policy. Lukashenko either didn’t understand the situation or didn’t care to improve relations with the EU. To pursue an effective policy towards Belarus, Poland needs partners. It won’t succeed without good relations and trust with Lithuania, and mobilising European leaders towards Minsk has to start with an agreement between Warsaw and Viln- ius. The Lithuanian foreign minister, Andronius Ažubalis, must become an active participant in this policy. Otherwise, Lithuania will be getting Brussels used to the fact that it has its own agenda in relations with Minsk. Paweł Kowal, Time to Treat Lukashenko Seriously Opinion and Analysis 59

The most effective move towards Belarus would be a similar manoeuvre to the one used towards Kyiv: greater involvement of Carl Bildt, the Swedish Minister of Foreign Affairs. Just like the Polish foreign policy, the protection of human rights drives Swedish foreign policy much more than investment does. This is why cooperation between Sikorski and Westerwelle was ineffective with respect to relations with Minsk, as both ministers were driven by very different policy goals. Cooperation between Sikorski and Bildt would bear much more fruit. Lukashenko needs to know that Poland has partners who are steadfast supporters of European standards in humanitarian affairs, and Minsk needs to be aware of the fact that as long as Ales Bialiatski and other political prisoners remain behind bars, there will be no dialogue with European states.

Backup means of communication

In terms of affecting policy in Minsk, there is also a need for dialogue with those in the government. In a situation when official communication fails, there should be a backup means of communication. At this stage, Lukashenko probably treats the states of the former Soviet Union much more seriously than the EU countries. Hence both Georgian and Ukrainian diplomacy should maintain relations with his regime when the EU cuts off its ties, and fulfilling this mission might also serve as a good “exercise” in europeanisation for Georgia and Ukraine. It is necessary to open an In addition to Viktor Yanukovych and Mikhail unofficial dialogue with those Saakashvili, there are many politicians in Ukraine and Georgia who are actually able to talk to in the government. Lukashenko. Another channel of communication was indicated by Lukashenko himself: the Church. Even during times of bitter relations with Minsk, many meetings took place in the Apostolic Nunciature (the diplomatic mission of the Holy See – editor’s note). In this context, the question remains to what extent can we expect Archbishop Taduesz Kondrusiewicz (the Be- larusian Roman Catholic Archbishop of Minsk – editor’s note) to take on the role of an intermediary? He seems to be even less interested in politics in Minsk than he was when he was in Moscow. But it should be worth exploring the question of whether Lukashenko is able to treat the Catholic community in a serious way similar to the situation when General Wojciech Jaruzelski engaged the Catholic Church during the political turmoil in Poland 30 years ago. The problem here is the relative weakness of the Belarusian Church and the lack of a tradition of political activism. I recently witnessed a discussion between a member of the European Parliament and a Belarusian oppositionist, which took place over foie gras at an elegant French 60 Opinion and Analysis Paweł Kowal, Time to Treat Lukashenko Seriously

restaurant in Brussels. The MEP explained that the biggest problem in Belarus is the weakness and divisions within the opposition. What position should the EU take towards Lukashenko’s opposition? Burdening them with constant demands and criticising them for being divided is not productive and extremely irritable for the already intimidated activists. What’s worse is that some observers stress that Brussels (and also Warsaw) initially supported Alaksandar Milinkievič, who has been attracting a group of activists connected with different opposition groups. At a certain point, the West also started supporting competing candidates such as Uladzimier Niaklajeu, a poet and leader of the “Tell the Truth!” campaign.

The truth hurts

The work of these activists has received support both from Brussels, Warsaw and Moscow, and it has become clear that Russia is actually the biggest donor supporting democratic movements in Belarus. In the post-Soviet world, the consequences of such a policy has already been tested on numerous occasions, including the recent colour revolution in Kyrgyzstan. Dividing the Belarusian opposition even further is simply unacceptable. Today, we have a few leaders who are divided around the issue of whether democracy in Belarus should be built on Brussels’ or Moscow’s terms. The truth hurts: revolutions of revolutionaries are very rare. Subsequent waves of democratisation, and especially the so-called “third wave”, which includes Po- land, Hungary, Lithuania, and others, or the “fourth wave”, which includes countries such as Egypt and Tunisia illustrate this sad truth. In 1989 Adam Michnik (a Polish dissident, leader of the transition from Belarus can serve as the first Communism, and who became editor-in-chief real exercise in implementing of the largest daily Gazeta Wyborcza – editor’s note) was looking for allies among the a joint EU foreign policy. reformers of Polska Zjednoczona Partia Ro- botnicza (the Polish Communist party), while the Kaczyński brothers (Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński were Solidarity activists who later became leading right-wing politicians – editor’s note) were looking within Stronnictwo Demokratyczne (the Alliance of Democrats) and the Zjednoczone Stron- nictwo Ludowe (United People’s Party – both were “satellite” communist parties under the communist system – editor’s note). Such a policy brings both gains and losses. For the changes to succeed, the last phase should allow the incorporation of some members of the old regime into the revolution camp, and Belarus should not be any different. This is why, in addition to changing the attitude towards the opposition, another important axis of EU policy towards Belarus should be working out the Paweł Kowal, Time to Treat Lukashenko Seriously Opinion and Analysis 61 power system around Lukashenko and getting through to people who are most interested in change. Such people exist inside Lukashenko’s inner circles, as well as within the administration, various ministries and the central bank. The West should send these people clear signals that they are being recognised, as it is they who will shape the course of the revolution, evolution or any other form of political change which is unavoidably coming to Belarus.

Take a deep breath

Have no doubt, Lukashenko will not call for free elections, and it is probably better for all of us to give up such a naive hope. Nonetheless, it is possible to force him to free political prisoners (as has already happened) and to make some conces- sions towards greater freedom of the press, abolishing censorship and protecting ethnic minorities. At the same time, Europe needs to take a deep breath, gather its thoughts and start treating Belarus as an opportunity for the first real exercise in implementing joint EU foreign policy, albeit without counting on any quick gains. It is here that Poland has a chance to transform Belarus’s failure into a success. We, as Poles, are entitled to demand a greater influence on EU decisions in foreign policy. But Belarus requires a long-term and consistent policy. Only then will the successes come earlier than expected. Translated by Iwona Reichardt

Paweł Kowal is a Polish politician and a member of the European Parliament and chairs the EU-Ukraine Parliamentary Cooperation Committee. He is the former Polish vice-minister of foreign affairs and specialises in Eastern Europe. FE_reklama_N_E_Wschodnia_165x235_ENG_black.pdf 1 06.06.2012 14:51

Advertisement The Rise of Viktor Yanukovych Yegor Vasylyev

Despite co-hosting the EURO 2012 football championship, the most prestigious sports event in Europe, Ukraine remains an outsider in terms of political values. Informal networking is the most prominent governmental standard, with the president traditionally at the top of the pyramid.

On December 1st 1991, Ukrainians cast their ballots in one of the most mean- ingful of all public votes: to decide whether they wanted to have their own country. The answer was impressive enough, with 92.3 per cent of the voters supporting the National Independence Act. These results surprised many observers considering that in March of that same year, in a Moscow-initiated referendum, 71.5 per cent of Ukrainians voted in favour of the preservation of the Soviet Union. It was not only ordinary citizens who changed their opinion en masse, but also the political elites. Former Ukrainian Communist party chiefs, Leonid Kravchuk, Vitold Fokin, Ivan Plush and others, who had led the pro-Soviet campaign only months earlier, dramatically changed their minds on such a fundamental issue and became ardent supporters of national independence. Thus, in a matter of months, the “local” apparatchiks, subservient to Moscow, saw themselves transformed into the national elite.

European outsider

Since then, for over 20 years, Ukraine has failed to achieve the level of progress of her Central European neighbours in democracy building. Despite co-hosting the most prestigious sports event in Europe – the EURO 2012 football championship – the country is an outsider in terms of political values and standards of governance. Transparency, efficiency and accountability, rubber-stamped in official papers and declarations, are superseded by other standards: informal networks, patronage, and a patron-client system are what truly shape the performance of state institutions, making them serve the interests of the elected rather than the electors. 64 Opinion and Analysis Yegor Vasylyev, The Rise of Viktor Yanukovych

Informal networking is one of the most prominent governmental standards in Ukraine. The president is traditionally at the top of the pyramid ensuring its func- tionality and composition. Leonid Kravchuk’s presidential term was dominated by networks from Soviet times, and Leonid Kuch- Viktor Yanukovych owes every ma’s first term was marked by his struggle with step in his career to someone. competitors from amongst former communists and the emergence of the oligarchs. His second term saw the rise of the oligarchs and his rule over them. Viktor Yushchenko’s presidency from 2005 to 2010 was more a rule of the oligarchs, than over them. In February 2010, Viktor Yanukovych became the fourth President of Ukraine, with the record of his predecessor and 2004 rival Viktor Yushchenko accounting for most of the widespread public disenchantment and Ukrainian fatigue in European decision-making circles. The mechanism of the state administration, which had become dysfunctional through oligarchic tussles and endless personnel rotations between 2005 and 2010, was quickly restored into “a vertical”. Some political experts even forecasted a reformative path, due to the fact that Yanukovych trumpeted the rhetoric of stable governance, reforms and European integration. However, two years into his rule, the opposition’s highest-rated politician, Yulia Tymoshenko, and its other leader, Yuriy Lutsenko, are behind bars following scan- dalously unfair trials on inconclusive allegations. The upcoming parliamentary elections are likely to be marred by undemocratic practices. The macroeconomic debt is looming, whilst populist social promises are proliferating. What used to be seen as a democratic, however corrupt, unskilled and ineffective governance has slid back into semi-authoritarianism, although equally corrupt, unskilled and ineffective. So was it stable governance that Yanukovych was really aiming to restore? The answer, as with so many things in contemporary Ukraine, must be seen in connection with the past.

From car mechanic to politician

It might well be said that Yanukovych, a former convict and car mechanic in the provincial east Ukrainian city of Yenakiieve, has owed every step in his steep career to someone else. Indeed, to get into a managerial position (in his case, director of a transport unit at the Yenakiieve state coal company) after two jail terms was itself a miracle in Soviet times. For the vast majority of other people, imprisonment usually meant the end of the story. Some allege that this was due to his “cooperation” with the authorities whilst in prison. Others claim his ticket came from as far away as space: it was usual practice in the Soviet Union for those in need to ask famous people, in particular cosmonauts, to petition the authorities on their behalf. In 1978, Yegor Vasylyev, The Rise of Viktor Yanukovych Opinion and Analysis 65 local hero and Soviet legend, Georgiy Beregovoy, petitioned the Donetsk district court about Yanukovych’s unfair imprisonments, which led, according to Yanuko- vych himself, to their annulment. His political career started and thrived in an environment of fierce competition (and often bloody confrontation) between informal networks for resources and influence. After the split from the Soviet Union, a war for assets (mostly former state enterprises) broke out between the clans. Their members came from those best positioned to acquire control over such assets. They had three major backgrounds: the former functionaries of the Communist party and Komsomol (the youth wing of the Communist party – editor’s note); “red directors”, the caste of Soviet managers in charge of industrial enterprises; criminals, intertwined with the emerging private business (“kooperators”). Yanukovych’s native region of Donbass, where the Soviet-built heavy industry was concentrated, saw the most of this war. No means were deemed unacceptable, and more than 50 murders of regional businessmen, committed in the early 1990s, remain unsolved to date. The new system, first dominated by the “red directors”, who came into control over hundreds of state enterprises between 1992 and 1994, soon experienced a shift. The group of Vladimir Sherban, a former functionary in the Soviet state trade system and a director of the trade centre in Donetsk, and his counterpart (although not a relative) Yevgeniy Sherban, rose to dominate the region. At the same time, the group of Akhat Bragin (once a butcher at a local market in Donetsk and a director of a textile shop), was also gathering strength. By 1994, Bragin, who had gained control over various industrial enterprises and the local football club, was considered the shadow master of Donbass. In 1994, Vladimir Sherban crowned his advance with a move into the highest official post in the region: the head of the Donetsk Oblast administration. During his time in the office, Yevgeniy Sherban’s Industrial Union of Donbass (ISD) was created to supply gas to the enterprises of the region, as gas prices had rocketed. The ISD’s ide- ologist, local businessman, Vitaly Gayduk, became deputy head of the administration.

Coal-coke-metal

In July 1996, Vladimir Sherban’s fortune in Donbass withered as he was ousted when prime minister, Pavlo Lazorenko, a favourite of the new president, Leonid Kuchma, lobbied his local protégée, Viktor Polyakov, to the post. This is when Vic- tor Yanukovych, previously unknown both to politicians and the general public was appointed deputy head of administration. In May 1997 Yanukovych became head of the administration. By this time, the regional business landscape had seen a striking change. On October 15th 1995, Akhat 66 Opinion and Analysis Yegor Vasylyev, The Rise of Viktor Yanukovych

Bragin died in an explosion during a football match at his team’s stadium in Donetsk. On November 3rd 1996, Yevgeniy Sherban and his wife were shot dead by a team of assassins on the airfield at Donetsk airport. Vitaly Gayduk soon left the administration to concentrate on business. The Industrial Union of Donbass became the key business conglomerate in the region, having joined efforts with Rinat Akmetov, who had succeeded Bragin’s business. The scheme, later known as “coal-coke-metal”, endowed them with a real breakthrough in profit. The scheme presupposed control over the whole chain of metal production, making the price of such production staggeringly low and thus, maximising profits from the sales. In Ukraine, there is no shortage of claims that Yanukovych owes his me- teoric rise to the patrons of these local business schemes. Yanukovych climbed to new heights in 2002. Counter-balancing different clans, Kuchma decided to give the post of prime minister to the Donetsk clans. His favours to these clans had been increasing ever since his 1999 re-election campaign, during which his unpopularity in Donbass and his loss in the first round of the presidential election was turned into a win with 52.9 per cent in the second round. This was achieved largely through the “effective” administrative measures exercised by the local governor, Viktor Yanukovych, and the head of Kuchma’s local support group, Vitaly Gayduk.

In February 2010, Viktor Yanukovych became the fourth President of Ukraine. Photo: Andrzej Brzeziecki Yegor Vasylyev, The Rise of Viktor Yanukovych Opinion and Analysis 67

At the time of Yanukovych’s first premiership, from 2002 to 2004, Kyiv, although having experienced the first of the three waves of “the great Donetsk migration”, remained far from being conquered by Yanukovych. Under both the Ukrainian constitution and informal patterns, the prime minister traditionally played a secondary role to the president. However, it was also the prime minister who was traditionally given the task of taking sole responsibility for the economic throes and failures. It is this lack of ambition in Yanukovych, accompanied by his willingness to accept whatever public humiliation President Kuchma was eager to give him (such as the famous 2004 scene broadcast on the national news when Kuchma lashed out at Yanukovych for re-reading an old report), which paved the way for his presidential candidacy in 2004. Widespread pressure kept Kuchma from standing for a third term and Yanukovych’s unambiguous subordination to the president during his meek Soviet-style premiership, encapsulated in Kuchma’s political will and Kuch- ma’s people, allowed him to gain his – albeit somewhat reluctant – nomination for successor of the regime.

Donetsk moves to Kyiv

Although the majority of the cabinet were Kuchma’s faithful team, during the course of his favours to the Donetsk clans, some other members of the Donetsk networks made their way into high offices in Kyiv. Vitaly Gayduk, who had gradually broken up his businesses with Rinat Akhmetov, was appointed deputy prime minister. Andriy Klyuyev, a businessman and previously a deputy to the former regional kingpin, Vladimir Sherban, took the post of another deputy prime minister. And Eduard Prutnik, Yanukovych’s youthful deputy in the Donetsk administration and a close confidant, moved to Kyiv to work as an advisor to the prime minister. They all had been preceded by Sergiy Levochkin, a former advisor to Yanukovych in the Donetsk administration. In 2000 he found favour with Kuchma’s head of administration, Volodymyr Litvin, as well as Kuchma himself. Levochkin became a consultant and later a personal assistant to the president. But the year 2004 ended in a disaster for Yanukovych, with the Orange Revolu- tion led by Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko. By the beginning of 2005, Yanukovych was on the brink of disappearing from the country’s political scene. Many of his close counterparts and even protégées, such as Eduard Prutnik, made public statements about how the will of the public had countered the will of the authorities. 68 Opinion and Analysis Yegor Vasylyev, The Rise of Viktor Yanukovych

Prime minister: Part II

The “Orange team”, made up of the members of clans and groups side-lined during Kuchma’s second term, immediately busied themselves with fierce internal scuf- fles. The electoral promises of comprehensive reforms and tackling the all-pervasive corruption were hastily forgotten. Their resounding lack of achievements echoed by endless mutual accusations soon brought about massive public disillusionment. Under these circumstances, Yanukovych, so close to oblivion in 2005, unexpectedly found a second chance: practically a gift from his 2004 opponents. Former Orange allies, who still managed to win a very narrow majority in the parliament after the 2006 parliamentary elections, failed to agree on a candidate for the new prime minister. In a traditionally (for the Ukrainian politics) opaque and surprising change of a mind, the Socialist party’s faction switched sides and formed a coalition with Yanukovych’s Party of Regions and the communists. The new coalition nominated Yanukovych for prime minister. His second premiership had relished much more freedom in decision-making, and, essentially, more power. Yanukovych quickly learnt to capitalise on Yushchenko’s lack of vision, inconsistency and volatility. He abruptly halted NATO entry dialogue, openly attacked the president on budget matters and opposed his decree on snap parliamentary elections. Upon his return to opposition in 2007, Yanukovych no longer seemed as confused as he had been in 2005. First and foremost, he was more self-sufficient than in the past. On Yanukovych’s initiative, new people, including his and Kuchma’s long-term protégée Sergiy Levochkin, were summoned to the Party of Regions’ election list for the 2007 snap elections and subsequently became members of its parliamentary faction.

From client to patron

Through a narrow and unconvincing victory in the second round of the 2010 presidential election, Yanukovych was finally voted to the presidential office (he still considers himself as having been robbed of it in 2004). Despite various expert predictions, he did not bother to think about the legitimacy of his authority or his inability to exercise it without comprehensive political negotiations with his opponents. Rather, he saw things in his usual fashion, developed through his life-long experience in the patron-client system. For the first time, he could be a real patron and must establish himself through exercising control. His majority in the parliament was created with lightning speed, contradicting a decision of the Constitutional Court. Then, the personal composition of the Constitutional Court itself was changed. This was followed up by an annulment Yegor Vasylyev, The Rise of Viktor Yanukovych Opinion and Analysis 69 of the 2005 constitutional reform, which had limited the presidential powers. He needed no complex negotiations to form new Cabinet of Ministers, which was built on the same principles as his 2002 cabinet. The day that Yanukovych came to presidential Yanukovych quickly learnt office, he appointed Levochkin as head of his to capitalise on Yushchenko’s administration. Throughout previous presiden- cies, this post has proved to be more influential lack of vision and than most posts in the cabinet, showing who inconsistency. really has the time and the ear of the president. Along with that, Borys Kolesnikov, the deputy prime minister responsible for EURO 2012, is the only close counterpart of Rinat Akhmetov in a visibly important position. Andriy Klyuyev has been moved from the forefront of the government to a traditionally sleepy office in the National Security Council, and Vitaly Gayduk has practically vanished from both the political and business landscape of the country. Eduard Prutnik, has been left out of high office. The cabinet also includes some celebrities of the Ukrainian political arena, although rather tellingly, in secondary roles. Sergei Tigipko, a second runner-up in the latest presidential elections, has seen his rating as the deputy prime minister responsible for social policy reform dwindle, and Petro Poroshenko has moved from his usual semi-opposition platform into a non-influential seat in the Ministry of Economy.

Newbies

The most spectacular feature of the government is a block of complete newbies. The first part of the block mostly relates to the state finance, with Sergei Arbuzov, a former advisor and president of a small local Ukrainian Business Bank in Donetsk, since November 2010 heading the National Bank. Donbass-born Vitaliy Zakharchenko, a deputy head of the tax administration of the Poltava Oblast in 2010, became head of the Tax Administration of Ukraine, moving up to Minister of Internal Affairs in 2011; his place succeeded by Olexandr Klymenko, a tax official from Donetsk. Finally, Yuriy Kolobov, who had worked in various commercial banks up to the presidential election, was appointed Minister of Finance in February 2012. There is also an older generation of newcomers who have moved into key positions in the judiciary, military and law-enforcement. Anatoliy Golovin, a former prosecutor and KGB-serviceman (in Donetsk, of course), has headed the Constitutional Court since July 2010; Viktor Pshonka, a communist functionary in Soviet times and then a Donetsk Oblast prosecutor, moved into the Chief Prosecutor’s office in November 2010; Viktor Tatkov, previously a president of the Donetsk Appellate Commercial Court became the president of the Higher Economic Court in Kyiv; and Pshonka’s 70 Opinion and Analysis Yegor Vasylyev, The Rise of Viktor Yanukovych

brother, Mykola Pshonka, was appointed vice-president of the new Higher Court on Civil and Criminal Cases. Two Russia-borns, Dmitriy Salamatin and Igor Kalinin have found themselves the Minister of Defence and the Head of Security Service (both of Ukraine) respectively. Many agree that there is one common factor for these incredible career spurts: personal allegiance and links to the president and his elder son, Oleksandr Yanukovych. These appointments are usually labelled as those of “the family”, which has become a common phrase symbolising the personal interests of the president and his sons.

The vertical completed

The rules of post-Soviet politics, born out of the rules of the Soviet apparatchiks and further developed under harsh times of the business-political-criminal wars of informal networks in the early years of independence, are ones of which the Ukrain- ian president certainly has professional knowledge. The specific understanding of power as unabridged domination has proved most effective in his life-path. The “patron-client” relationship is a staple scheme for the system and the most worthy part of it is for a client to become a patron. What he has created during the two years of his presidency now looks rather like a complete “vertical”, and like its Belarusian version, it is built on sworn allegiance to the president (or his family members) and nobody else. Yanukovych has fully succeeded in realising his vision and is tightening his grip month after month. Quite naturally, the political opposition is not welcomed Under fair elections, and the Tymoshenko and Lutsenko cases give the the opposition could most eloquent and active members of the opposition a clear perception of what to expect. be capable of securing No stranger to the rules of informal networks, a majority in parliament. Tymoshenko herself has a rich experience of the “patron-client” scheme of relations. A professional in this sphere, Yanukovych is fully aware that there is no chance of imposing guaranteed control over her political activity. Her detention fits perfectly into such a specific view of power and politics: those not turned into clients or at least properly controlled – in other words, competitors – must not be allowed. Since the start of Tymoshenko’s trial, the president has been distancing himself from the decision of an independent Ukrainian court, complaining persistently about “retrograde legislation”. The version, apparently, hatched out of a translator’s gaffe during his speech at Victor Pinchuk’s Yalta European Strategy forum in Sep- tember 2011, when the “the Code of Criminal Procedure” was translated as “Criminal Code”, was readily grabbed and used by European politicians to demand freedom for Yegor Vasylyev, The Rise of Viktor Yanukovych Opinion and Analysis 71

Tymoshenko. Meanwhile, new investigations by an independent Ukrainian prosecution and judiciary are at full speed – this time trying to peg her to Yevgeniy Sherban’s assassination in Donetsk in 1997 (a murder charge, not the abuse of power). At the same time, he is doing his best to succeed Leonid Kuchma’s tricks by exploit- ing the geopolitical agenda into leading the life of his dreams. When high-ranking voices from Europe finally started to deliver clear messages such as the boycott of the Central European leaders’ summit in Yalta and a political boycott or even re-location of the EURO 2012 championship (which he is trumpeting within Ukraine as a huge success of his presidency), the Ukrainian authorities reacted in a mixed way. Yanukovych demanded respect for Ukraine’s dignity and independence, quite akin to the usual fiery speeches of Alexander Lukashenko, while Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, once a keen proponent of a Russia-led union in 2003, immediately detected “a hostile plot” to move Ukraine away from the EU. European politicians seem to be in a quandary here – too much pressure and substantive enough messages will indeed be capable of moving Yanukovych and Ukraine, closer to Russia, both economically and politically. However, the upcoming parliamentary elections might still pose a challenge for his cherished “vertical”. The president’s Party of Regions faces a slump in voters’ confidence across all regions of the country, and the much-criticised opposition has recently managed to organise an unstable consolidation. Under free and fair elections, the opposition might well be capable of securing a majority in parliament. But the dirtiness of the election process and mass fraud are almost seen as a certainty waiting to happen. And Ukraine has a rich history of opposition candidates changing sides once they have been elected. Should the opposition be able to withstand these manifold challenges and the fraud turns out to be as bold and explicit as it was in 2004, the mood of protest might get really focused. The newly-built vertical system might then meet something that is truly out of its character: public protests. It is perhaps useful, here, to remember that the de-facto political isolation of Leo- nid Kuchma and his drift towards Russia resulted in the Orange Revolution, Yanu- kovych’s ugliest memory. He is convinced, however, that it had not been addressed in the proper way.

Yegor Vasylyev is an analyst specialising in politics and transition of post-Soviet states. He holds an LLM in European Law from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he was a British Chevening Scholar in 2009-2010, following five years with the Ukrainian civil service. Culture Caught in a Political Mess

Natalia Sniadanko

The debate about Ukrainian language and culture consists of constant rows and going from one extreme to the other. “If your given name happens to be Russian, pack up and go back where you belong,” was the advice given to kindergarten children by one extreme-right activist.

During a literary evening in Basel last autumn I was asked if language really was such a hot issue in Ukraine and why Ukrainians are dead set against the Russian language. Multilingual Switzerland has proved that having more than one official language can only work to their advantage. I tried to answer the question, although it had never occurred to me to compare the language situation of both countries, by explaining that Ukrainians are not trying to eradicate Russian from everyday use, and doubt if there is anyone who still believes that it would actually be possible. Rather, their aim is simply to hold onto the Ukrainian language. If Russian was declared the second official language, Ukrainian would practically disappear from official use, where it presently only functions in theory.

Cursing and swearing

Such fear is not unfounded given the Russification of Ukraine. In Switzerland, on the other hand, all languages have been granted equal rights and state policy is geared towards supporting and not eradicating languages. Explaining certain typically Ukrainian phenomena to outsiders is somewhat difficult; and not only for reasons of their complexity. The problem is that even Ukrainian intellectual circles have not gained full awareness of these issues and have not worked them through entirely. The Russian-Ukrainian language conflict happens to be one of these issues. Why, then, do Ukrainians refuse to see bilingualism as an advantage? Natalia Sniadanko, Culture Caught in a Political Mess Opinion and Analysis 73

It seems that the best starting point in explaining this situation would be to examine everyday situations, for example when people are refused to be sold juice somewhere in Crimea unless they ask for it in Russian. Local people stubbornly claim to “not understand” Ukrainian, although the phrase sounds almost identical in both languages. Alternatively, we could start with the argument of the necessity of translating literary works from Ukrainian into Russian (and the other way around) which generally leads to the conclusion that nobody needs translations, as Russians do not read Ukrainian writers anyway, regardless of whether the text is in Russian or Ukrainian. Then we have those typical swearing rants on the streets of Lviv, where a couple of old ladies dressed up in smart hats are asked the way to Taras Chuprynka Street (Chuprynka was the pseudonym for Roman Shukhevych, a Ukrainian national- independence activist during the Second World War – editor’s note). Cursing and swearing, the old ladies answer in Russian, spouting a series of complaints about the new name of the street which used to be named after Pushkin: “Why would they change it in the first place? What was wrong with Pushkin Street? He was a great Russian poet after all. And who is this Chuprynka anyway?” The belligerence of the issue can be seen if you look at the Ukrainian parliament, where a fist fight broke out in May 2012 between ruling politicians and oppositions during the debate on whether to make Russian a recognized official language. If you talk to someone in Switzerland using French, they won’t necessarily understand you. It is accepted that there are multiple languages in the country. But the issue of language is perceived by both Ukrainian and Russian speaking Ukrainians as one of constraint and choice rather than a matter of peaceful co-existence stem- ming out of one’s own free will. This way they become a target of political manipulation at Reading literature in their own request. Ukrainian has come to be seen “If your given name happens to be Russian, pack your bags and go back where you belong,” as a political manifesto. is the kind of advice given to kindergarten kids by Irina Farion, an extreme-right activist and a scandal-monger from Lviv during her “Ukrainisation campaigns”. Just as ruthless in their argumentation are her language adversaries, including the equally infamous Dmytro Tabachnyk, the current minister of education. Tabachnyk has introduced Stalinist versions of history into Ukrainian school programmes. He also uses a lot of invectives that originated in Soviet times to refer to anything that is Ukrainian, some typical examples being: “nationalistic”, “pro-west” or “banderish” (after Stepan Bandera, the leader of a Ukrainian nationalist movement in the 1930s and 40s – editor’s note). Both sides of the conflict use very similar rhetoric. They fall into opposite extremes but don’t differ much as far as subject matter goes. Politicians from these opposing 74 Opinion and Analysis Natalia Sniadanko, Culture Caught in a Political Mess

political camps have just one aim: to unleash a populist witch hunt rather than strive to fulfil the promises given during their election campaigns, as was illustrated in the parliamentary debate.

Lack of true debate

We are constantly faced with situations where the main judging criterion for literary work is the language in which it was produced. Critical remarks regarding Ukrainian translations of literary pieces or the translation of foreign film subtitles (into Russian) are often regarded as “unpatriotic” and pro-Russian – even if the translation happens to be really poor. It is generally believed that “everything Ukrainian” deserves promoting regardless of its true value; and by the same token, there’s a firm belief that the Ukrainian language and the art Freedom of expression of translation in Ukraine are still in their in- in Ukrainian literature is fancy, and for that reason the latter is assumed a priori to be of worse quality than the Russian attractive to many young translation. Such convictions, although going to people in Russified Ukraine. opposite extremes as far as the subject matter is concerned, bring about identical results. The lack of critical judgement leads to the poor quality of translated texts, and this along with the increase in the number of such texts, makes them more and more unpopular. Reading texts in Ukrainian has become a kind of political manifesto. It’s not surprising given that 90 per cent of our bookselling market has been overtaken by publishing houses from beyond our northern border. This is why to those who publish books or the press in Ukrainian, their own country has become a sort of ghetto and the desire to generate income has been replaced by political and ideological motivation. Sadly there is a lack of true debate on the topic that goes beyond the primitive di- chotomy of Russian versus Ukrainian. It is somewhat remindful of the arguments carried out by football fans who are unable to reach an agreement when trying to prove “that their team is the better one”. If they were only willing to analyse a particular match, taking into account the best and worst moments of the game on each side, they would certainly be able to approach a consensus much faster. Perhaps the Russian-Ukrainian language conflict could also be resolved if its participants addressed specific problems rather than focusing on arguing. By being united against their common enemy in the fight for free culture they could reach an agreement much easier, for that matter. After all, the current cultural policies of both Russia and Ukraine are only pseudo-cultural and politicised to an equal extent. Spending public funds to print work written by the Ukrainian president and his supporters is viewed as governmental support for Ukrainian publishing. At the Natalia Sniadanko, Culture Caught in a Political Mess Opinion and Analysis 75 same time, most of the Ukrainian authors writing in Russian hardly stand a chance of getting published due to the huge numbers of books imported from Russia. This seemingly wide range of titles available to the Ukrainian reader is usually poor quality pseudo-literature aimed at the mass market. Trying to find any interesting literary phenomena from modern Russian literature among them is pointless. Our government seems to believe that Ukrainian literature can be sufficiently promoted through financing numerous Ukrainian institutions abroad – nepotism flourishes in them and hardly anyone is aware of their existence, let alone their promotional activity. Ukrainian literature is also promoted during international book fairs staffed by state employees who are not communicative enough in English or other foreign languages, and who resent being questioned about this issue. As a result, they are nothing more than just another element decorating the stand already cluttered up with photo albums of Ukrainian mountains, embroidery and ceramics. “How am I to blame for not speaking a foreign language?” an employee from the Ministry of Culture once complained to me during a phone interview. “It’s true, the name of our country on the stand was not written correctly in English. So what? It’s English after all. Our writers would better help us rather than harass us.” I asked her if she saw any possibility of Ukrainian writers being present at international book fairs. She stated categorically that the government grant wouldn’t cover such expenses.

Equally depressing situations

Modern Ukrainian literature written in Russian finds itself in an even worse situation than that written in Ukrainian as the authors of these books stand a very slim chance of getting published. Russian publishers consider them “foreign writers”. They are first supposed to prove their right to be recognised in the cultural sphere of our brother nation and also break the wide-spread stereotype that everything Ukrain- ian is looked down upon, with “intra-family” superiority. Russian authors writing in Ukrainian are perceived even more so as “foreigners” by Ukrainian publishers and advised to publish their works in Russia. The case of Andrey Kurkov, a Ukrainian writing in Russian, is a perfect example. While his writing is quite popular abroad, his status in Russia is not so clear-cut. De- spite writing in Russian, he is either attacked for identifying himself with Ukrainian culture, as he conducts his promotional campaigns in Ukrainian, or he is accused of not doing enough to preserve the Russian language in Ukraine. The wide recognition that Kurkov receives abroad hasn’t guaranteed him the same high esteem in Russia. It is not easy to judge which country’s policies do more harm to Ukrainian literature. Is it the expansive policy of Russia or the suicidal policy of Ukraine? But is it really that important who is more to blame? Does it matter which of the two cultural 76 Opinion and Analysis Natalia Sniadanko, Culture Caught in a Political Mess

niches disappears first: the Ukrainian or the Russian? If the situation does not improve, the extinction of both is only a question of time. The cultures of the Russian and the Ukrainian languages find themselves in equally depressing situations as their non-commercial segments are not subsidized by the state in any form and are destined to become extinct. As a means of diverting the artists’ attention from this pitiful reality, the Russian authorities, follow- Politicians in Ukraine ing the ancient Roman strategy of “divide and use the language debate conquer”, blow Russian-Ukrainian conflicts out of proportion. as a distraction. I was recently given the opportunity to compare the language situations in Ukraine and Switzerland. A highly-esteemed Ukrainian literary journal asked me to conduct an interview with a Swiss poet writing in Romansh (one of the four national languages of Switzerland – editor’s note). He lives in Biel, a small bilingual town in which the coexistence of French and German is ensured even in announcing the names of bus stops in both languages. I asked him if multilingualism stands in the way of literature. In his opinion, it is quite the contrary: multilingualism can only enrich literature, giving it such tones and shades that could never arise in culturally homogeneous countries. The highly-esteemed Ukrainian periodical did not publish the interview claiming that “the author’s view on multilingualism differs radically from the editor’s opinion on bilingualism” (in the past we published some articles on Switzerland where our negative opinion about this issue was clearly expressed). Focusing on its own, internal and strongly politicised context makes the debate on Ukrainian provincially and internationally marginalised. Even here in Ukraine, the topic does not raise much interest due to the categorical views and rigidity of judgement of those already engaged in the debate. Young people from the Russified parts of Ukraine have shown a growing interest in the works of modern Ukrainian writers for a long time. Reading these texts somewhere in Donetsk or Dnipropetrovsk brings to mind sports competitions or political manifestations. The basis for this curiosity is not solely the language but the vividness and openness of Ukrainian literature that offers subjects without taboo. This freedom of expression is what attracts young people the most. But if the above mentioned selection processes in publishing become common, and if censorship also makes “the loyalty in opinion” a requirement for literary texts, this curiosity will irrevocably die and the literature will lose its vividness. In the long run, the introduction of taboos, even when it is done seemingly for the public good, leads to backwardness, mental benightedness, rigidity of thinking, and intellectual ossification. I would never want the future Ukrainian intelligentsia to display these features and I bet it wouldn’t only be General Chuprynka who would agree with me here, but Pushkin himself. Natalia Sniadanko, Culture Caught in a Political Mess Opinion and Analysis 77

The president’s generosity

The Ukrainian parliament has recently inflamed the political-language conflict by voting to reduce the quota for television and radio programmes broadcast in Ukrainian introduced by the previous government. And this reduction is certainly not benign: a drop from the 75 per cent of programmes currently being broadcast down to 25 per cent. Anyone who has ever watched Ukrainian television or listened to Ukrainian radio stations will realise that this 25 per cent is not assured even now. If you doubt your own judgement, have a look at the statistics which show that books written in Ukrainian constitute only 13 per cent of all titles sold in Ukraine. The bill immediately ignited a fierce debate and generated protests. The president, in an act of scornful generosity, assured that he “won’t let it happen” and he would veto the bill as “he doesn’t understand a thing about it”. Thus, nothing will change: the quota might remain as high as before but there is no one to enforce it. And since ignoring the quota is not punishable, our reality will not change in this respect. Which language is more suitable for Ukraine: Russian or Ukrainian? Which orthography is it more reasonable to adopt: the system introduced during the Soviet era or the post-communist Ukrainian version? Which borrowings are more politically correct: from Polish or from Russian? In the heat of this emotional debate we usually fail to notice an important issue. In our readiness to fall prey to the government’s provocations regarding language problems we do no more than what Stalin did to Ukrainian orthography: we politicise grammar once again, letting it go unnoticed how absurd the process is. Łukasz Adamski, a Polish historian and political scientist, touches on this issue very tactfully in his article, “Language: A difficult choice”, published by Nowa Europa Wschodnia (6/2011). Setting the problem against the complex historical background, the author introduces the reader to the topic and explains why the situation looks the way it does and what reasons lie behind it. I completely agree with every sentence of this article, and at the same time I wish that our linguists involved with the subject matter were able to approach it in a similar, unemotional way and see the Ukrainian situation from a broader European context. This would provide them with the comparative material necessary to look at our situation from a distance and reach an agreement on language issues without allowing politics to be involved. They would also be able to solve political and economic problems without using language as an argument. Translated by Agnieszka Rubka

Natalia Sniadanko is a Ukrainian poet, writer and journalist. She publishes in the Ukrain- ian press, as well as Krytyka, Dzerkal Tyżnia, and Sueddeutsche Zeitung among others. CIA Prisons on Polish Soil – A new perspective

Adam Bodnar and Irmina Pacho

Poland has been dealing with the issue of CIA prisons on Polish soil for almost seven years. It has become one of the most important topics for the future of Polish democracy, rule of law, and the protection of human rights.

When Dana Priest published her first article on the existence of CIA prisons in Central and Eastern European countries, later on specified as Romania and Po- land in the Washington Post in 2005, very few believed that it was credible information. Polish politicians managed to convince the public that no prisons existed and that leaks from US sources were the result of a conspiracy theory. They were so convincing in their policy of denial that journalists stopped investigating the matter after a couple of months, dissatisfied that this time there were no leaks from Polish security forces. However, over the years, thanks to investigations made by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (most notably Swiss senator, Dick Marty), the European Parliament, the international media and various NGOs, the situation has changed completely. Reports and press coverage have disclosed more and more information regarding the issue. In Poland, the official investigation started in 2008 and two Guantanamo detainees even received the status of injured parties in it. Public opinion stopped believing the politicians.

From denial to justification

When the politicians couldn’t lie any longer with respect to the alleged existence of the CIA prison in Poland, they changed their strategy. They now try to justify this action by reasons of necessity, national interest and the need for international cooperation with the US authorities and intelligence. Furthermore, their efforts Adam Bodnar and Irmina Pacho, CIA Prisons on Polish Soil – A new perspective Opinion and Analysis 79 to cover up the CIA prison case are supported by prominent journalists, such as Adam Michnik (Gazeta Wyborcza) and Igor Janke (Rzeczpospolita). They also claim that further explanation of the case threatens Polish interests. We have, however, observed significant change over the years. Politicians were pushed – thanks to international organisations, the media and NGOs – to change their policy of denial into a policy of searching for justification. But more importantly, the general view of Polish society on the matter has changed dramatically. No serious person currently treats the CIA prison case with a patient smile. The existence of the CIA prison inside the school of Polish intelligence at Stare Kiejkuty (in north-eastern Poland) needs further explanation and the search for accountability. According to reliable information available in the public domain, the prison existed between December 3rd 2002 and September 22nd 2003 and hosted six to eight prisoners, including “high value detainees”, in other words leading figures from Al-Qaeda. Most probably, they were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques, which was – to state it clearly – torture. Under the Polish Constitution, torture, and inhuman and degrading treatment is absolutely prohibited. Creating extra-territorial zones where such practices can happen is not permitted. Furthermore, the Polish authorities should not aid or 80 Opinion and Analysis Adam Bodnar and Irmina Pacho, CIA Prisons on Polish Soil – A new perspective

abet in any way in making such practices possible on Polish soil. In this regard, the Polish constitutional standards are in full compliance with requirements of the European Convention on Human Rights. Even if detainees were not tortured, the imprisonment of detainees without a court judgement or order is also a violation of the Polish Constitution. Poland is not Poland hosted the CIA a country where other states or private groups prison because the US can organise private prisons. If the Polish authorities had allowed this, they would have government couldn’t have it also violated our Constitution. on American soil. Interestingly, Poland hosted the CIA prison because the US authorities weren’t able to have it at home on territory under the jurisdiction of the United States. In such a case, the US Constitution would apply, which also prohibits torture. Therefore, the CIA had to find international partners to do the dirty work outside of the US, which would, thus, not put into question any potential violation of the US Constitution. The whole CIA rendition project was built on this model of cooperation – using the help of allies and abusing their trust.

Searching for accountability

The CIA prison case presents a serious question as regards accountability; and we can distinguish here political accountability and legal accountability. With respect to political accountability, nations involved in the CIA rendition project should have had full knowledge as regards to the political mechanisms governing involvement. If politicians violated their own constitution they should face political responsibility. Accountability in this sense also requires transparency and dis- closure of all the relevant information and documents concerning the secret site. Finally, it should have an impact on the relationship between a given state and the US. One may hope that after such a brutal example of the US abusing its superpower position, Central and Eastern European countries might be more careful in the future. Furthermore, they should immediately insist on the US government’s help to explain the case and not try to forget about its existence. If the Polish Constitution was violated, it means that the people responsible for this should face criminal responsibility. The relevant investigation is still pending but may result in bills of accusations submitted to the criminal courts, as well as in motions submitted to the State Tribunal, a special constitutional organ designed to deal with violations of the Constitution by the highest governmental officers. But accountability may also mean financial compensations to victims for damages caused on Polish soil or as a result of Polish assistance in creating and Adam Bodnar and Irmina Pacho, CIA Prisons on Polish Soil – A new perspective Opinion and Analysis 81 hosting the CIA prison. The United Kingdom has recently paid damages to some Guantanamo detainees and one cannot exclude such a scenario happening for Poland. Finally, Poland is already the subject of proceedings before the European Court of Human Rights, as a result of an application submitted by Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. This means that the case may also have international relevance and be subject to international methods of accountability.

Is accountability really necessary?

Some Polish commentators argue that searching for accountability in this case is not necessary, as it threatens Polish national interests in international relations. Others claim that due to Poland’s participation in the CIA prisons, it has become an easy target for potential terrorist attacks. There are also voices stating that Po- land had to cooperate with the American CIA at that time, taking into account the fresh wounds of 9/11 and the international effort to stop terrorism. We cannot agree with those claims. The most basic argument for accountability is the Polish Constitution and the rule of law. Either we treat it seriously, with all its consequences, or it is a document without any sense. The case of the CIA prisons brings legitimacy to the Polish constitutional provisions, shows that they are not irrelevant and that all actions by state organs should be based on the law. Fur- thermore, Poland has had a long history of abusing torture during its communist past. We should not forget about those painful experiences, which created a moral underpin- It cannot be excluded that ning of the current constitutional structure. Poland could become the With respect to the Polish national interests and its position in international affairs, Poland target of a terrorist attack. may, in fact, become a beneficiary. Polish national interests are not defined by what one or the other politician thinks. They are disclosed in the constitutional provisions. It is the duty of public officers to work towards achievement of constitutional values. By explaining the CIA prison case, Poland has a chance to present itself as the most mature democracy among all the other Central and Eastern European countries. It may also have an interesting impact on our position within the European Union and the Council of Europe. Even if Poland has committed a “sin” by having the CIA prison, it is democratically strong enough to admit it and hold those responsible accountable. One cannot exclude that Poland may become the target of a terrorist attack. No country is safe against such threats in the modern world. But such a danger should not prevent anybody from explaining the case. It is a typical “chicken and the egg” problem. The threat of terrorist attacks was brought by those who agreed 82 Opinion and Analysis Adam Bodnar and Irmina Pacho, CIA Prisons on Polish Soil – A new perspective

to work so closely with Americans and to host the CIA prison, and not by those who investigate the case. Finally, we cannot agree with the argument of the necessity of cooperation. Obviously, Poland could have refused to cooperate in this matter, as many other countries did. Secondly, Poland could have helped through other means, like the strong cooperation between Polish and American intelligence agencies. There was no imminent threat to the Polish nation that necessitated it to host a CIA prison on Polish soil. The CIA clearly abused their dominant position vis-à-vis Poland and probably relied on the political ambitions of some of its leaders.

Poland and why not Romania and Lithuania

Poland is currently the Central and Eastern European leader in regards to the investigation into the CIA prisons. Until now, Romania and Lithuania have failed to produce any convincing results or hope for a full explanation of the cases. One may question why Poland is such a unique The whole case will have an country in this respect. impact on the rule of law and In our opinion, there are many factors which contribute to this. Firstly, despite the policy of constitutional order in Poland. denial initially implemented by most politicians, there were a few who were interested in the case, most notably Józef Pinion, a Polish Member of the European Parliament. Secondly, the case attracted interest among some journalists, and although they were quite reluctant to deal with the case in the early phase (2005 to 2007), their journalistic investigations later produced significant results. Thirdly, the work of domestic NGOs brought important changes to the public discourse. The Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights has managed to obtain important data thanks to many freedom of information motions, and Amnesty International has organised a number of public events related to the issue. Most importantly, however, there were lawyers ready to deal with the case who were seriously concerned about the possible violation of the Constitution. Some of the prosecutors dealing with the case managed to collect substantial data, and there were two lawyers who agreed to become representatives of two Guantanamo detainees. One should also remember that the President of the Supreme Court recently ordered the Polish Agency for Intelligence to transmit all its data regarding the case to the prosecutor’s office. This procedural move has already had a substantial impact on the debate regarding the case. Adam Bodnar and Irmina Pacho, CIA Prisons on Polish Soil – A new perspective Opinion and Analysis 83

Dynamics of truth

The CIA prison case is pending. No one knows its future and nobody can clearly predict its outcome. It may happen that the Prosecutor’s Office will one day -re deem the proceedings due to some political motives. This would result in massive domestic and international litigation, but wouldn’t move the case forward. But it is equally probable that the Prosecutor’s Office will submit bills of accusations to the court or the State Tribunal, which could politicise the case. A lot depends on the politicians, their day-to-day interests and their real motivation for explaining the case. Most of the political forces are not interested in this, as the case may be dangerous to their political leaders. The Prosecutor’s Office is independent of politicians, although one doubts whether this independence is just theoretical and illusory. We can be certain, however, that with time the “dynamics of truth” will win. This term was coined by Dick Marty to describe the process of discovering new facts, issues, and connecting factors related to the CIA rendition programme. Ir- respectively of the legal accountability, Polish society will know more and more about the CIA prison in Poland. The whole case will have a tremendous impact on the Polish constitutional order. Cooperation between intelligence agencies should, of course, be possible, but must be made in accordance with the law. This case shows that many actions may sooner or later be disclosed, and the people who carried them out will be considered responsible for them. That is why it is worth addressing this issue. Politicians need to realise that there are things they must not do, because in a democratic country like Poland, methods that violate basic our constitutional rights are unacceptable. Poland is simply trying to treat our Constitution seriously, in the same way in which Poland was taught by American experts in the early 1990s, when the basic values of constitutionalism, human rights and the rule of law were created.

Adam Bodnar is later on specified as vice-president of the board of the Hel- sinki Foundation for Human Rights, and an associate professor at the Centre for Human Rights, Faculty of Law and Administration at Warsaw University.

Irmina Pacho is a lawyer with the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights and the coordinator of the “Strategic Litigation Programme”. Gorilla in the Mist Pavol Szal ai

Crowd-surfing through cheering party members with a bottle of Coca-Cola in his hand and a smile on his face, Robert Fico rejoiced the results of Slovakia’s general election. Fico’s Smer-SD (Direction-Social Democracy) won a majority of seats and ushered in the first one-party government since 1989.

For the foreign media the scenes on election night quickly became a means of getting to know Slovakia’s prime minister. Yet, for many in Bratislava it represents a sharp contrast with Robert Fico’s first electoral success in 2006. Back then, no journalist was allowed to report from the party headquarters, which was heavily guarded. And Fico went on to announce a coalition cabinet with the nationalists. This time, however, there are no nationalists. Fico won the election on a pro-Euro- pean platform and displays more openness than ever before. No wonder. The previous centre-right government imploded amongst infighting over the European bailout fund, and then received a fatal blow dealt by allegations of corruption. No, Fico has not changed. He has just learnt a lesson.

Gorilla strikes

The centre-right parties were in a bad position to start with. Iveta Radičová’s government, which was only in office for two years, did not survive a vote of no confidence, coupled with the vote on bolstering the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF). When Radičová announced she would retire from politics, the biggest party among the ruling coalition, the Slovak Christian-Democratic Union – Democratic Party (SDKU-DS), lost its most popular politician. Yet, the main issue of the early election was still to come. The so-called “Gorilla” file that spread through social networks presented a bleak picture of Slovak politics. Gorilla was supposedly the code name for a wiretapping operation of the Slovak secret services that resulted in a report on meetings of Slovak Pavol Szalai, Gorilla in the Mist Opinion and Analysis 85 tycoons with Slovak politicians. In 2005 and 2006, at the time of Mikulas Dzurinda’s second government, they allegedly discussed privatisation and public procurement deals. Although the authenticity of the intelligence still raises some concerns, the local media say Gorilla only confirmed what they had reported and what the police never uncovered: strong financial groups and corrupted government officials attempting to gain control of public bids and state property. The leaked file sparked protests unprecedented since 1989. They called for an investigation into the allegations against parties that made The leaked “Gorilla” file up the current, Radičová government, and for paints a corrupt picture a complete overhaul of the Slovak political class. Indeed, the March elections punished Slovak of politics and sparked centre-right parties, which had once brought unprecedented protests. Slovakia to the European Union and NATO, and won it the nickname of “Tatra Tiger”. In 2010 the centre-right gained 1.1 million votes (44.2 per cent), which gave it a majority of 79 seats out of 150. Two years later, the four parties won just 700,000 votes (27.7 per cent) and 51 seats. The 2012 results were most devastating for the two bigger coalition parties SDKU- DS and SaS (Freedom and Solidarity). SDKU-DS, formerly the prime minister’s party, basically shrank to a marginal opposition group, with Dzurinda quitting its leadership. Once a rising star, the free-market and eurosceptic newcomer, SaS (Freedom and Solidarity), is quickly fading. As for the other two, KDH (Christian- Democratic Movement) cemented its share thanks to disciplined socially conservative voters, and the Slovak-Hungarian Most-Hid (Bridge) was saved by the vote of the Hungarian minority.

Absolute winner

The 2012 election also kicked out Fico’s former junior coalition partner, SNS (Slo- vak National Party), and brought in a former fraction of SaS called OLaNO (Ordinary People and Independent Personalities). Given the nationalist tendencies in Hungary, SNS’s departure is good news, but some of OLaNO’s first steps have been suggesting who might replace it. The absolute winner of the election, the single parliamentary representative of the left, overcame the magic threshold of 1 million votes. It secured a comfortable absolute majority with only seven votes short of a constitutional majority. It made a cross- regional landslide and did well with among all sociological groups: those more and less educated, the younger and older, the richer and poorer, the urban and rural. The era when Fico only represented those unhappy with Slovakia’s transition to democracy and capitalism is over. Voting Smer-SD is now trendy. 86 Opinion and Analysis Pavol Szalai, Gorilla in the Mist

% of votes # of votes 2010 2012 2010 2012 Smer-SD 34.8 44.4 880,111 1,134,280 SDKU-DS 15.4 6.1 390,042 155,744 SaS 12.2 5.9 307,287 150,266 KDH 8.5 8.8 215,755 225,361 Most-Hid 8.1 6.9 205,538 176,088 SNS 5.1 – 128,490 – OLaNO – 8.6 – 218,537 total* 84.1 80.7 212,7223 206,0276 * only parties that overcame the 5-per cent threshold

The Gorilla scandal that erupted shortly before the election does not alone explain the decline of the Slovak right. It is part of a bigger story, which can be called the end of the old cleavage. Starting in the 1990s, it climaxed in 1998, when the authoritarian leader, Vladimir Meciar, was voted out and replaced by the wide (but mostly centre- right) coalition of Mikulas Dzurinda. The Meciar-Dzurinda political cleavage copied the educational, generational, income, and rural-urban divisions of Slovak society. In 1998, the modern face of Slovakia prevailed. Under Dzurinda’s first government (1998 to 2002) Slovakia joined the other Viseg- rad Group countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland) in the first wave of accession negotiations for the European Union, reinforced democratic institutions, and completed the transition to capitalism. Dzurinda’s second government (2002 to 2006), which won a majority even without the left, integrated the country into the EU and NATO, and vigorously pursued free-market reforms cutting unemployment from 18.8 per cent (2000) to 13.4 per cent (2006) and boosting GDP growth to 8.5 per cent (2006). In 2007, just before the crisis, both indicators had further improved to 11.5 and 10.5 per cent respectively. Much of this is thanks to foreign investment and Dzurinda’s flagship reform: the 19 per cent flat tax. This was the period when the Tatra Tiger was at its best.

Fico comes to power

In 2006, when Fico came to power for the first time, he ran on the promise of dismantling the “anti-social reforms”. He collected the vote of the discontent, taking over Meciar’s former supporters, and entered into a coalition with a weakened Meciar and Pavol Szalai, Gorilla in the Mist Opinion and Analysis 87

the nationalists. He rallied against the Iraq war supported by his predecessor and pledged a more balanced approach towards Russia. Fico’s rule was, however, featured by confrontation with the media, the Hungarian minority, European Socialists, and, most seriously, by the temptation of corruption. The cleavage in Slovak politics and the electorate appeared clear to many: the democratic, free-market, and pro-Western camp versus the authoritarian, socialist, and nationalist camp. Yet, during Fico’s first rule, the lines were already blurred. In the end, many of his economic promises simply boiled down to heated rhetoric: institutional checks and balances remained in place, and under his cabinet, and Slovakia joined the Schengen Area and the Eurozone. In 2010, however, the Slovak centre-right led by SDKU-DS once again managed to beat Fico, promising more economic expertise, less corruption, and a better European policy. If Fico departed from the old cleavage during his prime ministerial years, Dzurinda’s camp abandoned its old positions most visibly during the 2010 campaign. In an unprecedented step, SDKU-DS rejected the pre-agreed Brussels consensus on bailing out Greece. Robert Fico was elected During the next two years of Radičová’s gov- prime minister for the second ernment, the centre-right parties undermined their own legacy. They engaged in structural time under the banner: reforms to cut budget deficit and public debt, “People want certainties”. launched important anti-corruption initiatives, and secured Slovakia’s participation in the EU-negotiated bailouts. Much of this, however, remained in the form of roadmaps, never put in place, because the government collapsed over the issue of bolstering the EFSF. Additionally, it had to face its own corruption scandals, which aggravated the situation even more. When the Gorilla protests erupted due to the corruption allegations of the same parties going back to 2005 and 2006, they only reinforced the impression of a corrupt and inept government. The end of the old cleavage was brought about also by international changes: Slovakia, but mostly the centre-right and its voters, learnt that “European” does not automatically mean “prosperous”, that even the EU and western states can face an institutional crisis, and that the unipolar world led by the United States is – in the wake of the failed Iraq war – over. In 2012 the centre-right’s ideological vacuum was almost tangible. As Daniel Lispic, the former interior minister and KDH’s most popular politician put it: “The centre- right parties lack a strong, appealing vision. The mere defence of 10-year old reforms… is insufficient. The world and Slovakia have changed. We need a vision… and we- ap parently don’t have it.” 88 Opinion and Analysis Pavol Szalai, Gorilla in the Mist

People want certainties

In this context, it was not difficult for Smer-SD to portray itself as a solid force that would re-establish the equilibrium in Slovakia’s institutions, economy, and relations with the world. Fico was elected prime minister for the second time on the slogan: “People want certainties”. The main task now for his one-party government will be to deliver them in times of crisis which are far from over. What will Fico II’s specific challenges be, and how will A big challenge for he deal with them? Smer-SD is its lack of ideas. First, there is the economy. Together with the centre-right, Smer-SD has passed a constitutional law establishing long-term ceilings for public debt and institutional checks to achieve them. Joining the old government, Smer-SD signed up to the European Fiscal Compact obliging EU member states to keep their budget deficit under 3 per cent of GDP in 2013. To succeed, Fico’s cabinet will have to cut the budget by 1.85 billion euros (2.4 billion dollars) according to The Economist. He has already announced savings on both the income and spending sides. He wants to dismantle the centre-right’s flagship programme, the 19 per cent flat tax, by raising the marginal-income tax rates to 25 per cent and corporate taxes to 22 or 23 per cent. Moreover, he plans higher bank levies and higher taxes on luxury property and goods. However, the socialist prime minister’s main challenge is coupling austerity with promises of large investments and increasing social welfare – under conditions of 1.8 per cent GDP (estimates of the European Com- mission for 2012) and unemployment at 13.9 per cent (March 2012). No wonder he accepted Europe’s 3 per cent growth goal while calling it “a wicked plan”. Fico is also waiting for France’s new socialist president to switch the European focus from austerity to growth. The other obstacle is a lack of ideas. Smer-SD sounds more like a conglomerate of various ideological and business groups than a modern social democracy when proposing to train more young Slovaks for factory jobs, to help the Roma while “yielding on human rights issues”, and basically having no sustainable measures for healthcare or the environment. Secondly, there is the cronyism of Fico’s first cabinet and the fear of a repeat of the Gorilla protests. However, there was a visible change this time around. Some of Smer-SD’s previous ministers suspected of corruption were not re-nominated and it sought advice from the anti-corruption watchdogs that criticised its first term. It also promised to leave the police team investigating the Gorilla allegations intact. The whole party now communicates much more with the same media that once forced its ministers to resign. Pavol Szalai, Gorilla in the Mist Opinion and Analysis 89

Yet, it remains to be seen how much of this is Fico’s politics and how much are his policies. The Slovak media have already noticed that several ministries have been awarded to loyal party officials with little experience in their respective areas of responsibility, or with suspicious links to the same financial groups that Slovaks rallied against during the spring. Finally, there is the EU and NATO. Fico rushed to Brussels to confirm his engagement for the European Fiscal Compact and NATO’s mission in Afghanistan until 2014. Accompanied by his foreign minister, Miroslav Lajcak, who served in his first cabinet and then as managing director of the European External Action Service, Fico did sound trustworthy. His cabinet’s ambition to prepare the Slovak presidency of the Council of the EU in the second half of 2016 (just after the next general election) testifies to Fico’s engagement in Europe and symbolizes the end of the old cleavage. Fico’s bet on the European card, which is an electoral joker now, however, could quickly become the losing card later. In the EU’s volatile institutional and financial environment things can deteriorate fast. As for the Smer-SD’s persisting “Russian sentiment”, it could become a factor when it comes to integrating the EU’s energy markets or reinforcing its energy security.

Robert Fico and his social democratic party SMER-SD returned to power in Slovakia, winning a one-party majority in April 2012. Photo: European Comission 90 Opinion and Analysis Pavol Szalai, Gorilla in the Mist

Changed behaviour?

Observing Fico’s changed behaviour, many in Slovakia ask if Fico’s personality has changed. It is irrelevant. If anything, he has learnt his lesson, steering away from odd economic ideas, tolerating cronyism, and promoting nationalism towards more balanced economic views, more transparency, and a clearly pro-European approach. The new stance was to be confirmed by his non-party ministerial nominations and dialogues with everyone from trade unions to NGOs to the opposition. All this is also a reason why early comparisons of Fico to Hungary’s Viktor Orban are misplaced. Given that the once reformist centre-right reached a dead end in its economic views and slid back on corruption and Europe, the old Slovak political and electoral cleavage has evaporated. It will be the next four years of Fico’s cabinet that will define the new cleavage. At the moment, the weakened and fragmented opposition has one big advantage. With Smer-SD controlling all levels of power from local government to parliament and even the president’s office, it is fairly easy to portray each new election as a referendum on Fico and his policies. Regional elections will take place next year. In two years Smer- SD will have to defend its positions in municipal, presidential, and European elections. OLaNO, the second most powerful, but least known, opposition party, will seize any opportunity to criticise the one-party government for economic mismanagement, corruption, and for “obeying Brussels”. If Radičová decides to run for the presidential palace in 2014, she stands a good chance of beating Smer-SD’s candidate or even Fico himself. Fico’s biggest advantage, however, lies in his ability to learn. He aims to expand his electorate, and not to adhere to a particular ideology. Nevertheless, the bottle of Coca- Cola in his hand on election night does not testify to that. The problem is that Robert Fico also appeared in the Gorilla wiretappings. The recordings reveal that he did not say much but only asked for a Coke upon his arrival. Thus, making a show with the same drink during the elections, he was either indifferent about the connection of him, Gorilla and Coke or he did not completely understand the main issue of Slovakia’s last election. Fico’s spokesman said that he drinks Coca-Cola for digestion. The opposition should understand it as a sign of possible mis- steps already for Fico’s second government.

Pavol Szalai is a former journalist at the Slovak daily SME currently studying at Sciences Po in Paris. East of Berlin Basil Kerski

The policy of Putin’s Russia is a challenge for the political culture of the Berlin Republic. We can clearly see two separate ways of thinking in the domain of German foreign policy: the traditional one focused on great powers, and a new attempt to build a multi-layered policy.

As Poles, entering the discussion about German eastern policy, we might choose between several themes. If we focus on the former chancellor, Gerhard Schrőder, and his connections with Gazprom, we are resigned to the fact that we are an ob- ject rather than an active agent of politics between Berlin and Moscow, which is happening above our heads. The average Pole or German is probably unaware that the discussions and debates taking place in Poland and Germany are similar. Gerhard Schrőder’s friendship with Vladimir Putin has been very critically received – not only in Poland but also in Germany. Violations of human rights in Russia, authoritarian tendencies in Ukraine, and the dependence of Central Europe on Russian energy, give much cause for concern.

Critical distance

The German press has been observing Moscow’s instrumental use of the energy sector in foreign policy for many years. In early April the German conservative daily, Die Welt, pointed out that Russia is trying to build an image of a credible economic partner in the West, while revealing its “imperial face” in the East. Die Welt suggested the need of a critical distance towards Russia with respect to energy policy or even a strategy of restraining Russian influence; thus, a strategy of “energy containment” has been advocated. These are not just isolated pronouncements. On the contrary, with the increasing presence of Russian energy companies in Germany, these types of assertions are becoming more and more prominent. 92 Opinion and Analysis Basil Kerski, East of Berlin

Germany is not only an important market for Russian gas and oil. The Russians have been trying to enter the market of energy distribution in Germany for several years, and in order to underline the strategic importance of Germany for the expansion of Russian industry, Gazprom has been carrying out a nationwide cultural and promotional campaign. It is enough Putin’s energy policy is to remember that since 2007, Gazprom has a challenge for Germany’s been a sponsor of FC Schalke 04 Gelsenkirchen, a top division football club. political culture. The energy policy of Putin’s Russia is a challenge for the political culture of the Berlin Re- public. Two separate ways of thinking which confront each other in the domain of German foreign policy can clearly be seen: the traditional one focused on great powers, and the new attempt at building a multi-layered policy combining realism with concern for Western values, seeing strategic partners not just in the big powers. Advocates of both approaches can be found in all of the main German parties, media organisations and groups of economic interest. Indeed, we are witnessing an interesting argument about German eastern policy. Poland should join this debate as the strength of the second view of the Berlin Republic’s eastern policy is, to a large extent, dependent on our attitude and credibility. The tendency in German foreign policy focused on large political centres is not just a relic of the old authoritarian connections between Berlin and Moscow, but also reflects the postwar experiences of the Bonn Republic. The Germans have long been convinced that foreign policy is based on engaging the big powers, and that the key to German reunification is in Moscow or Washington. I remember a meeting with a leading CDU politician, a representative of German Catholics and a proponent of Polish-German reconciliation. He had been visiting Poland since 1972 and had met all of the important Poles including Cardinal Karol Wojtyła (later to become Pope John Paul II – editor’s note). Our conversation about the dynamics of European politics before 1989, covering the period from the 1965 letter from Polish bishops to German bishops, to the first partially-free elections in Poland in 1989, revealed that Cardinal Wojtyła becoming pope in 1978 and the emergence of the Solidarity movement were both regarded as important events by my interlocutor. But he admitted that before 1989, neither he nor his political colleagues who were close to Poland, believed that such events could result in anything important or change the geopolitical division of Europe. “We thought that the keys to German reunification were only in Moscow and Washington, not in Poland,” he concluded. Basil Kerski, East of Berlin Opinion and Analysis 93

Absorbing Moscow’s perspective

It wasn’t until the 1970s that the German Federal Republic started establishing its relations with the individual countries of Central Europe. But in mid-1950s Chan- cellor Konrad Adenauer had already travelled to Moscow in order to enhance relations with the Soviet Union, and was successful enough to negotiate the return of war prisoners to Germany. During this period, the political culture of democratic Germany had developed a strategy, which included the imperative of maintaining relations with the Russians; regardless of who ruled in Moscow, you could always strike a deal with them. Such values as human rights were regarded as important but a realistic approach based on national interests was more important in the policy towards Moscow. It is also worth pointing out that democratic post-war Germany forgot about the issue of independence of countries such as Ukraine and Belarus, despite the presence of large émigré communities from Eastern Europe in Germany, including such renowned figures as Boris Levitsky and Bohdan Osadchuk. The notions of an independent Ukraine and Belarus were treated with suspicion, and were associated with the anti-Bolshevik policy of the Third Reich. The memory of the traditions of countries constituting the Soviet Union gradually disappeared, and all the attention was focused on accepting the Russian Em- pire as a stabilising factor. This tendency was deepened by education: Slavic studies were strongly centred on Russia, as were historical and political studies of Eastern Europe, which meant that the school system produced elites who absorbed Moscow’s perspective. Of course, a large burden for the Berlin Republic is the legacy of relations between East Germany and the Soviet Union. On the one hand, fraternal relations condemned the GDR to a life in the shadow of the empire. On the other hand, Soviet violence was a source of fascination. It is a very strange and complex phenomenon. The fact that East German propaganda never mentioned the issue of the independence of other states or nations in the Eastern Bloc and pointed to the West as the enemy was also significant. Inevitably, the consequences of this are still felt. When you speak badly about someone for a long time it is difficult for you to assume the role of their ally. For the Germans, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the new states was surprising, they were culturally and mentally unprepared for this process. Since 1985, West Germany, not just politicians but also journalists, intellectuals and the academic community, had invested much hope in the reforms launched by Mikhail Gorbachev. The Russian discourse, for example the debates on the Stalinist legacy, were eagerly followed in Germany. The Germans hoped that 94 Opinion and Analysis Basil Kerski, East of Berlin

the reforms would bring about profound change, and making German reunification possible, Gorbachev fulfilled the German hopes. What he left behind after his downfall, however, was profound gratitude as well as much frustration.

Bridge between Germany and the East

Today, positive emotions for Gorbachev are a thing of the past, and his succes- sors have also failed to achieve this kind of German trust. German public opinion holds a generally negative view of the Russian political elite. Moreover, the German political elite exhibit a mental and cultural acceptance of the independent states founded after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The German public has Those in German-Polish circles in Germany a generally negative view of have been very helpful in this aspect, especially those supporting Jerzy Giedroyc’s vi- the Russian political elite. sion of an eastern policy, the concept of ULB (Ukraine-Lithuania-Belarus). It was these circles, including my Polish-German magazine DIALOG and many other journalists and columnists such as Cornelius Ochmann, Gerhard Gnauck, Reinhold Vetter, Gabriele Lesser, Michael Ludwig, Thomas Urban and Christoph von Marschall, which served as the bridge between Germany and the countries of the ULB and the Caucasus before the Orange Revolution. These communities promoted artists and intellectuals from Ukraine and Belarus. The German-Polish groups based their credibility on the conciliatory Polish eastern policy, and the fact that despite their difficult history, Poles had established good contacts with Ukrainians and Belarusians and created an atmosphere where Polish eastern policy was classified in the West, is remarkable. Today, the German-Polish lobby does not have to fulfil this function: Eastern European intellectuals are present in the awareness of Ger- man public opinion, close cultural and political relations have been established between the Berlin Republic and the ULB countries. There are no respectable people in the Berlin Republic who would question the independence of Ukraine and Belarus. Germany pursues an active eastern policy, and there are groups who maintain close relations with their eastern counterparts – not just communities of naive outsiders, but trade organisations, economic lobbies and new cultural groups. The Heinrich Böll Foundation, who work closely with the Green Party, became involved in Ukraine during the early 1990s, and for many years supported the Independent Cultural Studies Magazine “Ї” in Lviv. New centres of competence were founded, including the excellent Ukrainian Sum- mer School at the University of Greifswald. The prestigious Suhrkamp publishing house has been publishing Belarusian, Ukrainian and Lithuanian literature for Basil Kerski, East of Berlin Opinion and Analysis 95 many years, and has introduced such writers as Yuri Andrukhovych and Tomas Venclova to the Germans. One interesting lobby called the German-Belarusian Society, was established by German diplomats, businessmen and academics. Professor Rainer Lindner, one of the organisation’s founders and a historian specialising in Ukraine, heads a German lobbying group for trade with Eastern-Central Europe (Ost-Ausschuss der Deutschen Wirtschaft), an organisation which used to be strongly focused on Russia. Another organisation playing an important role in the relations between Germany and the newly independent eastern states is the Bertelsmann Foundation, especially the programmes carried out by Cornelius Ochmann. Of course, the intellectual biographies have changed. The German attitude towards Russia and the imperialist tradition, has also changed. Ten years ago Vladimir Putin gave a speech in German in the Bundestag which made a great impression. And although he seduced the Germans then, the memory of the German elite is today dominated by Chernobyl and Putin’s behaviour during the tragedy of the Kursk submarine. These memories serve as a warning against threats resulting from the incompetent use of nuclear energy and as proof of the inefficiency of the authoritarian state and the imperial tradition.

No growth without progress

Mikhail Khodorkovky’s name is like a political rallying call in Germany with many communities declaring solidarity with him. It is no accident that the excellent documentary by Cyril Tuschi about Khodorkovsky was made in Germany, and although this fact is not reflected in the film itself, the venture was supported by many prominent Germans, including German politicians who followed Kho- dorkovky’s trial. The commentary fromDie Welt mentioned earlier shows how much the climate of German debate on foreign and economic policy has changed. Germany is a big power in an international economy, but perceives itself as a European power. It is too small for the world and 80 per cent of its exports are sold to European countries. A strong and smoothly functioning European Union is in Germany’s interest, but doing business with Russia is increasingly being perceived as doing business with a Third World country: you buy gas and oil, you sell heavy machinery, and that’s it; you won’t be able to establish stable long-term economic relations which will also benefit small and medium-sized businesses. The economic realities and statistics confirm this. “Small” Poland remains a more important trade partner for Germany than large Russia, and trading with Poland provides more jobs than trading with Russia. In 2011 the volume of imports and 96 Opinion and Analysis Basil Kerski, East of Berlin

exports between Poland and Germany reached the record level of 70 billion euros (88 billion dollars). This situation has strengthened the idealist-realist tendency in German foreign policy: economic growth is dependent on the progress of democracy and open society. There will be no stable growth of trade in the East without progress of civilisation, without a diversified eastern policy independent of Russia. This is the argument which is gaining promi- Today, Berlin perceives itself nence in the German political discourse. as the centre of Europe. It is remarkable that the German Council on Foreign Relations (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik – DGAP), a fairly conservative institution founded in the 1950s, which I would not expect to make such a gesture, has published a memoran- dum transcending party lines. Former leading politicians, such as Rita Sűssmuth, Gűnther Verheugen and Markus Meckel, have encouraged the government to have stronger engagement in the Eastern Partnership; in other words: the post-Soviet states, without Russia. They argue that they cannot imagine prosperity and good economic cooperation without democratisation in these countries. The document issued by the DGAP went unnoticed in Poland, and I can understand why people are tempted to ignore it: these are just retired politicians.

Changing perspective

However, when I look at the biographies of some of the signatories, for example the former EU Commissioner, Günter Verheugen, I am sure that years ago they wouldn’t have been able to predict that they would become so strongly committed to this cause. And this proves that the perspective of western politicians is changing. There is no doubt that Europe’s thinking about itself has changed as a result of the transformations in Germany after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Today, Berlin perceives itself as the centre of Europe. What happens behind the eastern border of the EU could have consequences for the Germans, and this defines the new perspective. More than a decade ago, Alexander Rahr, a German biographer of Putin, argued that the Russian president had been wrong to pursue his policy of engaging more powerful countries while ignoring Central Europe. Putin was interested in Berlin and Paris, in the classic policy of state-to-state relations and in a weak EU. But Pu- tin began to build relations with the EU, and Berlin demanded that Moscow treat the EU seriously. A coherent EU and its market are in Germany’s interest, and the Germans can’t imagine the EU without Poland. I am deeply convinced that the change in Russian policy towards Poland – although some regard it as purely symbolic and superficial – was to a significant extent caused by behind-the-scenes Basil Kerski, East of Berlin Opinion and Analysis 97 pressure from Germany. It may sound not very credible to many, but Poland is perceived as an ally by the elites of the Berlin Republic. We, as Poles, are not alone in noticing the strategic geographic position of Poland and its size. However, our problem is that we are not very good at the patient and unrewarding daily labour of international relations. It is not only worth us talking to politicians, but also to other partners from civil society, culture and business. If we, as Poles, want our voice to be heard, we must establish relations with groups which have views similar to ours even if they don’t hold power. Sometimes this means alliances above political divides. We should participate in German debates about Russia and other Eastern Euro- pean countries, instead of complaining that Schrőder is supporting Gazprom. If we treat the Germans as egoistic opportunists who only see the rulers of Moscow, we will strengthen these groups in Berlin which are distancing themselves from Poland and siding with Putin. We will strengthen the great power tendencies in German foreign policy, and will only reinforce the self-perception that Poland is a country without influence – a German-Russian condominium. Translated by Tomasz Bieroń

Basil Kerski is the director of the European Solidarity Center in Gdańsk. Interview East of Berlin – Photo: Annabelle Chapman 98 A Historian of the Present

A conversation with Timothy Garton Ash, British historian and expert on Central and Eastern Europe. Interviewer: Annabelle Chapman

NEW EASTERN EUROPE: You not only re- How would you capture the atmosphere ported, but participated in, the revolutions of those days in a single word? of 1989. How did you first travel to Central Well, “incredible” is the obvious word; Europe? miraculous, fantastic. Every day brought TIMOTHY GARTON ASH: Thomas something that had seemed impossible. By Mann is really to blame. Through read- the time we got to Prague in November ing his novels, I first became interested in 1989, it was almost like a fairy-tale. The German history. What came to fascinate Velvet Revolution was the most fabulous me in German history was the question of them all, partly because Václav Havel of what makes one person a dissident and created this great play on Wenceslas Square, another a collaborator. Then I realised that headquartered in a theatre. But also be- people were facing that question behind cause, by then, we had a pretty clear idea the Iron Curtain every day. I went to live that the Soviet Union was not going to in- in Berlin in 1978 and began travelling be- tervene, and therefore the chances were on hind the Iron Curtain, getting to know the success. I would say that we were aware of opposition movements. Therefore, when the historical dimension, everything from 1989 happened, I knew all the main ac- the transformation of the lives of my oldest tors better than most people in the West. individual friends in East Germany, whose I had been what Raymond Aron called the lives would never be the same again, to the spectateur engagé. I just consider myself transformation of world history. incredibly privileged to have been such a close witness of that turning-point in Is there anything we still don’t know about world history. Now, more than 20 years the events of 1989? on, the outcome is still overwhelmingly It is amazing how much we do already positive. I can imagine, in another life, know, including information from the se- I might have got excited about the revo- cret archives. So I doubt there are any huge lution of 1789 or 1917, for example, and revelations to come. What we don’t know having somewhat more negative reflec- is the long-term consequences. What looks tions 20 years on. like an ironic consequence of 1989 is that 100 Interview A Historian of the Present – A conversation with Timothy Garton Ash

China, which is still ruled by the Commu- means violence.” It is not often you see nist Party, is the emerging superpower of such a world historical shift in models. It today. There is a direct connection: 1989 was very interesting how quickly people unleashed globalisation, which has hugely reached for 1989 as a comparison during benefited China’s export economy. In addi- the Arab Spring. tion, the Chinese Communist Party learnt the lessons of 1989 in order to avoid mak- You describe your essays as the “History ing the same mistakes as the leadership of the Present”. What do you mean? of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The label comes from a review of my first book of essays, The Uses of Adversity, by What is the current meaning of 1989 for the American diplomat George Kennan. the countries of Central Europe in which He described it as a rather unusual genre these revolutions occurred? of trying to write about the very recent past I think the myth of 1989 shines bright- (what we conventionally call “the present”), est in the imagination of those outside. as if it were history; asking the historian’s For those inside, it is a much more of questions, about causes and consequences. a mixed story, because it got mixed up And that is what I have tried to do for 30 with the hardships of transition. There years. It is more necessary now than ever, are so many losers in these societies and, because history is increasingly being re- through the negotiated transition, many corded instantly, using technology. But it nasty people stayed in power or translated is also more evanescent. In 30 years’ time, political power into economic power. All of you won’t be able to find these recordings this makes the perception of 1989 within in the archives, so it is actually more urgent these countries more ambiguous. It’s what than ever to start asking these historian’s Ernest Gellner called “the price of Velvet”: questions sooner rather than later. the price of the Velvet Revolution. What role is there for this approach to What is the meaning for the recent popu- history in Central and Eastern Europe where lar uprisings in the Middle East? recent history is such a contested issue? 1989 produced a new default model of Look at the textbooks, with the tremen- revolution, replacing that of 1789. So, when dously unsatisfactory things they say about Tunisia happened, as with Ukraine, the the recent past. Look at the current argu- default hope was that it would be another ment between Poles and Lithuanians, or Velvet Revolution; it is going to be peace- Czechs and Germans in the 1990s. Here, ful, or some sort of negotiated transition. you see that the past is not past. When things become violent, as in Libya or Syria, we feel that something has gone Would you say that history is more of wrong. Fifty years ago, people would have a divisive issue in Europe, or one that can said, “That’s just revolutions. Revolution bring people together? A Historian of the Present – A conversation with Timothy Garton Ash Interview 101

No one has quite worked out how to Prague were tightly intertwined. So people write European history in a way that is are doing this, but these are not the books helpful to the European project. There are that people read in schools. still the two extremes. On the one hand, you have nationalist histories; ever more of In a recent article, you spoke of the “horri- them, as Europe gets increasingly smaller ble divergence” between Poland and Ukraine. nations. So suddenly there is the Serbian Why is this happening? version, the Croatian version and the Bos- This is one of the really depressing stories nian version, and the Czech and the Slo- of the last ten years. I was fortunate enough vak version. On the other hand, you have to witness part of the Orange Revolution; a kind of mythopaeic history writing, what the people on Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kyiv I call “euronationalism”, which attempts (Independence Square – editor’s note) hoped to tell the story of the European Union that it would be another Velvet Revolution as if it were one single national unifica- that would launch Ukraine on a trajectory tion. This produces books with titles like towards the West. All of the Polish govern- “From Charlemagne to the Euro”, which ments, both left and right, have consistently is just as much a falsification of history. supported Ukraine’s path to Europe. The We need to find a middle way which says: responsibility is split between the horrible we come from very different places, with mess in Ukraine itself, with the Ukrainians many conflicts, but we have somehow being their own worst enemies, and an aw- decided to travel forward together. In or- ful lot of Western Europeans who say “yes” der to do so, we each need to understand but mean “no”. The most recent example is where we are coming from. And there is the Yulia Tymoshenko case. Clearly, “she’s nothing inevitable about us continuing to no angel” as we say in English, but this is so travel together. obviously a political arrest. Listen to Presi- dent Viktor Yanukovych speaking about Are you sceptical about uniting the two it and it is pure homo sovieticus; he can’t halves of European history, East and West? even lie very well about it. This provides It is already happening and Norman the perfect pretext for those EU member Davies started the process in his books by states that don’t want Ukraine as a member, putting the two together and giving equal or even to have a close association, because weight to East and West. And then Tony they can say Ukraine is not living up to Judt continued the process, this time by European norms. integrating the two. In Postwar (Judt’s history of Europe from the end of the Second Can we speak of a new division of Europe World War – editor’s note), he really tries in the 21st century? Where is this line drawn to tell them not as if they are two sepa- and how fixed is it? rate histories, but how they connect; for I absolutely don’t think that we can talk example, the events of 1968 in Paris and about a new Iron Curtain. The lines are 102 Interview A Historian of the Present – A conversation with Timothy Garton Ash

both more fluid and more complex. For problem in Eastern Europe because of old example, if you look at the politics of the minorities, and a dramatic problem in Eurozone, the North-South line is almost Western Europe because of new minorities, as important as the East-West line. It is now in particular, Muslims. This is fundamen- a question of multiple fault-lines, across tally a question of freedom of expression, multiple Europes. including the question of how we talk about difference, of all kinds. Secondly, in Over the past few years, your work has the age of the internet, we are all becom- focused on freedom. ing neighbours. Up to four billion people Looking back, I realise that my work has are digitally connected. In a broad sense, been devoted to two great themes: Europe we are all living in the same country, and and freedom. I have always been happi- so the question of “living with difference” est when the two have marched together, is posed in an entirely new way. as in 1989, and least happy when they have conflicted; because sometimes they What would you say about today’s East- do – the European project has not always ern Europe? How strong is the legacy of been an unambiguous friend of freedom. the authoritarian regime and communism? When my dear friend, Ralf Dahrendorf (a The most characteristic issue here is me- German-British sociologist, philosopher, dia freedom. The Vladimir Putin model is political scientist and liberal politician – very different from the old Soviet model. editor’s note) died in 2009, I established the You can say almost anything you like on Dahrendorf Programme for the Study of the Russian internet, but how many people Freedom, here at Oxford University, in his does it reach? If you look at the control of memory. As part of this programme, I am the mass media, both direct state control currently leading an online project called and indirect control, then the question of Free Speech Debate (www.freespeechde- getting a variety of genuinely open mass bate.com). Using an international team of media becomes crucial. And, moreover, graduate students, we are trying to explore you might get killed for saying it. So there what we think should be the norms of free is a combination of brutal intimidation speech. The website appears in 13 language and this rather subtle form of political versions, and we are trying to organise technology and media control. a genuinely global debate on these issues. Does Russia have different values re- Why freedom of speech, in particular? garding these fundamental freedoms? Or I have increasingly been focused on free- is it just the rhetoric of Vladimir Putin and dom of expression for two reasons. First of his establishment? all, because at the heart of the European There is a specific post-imperial and challenge of the 20th century is how we post-Soviet Russian trajectory. In the 1960s, combine liberty and diversity; a familiar US Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, A Historian of the Present – A conversation with Timothy Garton Ash Interview 103 said that Britain had lost an empire but That is the only case, and it only applies not yet found a role. And the same goes until they become members; once you for Russia since 1991. Russia has lost an are in, you can get away with murder. empire but not yet found a role. It takes And it is particularly weak with Russia time for a great country to adapt to its because of the special energy relation- new position; to work out where it wants ships of a few key European states. to be and what it wants to be. So I do not believe that there is a Huntingtonian, What is the main contribution that Poland black-and-white difference between so- can make to the EU? called “Russian values” on the one hand, Poland has really stepped up to its poten- and “European values” on the other, and tial in the last few years. I think it is already that when you cross the Latvian border a major player in European policy. I think with Russia you step mysteriously from the current government has done a great one value-world into the other. I don’t job. I think the EU Presidency went very believe that for a moment. But Russia’s well. You could well argue that Poland has trajectory is obviously longer and more had more influence on European external difficult. policy in the last five years than Spain or Italy – which is quite an achievement. But Do you think that the EU is sending across Poland must learn to be more than just a clear message regarding basic freedoms? an advocate of Eastern policy. Everybody It is sending a very unclear message. knows that when the Polish representative Occasionally, the EU can pleasantly is in the room, Ukraine will be mentioned, surprise us; the message on Yulia Ty- Russia will be mentioned. And that’s fine; moshenko and on Hungary was quite it is as it should be. When the Spanish good. The EU is a community of law, so representative is in the room, the Mediter- where there is a clear violation of law or ranean will be mentioned. But if you are constitutional standards, then the EU going to become a first-league player in can be quite good. But, on the whole, European external policy, you must have the EU is extremely weak in projecting something to say about other people’s and promoting its own values, except neighbours and other people’s problems. in countries which want to be members. And there Poland is still very weak.

Timothy Garton Ash is a British historian and Professor of European Studies at Oxford University. He is the author of several books including We the People: The Revolution of ‘89 witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague (1990) and the collection of essays Facts are Subversive (2009), as well as a weekly column on international politics for the Guardian. To read more about his project, the Free Speech Debate, visit www.freespeechdebate.com. Building a Jewish Future A conversation with Tad Taube, Chairman of the San Francisco-based Taube Philanthropies, and Honorary Consul for the Republic of Poland in the San Francisco Peninsula Region. Interviewer: Shana Penn

SHANA PENN: Could you ever have im- Heritage Initiative as working towards agined there would be a revival of Jewish a larger goal of investing in the cultural life in your native Poland? future for all of Poland. TAD TAUBE: As someone who was born in Poland and narrowly escaped How did you first go about supporting the Holocaust, I spent many years after Jewish programmes in Poland? the war mourning a world that I thought In the beginning, before we established was totally lost. But since the collapse of the Jewish Heritage Initiative in Poland, the Soviet Bloc, in the country that saw we didn’t know very much about the sup- an almost total annihilation of its Jewish port structure for the resurgence of Jewish population and the rich civilisation that life. But it didn’t take too long to figure it produced, I have had the privilege of it out. One of the first organisations we being involved in this cultural revival supported was a Jewish Day School in as Jewish and Christian Poles reclaim Warsaw for children between the ages Polish Jewish heritage. That is the pur- of five and twelve. Normally children pose whereby my family foundation have the opportunity to observe a par- created the Jewish Heritage Initiative ent, an aunt or uncle, a grandparent or in Poland back in 2003. great grandparent, but in Poland in the The mission is to strengthen the revital- early 1990s, it was the adults who were isation of Jewish life in democratic Poland, learning about Judaism from the chil- and to broaden the world’s understanding dren schooled in the classroom about of the historical role of Polish Jewry and religious holidays, history, music, bak- its significant contributions to western ing challah every Friday, the meaning culture. We are honouring the past and of their Jewish background, from its building a Jewish future by connecting cultural foundation to its foundational diaspora Jewry to their Polish heritage. languages. It was a kind of reverse-trans- Moreover, with so many Christian Poles mission of knowledge and experience of involved, I view my foundation’s Jewish Jewish traditions. Seeing that direction Photo of courtesy Taube Philantropies

Tad Taube signing the July 2009 agreement at Kraków City Hall that established the sister city relationship between San Francisco and Kraków. 106 Interview Building a Jewish Future – A conversation with Tad Taube

of Jewish education gave us insight into the world attended more than 250 events the bottom-up evolution of Jewish life during the ten days of the festival. Per- in Poland at that time. formers, speakers, artists and instructors flocked to Kraków from the US, Israel, Which is more important, to create Europe, the former Soviet Union, even a community for those people who are just Mali; and of course, from within Poland. now discovering their Jewish roots, or to The Jewish Culture Festival proved once show all Polish people and the world at again that it is a living testament to the large this remarkable heritage that once power and durability of the Jewish Peo- thrived and was then destroyed? ple – and to Christians who respectfully Both are important. We are directing seek to honour Jewish heritage in today’s our philanthropic work in Poland toward democratic Poland. The Taube Founda- a global community. There are millions tion is proud to be the leading American of people on this planet who don’t have sponsor of the Festival, and we hope it a clue about what Poland is today, what will soon become a destination site for role it’s playing and has played in Jewish Jews the world over. achievement, and what constitutes Jewish life in Poland over hundreds of years. At A lot of young people attended the Fes- the same time, our work supports local tival in 2011, with the greatest age cohort awareness, consisting of the Polish peo- being between 19 and 29. What do you ple who are now learning the lessons of think of this trend? their history, including the people who The youth of Poland are interested in had family connection to Jewish life. In learning about their history, and em- the new free democracy, young people bracing it. Hundreds of Christian Poles have a great thirst for knowledge, par- have been filling Jewish studies courses, ticularly about themselves and their past. researching community archives and delving into all aspects of Jewish cul- Another programme you support that fo- ture. The Jagiellonian University recently cuses on the preservation and celebration inaugurated a Masters Programme in of Jewish heritage is the Jewish Culture Holocaust Studies, and it is already re- Festival in Kraków. ceiving applicants. The Jewish Heritage The Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków Initiative in Poland also supports young is the perfect example of an innovative adult groups which are constantly in- civic and educational initiative that creasing their membership and contrib- enables Jewish and Christian Poles to uting to the cultural discussion, such as celebrate global Jewish culture and its ZOOM (Polish Jewish Young Adult As- Polish roots. The Festival is not intended sociation) and Czulent. The president of for Polish audiences alone. In the summer ZOOM, Anna Bakula, was nominated to of 2011, over 25,000 people from around the European Union of Jewish Students Building a Jewish Future – A conversation with Tad Taube Interview 107

(EUJS) and elected its vice president. Past not necessarily the borders that are on president of ZOOM, Jan Śpiewak, and the map today, but the borders as they member, Ivo Krankowski, have received were as they shifted from one period praise for their documentary film, “8 Sto- of history to another. One exhibit gal- ries That Haven’t Changed the World”, lery will be devoted to the Holocaust. documenting the childhood memories of However, the museum will not be Hol- eight Polish Jews born before the Second ocaust-centric; it will be a history mu- World War. Just as the children taught seum telling the epic thousand-year their parents about their Jewish heritage story of Jewish civilisation in Poland, in that first generation after the end of from the earliest times in the tenth communism, it is the younger generation century through to the dismantling today that are leading efforts to learn of the People’s Republic of Poland and about, appreciate, and transmit Polish the rebirth of Jewish life today. I think Jewish heritage. every person that has any scholarly interest has a pretty good appreciation for Tell us about another remarkable project the fact that there is some component you are championing: the Museum of the of the past that’s going to dictate what History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. happens in the future, and so it is with The Museum of the History of Polish this museum. Jews will present the thousand-year history of Jewish civilisation in Poland, the The City of Warsaw donated the land epicentre of world Jewry for centuries for the Museum, and together with the prior to the Holocaust and the ancestral Ministry of Culture is covering most of the home of the majority of Jews today. When capital costs of the building, with a con- completed in 2013, this world-class edu- tinued investment in the Museum for the cational facility will be on a par with the future. Why do you think these government US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Is- institutions have involved themselves to rael’s Yad Vashem. The key difference is this extent? that the Museum of the History of Polish The best answer I can give you is Jews will extend the historical narrative their answer. Early on, when we were beyond the Holocaust to encompass an putting together an advisory group epic Jewish history that shapes Israeli and to help us plan, we had in that group American Jewish life even today. a high-ranking diplomat represent- The Museum is organised as an in- ing the government of Poland. One teractive history museum, a “theatre of the people in the group asked him of history”. There are going to be eight the question, why. Why are the Poles large exhibit halls and each will portray doing everything they can do now to a certain segment of Jewish history in assist the renaissance of Jewish life in Greater Poland. Greater Poland means Poland, renaissance of organisations, 108 Interview Building a Jewish Future – A conversation with Tad Taube

institutions and so forth? And he said, The principal challenge is that we “Before the war, the percentage of the are trying to complete a multi-million Jewish population in Poland was about dollar project in a country that is not ten per cent of the total. There were accustomed to large capital projects of about three and half million Jews out that kind. We are trying to explain the of a Polish population of 38 million.” need for this kind of capital to largely The Poles are painfully aware that when American donors, because Americans they lost their Jewish population, they have the interest and the money to sup- lost an important element of their own port large capital projects, and we are cultural life. A vast number of Polish still faced with the problem of trying to Jews who emigrated to the United States explain what this Museum is and why it have been extraordinarily successful in is so important, taking into account the the arts, music, theatre, science and so geographical disconnect. Why should forth. Over 70 per cent of the Jewish a wealthy individual who lives in De- population in the United States today troit and is capable of making a large has Polish origins. And Polish people gift support a museum in Warsaw? It’s are also aware what extent of histori- not the easiest story that one can cham- cal responsibility their country had. pion if you are trying to fund a large They are working very hard to regain capital project. And then one encoun- something that is very important to ters significant residual resistance from Poland. They have made significant people who really don’t understand that investments in restoring some of these there has been a phenomenal societal cultural activities. As noted, they have transformation in Poland, that it is not a majority of the investment, in addi- the same East European country which tion to the land, in the structure of propagated anti-Semitism over several the Museum. The Polish Government hundred years. The Polish government is also undertaking to pay for a large has been the least of our challenges. part of the operating expenses, and it They have been the most supportive, is usually the operating expenses that helpful to a fault, not only with money, make or break a museum. As there is so but with their outreach. We had the much front-end effort to raise money to former President of Poland, actually build the museum, there is often very both former Presidents of Poland, but little residual energy left to fund the initially Aleksander Kwaśniewski, come ongoing expenses of operation, which to the United States and do a multi-city for a museum are very large. tour promoting the Museum. Think of how important that must be to Poland What is the most challenging aspect of to have the president out there acting as the work that you are doing in Poland and a spokesperson for and promoting this specifically about this museum project? Museum. His successor, the late Lech Building a Jewish Future – A conversation with Tad Taube Interview 109

Kaczynski, was also advocating in the 2012, a group of Jagiellonian law students United States. He was the former mayor will come to California for an intensive of Warsaw, so he was the mayor who ac- summer course in American law. I could tually made the decision or joined in the not be prouder to support such activities decision to contribute the land for the that foster cross-cultural experiences. Museum. And the Foreign Ministry has been extremely helpful. I can’t think of You have indicated that what brings an element of organised political life in together your activities in Poland and Poland that hasn’t been at the forefront the San Francisco Bay Area in the area of trying to make this happen. of Jewish philanthropy is an overarching goal of supporting “Jewish Peoplehood”. You have supported a myriad of pro- Can you define Jewish Peoplehood for us? grammes in Poland via your philanthropic Peoplehood is everything that one organisation. How has your role as Hon- would consider to be traceable to Jew- orary Consul for the Republic of Poland ish culture. Peoplehood is a hot pas- helped you in your involvement? trami sandwich on rye. Peoplehood is My role as Honorary Consul gives Jewish comedians. Peoplehood is Israel. me a formal title through which to ad- Peoplehood is the Torah, bar mitzvahs, vocate for Poland. Recently, I have been bat mitzvahs. It is an all-encompassing spearheading a campaign on behalf of phrase that defines who a Jew is and the Poland’s inclusion in the Visa Waiver breadth of what that really means. Program, together with other Honorary The most important purpose of Peo- Consuls across the United States. The plehood is to give individuals a sense of bill is currently in the US Senate and who they are and where they came from. House of Representatives, and we have Jewish Peoplehood in all of its compo- high hopes that it will be passed and nents, including the work that we do in the visa requirement waived for Poland. Poland, ultimately leads us to the con- With my fellow Honorary Consul in clusive statement that Judeo-Christian the San Francisco Bay Area, Christo- culture and western civilisation are pher Kerosky, I am also the co-chair of the work, in part, of Jewish people over the San Francisco-Kraków Sister Cities a 1,000-year period in Eastern Europe. Program, which sponsors activities to I would encourage everyone to go to bring the two metropolises closer to- Poland, and to experience and celebrate gether. For example, through the Sister the revival of Jewish life, and I would Cities Program, we recently launched an encourage those already in Poland to academic exchange between the Jagiel- do the same. I would encourage every- lonian University School of Law and the one who can to go to the Jewish Cul- University of California, Berkeley Boalt ture Festival in Kraków, the Emanuel School of Law. Starting in the summer of Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute 110 Interview Building a Jewish Future – A conversation with Tad Taube

and the Jewish Genealogy & Family Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The opening of Heritage Center, the Galicia Jewish this modern, forward-thinking museum Museum, the Jewish Community Cen- in this anniversary year encapsulates tre in Kraków and the up and coming what we are trying to do: honour the Jewish Community Center in Warsaw. past, see how it has shaped the present, And I would encourage all to visit the and use that to create a better future Museum of the History of Polish Jews, for Jewish people, reinforce Polish de- scheduled to open in 2013, a year that mocracy, and inspire the international will honour the 70th anniversary of the community.

Tad Taube, born in Kraków, Poland in 1931, left with his parents for the United States in May 1939, a mere few months before the Nazi occupation. For nearly a decade, as Chairman of the San Francisco-based Taube Philanthropies and President of the Koret Foundation, he has directed his philanthropic efforts toward supporting the resurgence of Jewish life in his native country. Taube Philanthropies is the single largest American Jewish family foundation operating in Poland today. Tad Taube is the recipient of the 2004 Command- er’s Cross, Poland’s highest civilian medal, and was appointed Honorary Consul for the Republic of Poland in the San Francisco Peninsula Region in 2007. Advertisement We Won’t Disappear Małgorzata Nocuń

It’s a funny feeling going to a demonstration and finding more journalists and police officers than demonstrators. And this is how things currently are in Moscow. Yet the atmosphere of the protests does not leave much doubt – the Russian capital is awakening.

The May 2012 swearing-in of Vladimir Putin as Russia’s president was a sad show – Moscow’s empty streets with convoys full of armed OMON officers and a spine- tingling silence. It was in this kind of atmosphere that Vladimir Putin arrived at the Kremlin to take up the position of Russia’s head of state for the third time. The empty streets were a grim reminder of how much Russia does not want Putin. The day before the inauguration, the police broke up the opposition’s demonstration and 450 people were arrested. Among the wounded were both protesters and the police, and the opposition’s main leaders were sent to jail. No wonder that on the actual day of the inauguration, Moscow looked like a ghost town; the capital had to be “cleaned” so that no unpleasant surprises would take place.

Moscow’s Maidan

In the last six months the Russian government has witnessed one unpleasant surprise after another. Firstly in Moscow, but also in other larger cities such as in St. Petersburg whose streets have recently hosted various demonstrations and events. What is happening in Russia now can be called the largest explosion of discontent since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In November and December 2011, Moscow’s streets were filled with hundreds of thousands of people – a record number. The most important question today is: will these protests die away or will they explode with tremendous force? The editor ofRosbalt news agency, Ivan Preobrazhensky, tells me: “It is possible that there will be large protests, caused by social issues, which will take place not only in Moscow but all over Russia. The biggest mistake during the presidential Małgorzata Nocuń, We Won’t Disappear Reports 113

campaign was made by Putin himself. He gave out promises which clearly couldn’t be fulfilled. Putin also pretends that Russia is a democracy, which is why he has created the illusion that people themselves can make decisions. In other words, it was nobody else but the president himself who got the country out of a coma.” Moscow always seemed like a “cleaned” city. Here, everything has already been decided on, the citizens, caught in the daily grind, are not really that interested in politics and the power is held by the same group of people. Only on the 31st of each month are the streets of Moscow attended by demonstrators defending human rights, who demand the observance of the constitution and especially article 31, which guarantees the freedom of gatherings. It is clearly visible that under the layer of apathy something is really brewing. After the breakup of the demonstrations the day before the presidential inauguration people had real reasons for fear, but they did not hide in their houses. Today, Moscow is protesting and it is doing it in a fun way with new cultural events being organised every day, such as the “walks with poets and literary men”. The most important event seems to be Moscow’s “Maidan”. In the summer, young people wanted to make a tented city in Moscow, something similar to what was created in Kyiv during the Orange Revolution in 2004. The youngsters stationed themselves at Cziste Prudy, a boardwalk in Moscow’s centre which is surrounded by boulevards. They complied with the code of conduct: the use of alcohol was banned, and littering and hooliganism was prohibited. And yet the government employed the same-old techniques against them. The residents of the nearby houses suddenly Many social activists aim started to complain about the protesters – that at making people aware of they were loud and that people couldn’t sleep. It turned out that these “residents” were in fact being citizens and having an activists of the pro-government United Russia influence over their own lives. party who actually live in completely different parts of Moscow. Finally, early one morning, when Russia’s capital was still asleep, the tented town was coercively removed: the protesters were packed into police cars and removed from the boardwalk. But those who were determined not to give up so easily gathered for another protest at a square near Barrikadnaya metro station. The people protesting at Barrikadnaya looked exhausted. They would pin white ribbons to their clothes – a symbol of the protest – and shout “Russia without Putin” and “We won’t disappear”. Some of them lay collapsed on street benches out of fatigue. But the nice, warm weather started to brighten up the atmosphere. Somebody showed up with a guitar and started to play popular Russian rock songs of bands such as Kino and DDT. The lead singers of these groups, Yuri Shevchuk and the late Viktor Tsoi, are considered legends of the Russian rock scene and it is 114 Reports Małgorzata Nocuń, We Won’t Disappear

quite amazing how relevant the messages of their old songs still seem today. Sol- emn slogans such as “this is how authoritarianism will die” or “this is the way the new Russia is being born” were there too. But because of the small number of the protesters, however, they sounded a bit comical.

The legalists

Among the supporters of the protests at Barrikadnaya was Yelena Tkach, a coun- cillor from the Presnya district (the majority of votes in the recent election was won by the opposition at Presnya district council). Tkach came up with an idea of organising a festival called “The Summer of Freedom” at Barrikadnaya and wanted to get an official permit from the city authorities. This time the authorities were implacable, and late in the evening packed away the tent which Tkach was trying to set up. The group of exhausted young people were left with no choice but to move somewhere else: this time they chose Stary Arbat. “Tkach’s case is important because the protesters should first detect who is leni- ent towards them among the official authorities, as well as how to lead to the sanc- tioning of the protest, and how to legally demand changes,” says Preobrazhensky. People gather in the streets for many reasons in Russia. Some are not happy with their lives in this authoritarian country, while others want a new quality of life. Among them are representatives of the middle class who feel suffocated by the state’s system. There are also artists who are demanding more culture in everyday life, as well as students and the elderly who are simply unhappy with their material situation. Preobrazhensky believes that “if large protests erupt in Russia, it will be important who will lead them. It is no secret that the opposition is divided and its numerous leaders do not think about unity.” Among the protest’s leaders are Sergei Udaltsov, a left-wing activist; Alexei Na- valny, a famous blogger known for his decisive nationalistic views; and Mikhail Kasyanov, the former prime minister. Each one of them is different and has a different vision for Russia. “I cannot call any of them ‘my guy’, but I am clearly closer to them than to Pu- tin, and this is how the majority of Russians think these days. They don’t support a particular politician but change in general,” says Preobrazhensky.

The lighthouse

Moscow has a long and beautiful tradition of artistic street events. In 1958, a monument of Vladimir Mayakovsky, poet, playwright, and futurist, was unveiled here. During the pompous ceremony Soviet poets recited their poems, Małgorzata Nocuń, We Won’t Disappear Reports 115

which were, of course, in accordance with the party line. The event, however, got out control and after the official unveiling, some members of the public started to recite their own poems. The Soviet press initially praised this action and encouraged its continuation. All until the students took over the gathering at the monument and started reading the poems of forgotten and oppressed poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova. Suddenly the square near the statue (sometimes referred to as mayak which in Russian means the lighthouse) turned into a place of political disputes, angering the Soviet authorities. The gatherings were banned. Once the ban had been issued, people started to meet around the monument of a well-known Soviet dissident, Vladimir Bukovsky. And today, Russian poets and artists have returned to the tradition of gathering at monuments. On one spring afternoon, the translator, Anatol, invited those interested to join him in reading poems at the monument of Osip Mandelstam in Moscow’s Kitay-Gorod district. “This was a spontaneous decision, we just said: ‘let’s read

Today the protests take the form of an event. People bring flowers, dance, sing, like at this monument of Abay (Ibrahim) Qunanbayuli, a Kazakh poet, composer and philosopher. Photo: Jadwiga Rogoża 116 Reports Małgorzata Nocuń, We Won’t Disappear

some poems’. People were organised online and invited their relatives and friends,” Anton recalls. The monument was surrounded by many people. Those who were there for the poetry reading were being watched by police officers, who clearly looked bored. The poems were recited by both Moscow is protesting in a fun women and men, as well as young people, way with new cultural events and children wandered and played around the monument. Spontaneity and joy could being organised every day. be clearly felt in the air. After each poem, the audience applauded. “This city seriously lacks culture and that’s the whole secret of this initiative. We want to show that we are the citizens and that we can meet and do something together,” says Anton. And there are many of such initiatives in Moscow today: they include walks with artists, meetings with painters, and group readings of books. Sometimes participation in these events is quite grotesque. A series of events might be organised on one day, and it might happen that their location changes, hence people run around town to “catch” one of them.

The citizens

Putin’s Russia is being more and more often compared to the late tsarist Russia or the stagnation of Leonid Brezhnev’s era; although, with one difference: in Pu- tin’s Russia, the word “citizen” seems to be more often used. Many social activists aim at making people aware of being citizens and having an influence over their own lives; or at least they should try to. One of the social initiatives is the movement of “blue buckets”. The name refers to the sirens on the privileged automobiles of Russian VIPs. Drivers of such cars tend to break the rules of road, and there have even been a few accidents in which a VIP car has hit a pedestrian at a green light; the pedestrian died, but the violator didn’t face justice. Such accidents have been condemned online by representatives of this movement and the cases were directed to the courts. Piotr Shkumatov, of the “blue buckets” movement explained to me: “Have our initiatives brought an effect? Let the answer to this question be the recent decision on reducing the number of ‘privileged’ cars driving on our roads”. When the Moscow intelligentsia talks about change, the first thing put forward is not removing Putin, but that change needs to start with the people themselves. This attitude is reflected in the voice of Yelena, who works for the city government of Moscow: “Let’s start fighting for the city to renovate our buildings, to take care Małgorzata Nocuń, We Won’t Disappear Reports 117 of playgrounds and green areas. Let’s collects signatures, let’s fight. This is the only way to achieve something.” In the West, these words perhaps sound a bit naive. People living in the West have long-known that such small social initiatives can change the area they live in and, on a larger scale, even the whole country. But in Moscow – as it would be too much to say in Russia – this is something new. Looking at these movements it has become clear how the Russians are changing and how much Putin’s regime has changed too. Translated by Iwona Reichardt

Małgorzata Nocuń is the deputy editor of New Eastern Europe and Nowa Europa Wschodnia. Baku Shedding its Skin Wojciech Górecki

Baku’s latest showpieces include the ultra-modern glass and steel structures of the new airport terminal and the heavy pseudo-oriental style buildings which are dripping with gold. However, behind this glittering modern façade lie the corruption and human rights violations of the building trade.

“What do I think of the new Baku?” repeats Isa Gambar, the leader of the opposition party in Azerbaijan as he drags on a cigarette and ponders on what to say. “I’ll answer with an anecdote. A rich Russian man and his wife go to a party. As they enter the room, a beautiful long-legged woman throws herself into the man’s arms. ‘Hello, Sasha!’ she greets him. A little uncomfortable, his wife asks him who the woman is. ‘It’s Ivanov’s mistress,’ explains the husband. The situation repeats itself. ‘Sergey’s mistress,’ explains the man freeing himself from the arms of an even more attractive girl. At some point another stunning blonde, even more charming and sexy than the previous ones comes up to the couple. ‘And this is my mistress,’ says the husband as he introduces the girl to his wife. The wife says nothing for a while and then bursts out ‘Ours is the best!’” “It’s the same here,” Gambar says returning back to the question. “People don’t get a penny from oil but they like looking at something nice and identify with it. Everyone knows the new face of Baku is just a façade and that the same problems still lurk behind it, with corruption and the violation of human rights at the top of the list.”

Oil turning into gold

The grand scale of investment can already be felt the moment you arrive. The bus carrying passengers from the plane to the Heydar Aliyev (named for the father of the current president, Ilham Aliyev - editor’s note) terminal meanders past scaffolding, shells of buildings, cranes, excavators and bulldozers. However, Wojciech Górecki, Baku Shedding its Skin Reports 119

it is difficult to say why all this construction actually exists. The old airport was comfortable and convenient; queues before the gates were few and far between. Perhaps the government decided that the airport which resembled a pyramid was not impressive enough? The booths where you pay to enter the airport give you a taste of the futuristic atmosphere of the place. A streamlined roof shaped like the wing of a paraglider hangs above the booth, and the way in which the lights are arranged, resembles the sky. It is clear that this whole airport is going to be high-tech, and that Baku’s showpieces will either be the ultramodern glass and steel structures or the heavy pseudo-oriental style buildings dripping with gold. From the airport, two roads lead into the city of Baku. The old one was repaired ten years ago providing two and a half lanes each way, making it extremely easy to access the city centre. There were three roundabouts on the way, but one could cut across them quickly as cars coming from the airport had the right of way, and you didn’t meet the first traffic lights until you neared the city centre. Four years ago, however, a highway was constructed. It is longer than the other road, but it makes for faster travel. The old road has since been re-modernised, now boasting four lanes each way, and the roundabouts are gone. This has resulted in the 17-kilometre-long highway, which cost 217 million dollars to build, now being completely empty. Plans to connect the airport to the city centre with an underground train are also in progress. “These kinds of investment bring the biggest profit,” says Gambar explaining that everything which happens in Azerbaijan is based on corruption and self-interest. “A company from Azerbaijan builds roads both in Azerbaijan and Georgia. But, somehow building one kilometre of road in Georgia costs 50 per cent less.” At the end of the 1990s, before the onset of the real oil and building boom, a new head office of the Azerbaijani Central Bank was built. At the time, it was the -ul timate in imagination and flair. Today, the edifice of the Central Bank building stands Developers in Baku have little out from the other buildings surrounding it interest in sparing buildings by virtue of its ascetic modesty, and it is very likely that another modernistic structure will of historical value. quite soon replace it. The building consists of a golden core with two black towers on each side. The symbolism is clear: the towers are oil wells, and the oil pumped from them turns into real gold that fills the state treasury. At the beginning of the 1990s, Azerbaijani oil barely trickled onto the world markets. There was enough money, however, to build the first luxurious hotels and apartment blocks, but more was needed to change the entire look of the city. 120 Reports Wojciech Górecki, Baku Shedding its Skin

Opening the first pipeline from Baku to the Turkish terminal in Ceyhan on the Mediterranean, and later a gas pipeline along the same route to Erzurum in Tur- key, was the turning point. Huge sums of money began to flow into Azerbaijan, most of which was invested in construction and almost exclusively in the capital city of Baku. The attractive plots in the city centre were soon finished and developers set about demolishing older buildings. High rise blocks with more than a dozen storeys cropped up among the old three to four-storey townhouses. The streets were immediately jammed with heavy traffic as the inhabitants of the high rises, who had paid 5,000 dollars (or more) per square metre, usually had several cars. Over- loaded water pipelines and an outdated energy grid failed on an everyday basis. To reduce costs, the investors tried to build as fast as possible, often ignoring artistic value or violating technological rules. They hired incompetent, young men without any experience instead of professionals. Accidents happened regularly, although news of them blew over fast. The opposition press would describe who really owned a certain novostroyka (an old Soviet term used to refer modern blocks of flats). It was usually people from the higher levels of power and no one could harm a hair on their head. At worst, a site manager was fined when it was clear that a building permission never actually existed. This free-for-all ended after the disaster that struck on August 28th 2007, when a 16-storey apartment block that was just being finished collapsed on Mukhtarov Street. Twenty-five workers were buried in the rubble. They were all from the area of Astara (the borderland between Azerbaijan and Iran) and most of them came from one village. They lived and worked at the building site.

Maiden Tower Hotel

Developers who compete for land had little interest in sparing townhouses of historical value. In order to be granted permission to demolish a building which was on the list of historical places, it was necessary to reduce it to a state which made any renovation impossible. This was almost the fate which met the house that stands at 11 Mirza Ibrahimov Street, built in 1889. It is most likely that Józef Gosławski (the 20th-century Polish sculptor and artist – editor’s note) lived there between 1902 and 1904, designing the grand edifice of Baku city hall as well as the Zeynalabdin Taghiyev Palace which houses the Azerbaijani State Museum of History. The tenants of 11 Mirza Ibrahimov Street were alarmed by the rumour that a serious investor had taken interest in the plot where the building stood. As several luxury apartment blocks had already been constructed in that area, the news gave cause for concern. The concern grew even greater when the cellar of the house was he new Baku stands in contrast with Azerbaijan, Tnot because of its cultural strangeness but because of its ostentatious wealth.

Photos: Andrzej Brzeziecki eople don’t get a penny from oil but they like Plooking at something nice and identify with it. Everyone knows the new face of Baku is just a façade and that the same problems still lurk behind it.

hen confronted with developers, the tenants of houses that are Wdue to be demolished, historical or otherwise, don’t really stand a chance. Th ey can consider themselves really lucky if they are off ered fi nancial compensation or a fl at in a new block. But this happens very rarely. Wojciech Górecki, Baku Shedding its Skin Reports 125

flooded one night and the cellar door was bolted shut, making pumping out water impossible. At the same time trucks from the local building sites began parking close to the building, often driving so close they damaged the building’s exterior. Sisters Irina and Viera Trofimova, custodians of mementoes left by Gosławski (including the architect’s drawings and postcards bought on his trips to Poland), decided to act in defence of the building. The authorities were inundated with letters sent by “The first oil boom built the the sisters who also alarmed the Polish embassy Baku that we used (both of them are members of the Polish community abroad). They eventually sought help to know and love. The from the president’s wife, Mehriban Aliyeva, second destroyed it.” head of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation which takes care of Azerbaijani national heritage. The First Lady intervened in the Baku mayor’s office, and as a result, the municipal services pumped out the water, dried the cellar and fenced off the building with a steel line to make parking there impossible. In June 2008, the-then First Lady of Poland, Maria Kaczyńska, unveiled a commemorative plaque dedicated to Józef Gosławski on the wall of the building. However, this case is quite an exception. When confronted with developers, the tenants of houses that are due to be demolished, historical or otherwise, don’t really stand a chance. They can consider themselves really lucky if they are offered financial compensation or a flat in a new block. But this happens very rarely. The solidnye lyudi, as wealthy people with considerable influences in Azerbaijan are called, don’t want to have just anybody as their neighbour. So most of those who are kicked out are compensated with only enough money to buy a tiny flat on the outskirts. A feature film made by Shamil Aliyev in 2005, features a mysterious man in a white suit who intends to turn Baku fortress (the oldest part of the city, surrounded by walls) into a huge amusement park. He plans to open a hotel in the Maiden Tower, (Baku fortress and the Maiden Tower are both on the UNESCO World Heritage List). Aliyev’s imagination is not that far from reality, and even though no one will mess with the historical Maiden Tower and the Palace of the Shirvanshahs, some illegal buildings have already been built in the fortress.

An island in the Azerbaijani sea

“I sometimes think it is bad we have oil,” Zeynal, a taxi driver, says with nostalgia. “In the past, people were poorer but life was happier. Money has spoiled people, they scowl at each other and no one helps each other in times of need. You can only count on yourself now.” 126 Reports Wojciech Górecki, Baku Shedding its Skin

Zeynal has higher education, knows more about Polish jazz than I do and his Russian is impeccable. Zeynal is a classic Baku resident, a survivor of the cosmopolitan class of citizens who have set the tone in Baku for over 100 years. They do not like the contemporary architecture, find the nouveau riche splendour of- fensive and look down on the high rise buildings. There are exceptions, though. Nurani, the head of the foreign section of the Russian language journal, Echo, and a genuine resident of Baku says every epoch needs its own expression. “Not everyone liked the trends in architecture in the Construction of Khazar Islands, 19th century, although we still admire those a luxurious island complex buildings today,” she says. What is most important, however, is that the in the sea, will begin in 2013. Baku elite like the new architecture. The class of Baku residents such as Zeynal is on the verge of extinction. They have to adapt like Nurani, or leave like Fuad Akhundov, an expert in the history of the city, author of television programmes about Baku and an ex-police officer who was Azerbaijan’s Interpol representative. Akhundov emigrated to Canada. “I don’t want my son to grow up here,” he explained to his friends. “The first oil boom created the Baku we used to know and love. The second one destroyed it.” Akhundov means the European Baku which stood out from the rest of the country. “The solid, in fact pompous style of the old town makes the capital of Azer- baijan unlike either Tbilisi or Yerevan, it is indeed unlike any other city in this area,” wrote Polish journalist, Ryszard Kapuściński, in his book, Kirgiz schodzi z konia (The Kirghiz Dismounts). “Baku is exotic in the Asian context because of its bourgeois, European character. First of all, Baku contrasts with Azerbaijan itself. A Muslim, half-nomad country, Persian or Turkish, and suddenly you get a part of Chicago or Hamburg.” Paradoxically, the new Baku, where Azerbaijani is spoken (even though it is still possible to communicate in Russian, and more and more often in English) also stands in contrast with Azerbaijan, not because of its cultural strangeness but because of its ostentatious wealth. Yet no one would now compare it to Chicago, but rather with Dubai. Instead of calling it European or Near East, Baku remains an island, a colourful patch of land in an Azerbaijani sea, grey from steppe dust.

Winter garden

In 2010 the state made attempts to bring the chaos of construction under control and channel Baku’s bursting energy. It started with the highways crisscrossing the city. Overpasses and tunnels, hundreds of metres long, became the trademark of the city. The time needed to get from one part of the city to another was reduced Wojciech Górecki, Baku Shedding its Skin Reports 127 considerably. Every investment is marked with a marble plaque: “On this day (with date) this bridge (or tunnel, or underpass) was opened by the President of the Re- public of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev.” Side roads have been repaired, and the airports in Nakchhivan, Ganja, Lan- karan and Zakatala revitalized. The seafront embankment, designed as far back as the beginning of the 20th century by Kazimierz Skórewicz (a Polish architect who spent many years as Baku’s main architect – editor’s note) has been rebuilt. Hundred-year-old palm trees and cypresses were replaced with two hundred-year- old silk floss trees from Argentina. The construction of a winter palace began. To make this possible, a decision was made to demolish all the buildings between Fizuli and Heydar Aliyev squares. One of the houses earmarked for demolition was at 38 Shamsi Badalbeyli Street belonging to Leyla and Arif Yanusov, well-known Azerbaijani human rights defenders. The couple objected to the decision and a court ruled that the investor would need to obtain a separate court verdict which would be final and binding. On the evening of August 11th 2011, while the Yanusovs were in Norway, a bulldozer levelled the building to the ground. There was no separate court decision. In addition to Arif’s office, the building also housed offices of three non-governmental organisations (the married couple had been living in a different place). Their co-workers had not even been allowed to take their computers with them. Apart from the furniture, a library and all their documentation regarding human rights were irretrievably lost. Allegedly, there had been a gas leak and the danger of explosion. “I most regret losing the portraits of my parents, painted 60 years ago,” says Leyla Yanusov. “Everything else can be reconstructed.” She does not want to leave Baku. It is her city, her country. After protests flooded in from all over the world, the mayor’s office sent a predated letter to the couple with a proposal of fair compensation for the house; fairer than what had been previously proposed (the house was worth around 625,000 dollars according to the Yanusovs). It seems that people were more concerned with their fate abroad than at home.

Glass houses

In May 2011, Azerbaijani singers Eldar Gasymov and Nigar Jamal (known as the duo, Ell & Nikki) won the 56th Eurovision Song Contest, bringing a wave of joy and patriotic elation to the country, as well as adding impetus to new investments. The May 2012 contest was held in the concert and sporting arena called Baku Crystal Hall, in the seaside district of Bailovo (south of the centre), which has a capacity of more than 23,000 people. 128 Reports Wojciech Górecki, Baku Shedding its Skin

At the beginning of 2012, a mysterious Azerbaijani investor known as Haji Ibra- him announced he was planning to build the world’s tallest building – 185 storeys – in Sahil on the Caspian Sea, 20 kilometres south west of Baku (the current tallest building in the world is Burj Khalifa in Dubai which has 163 storeys). The head of the State Committee for Urban Development and Architecture, Dovletchan Dov- letchanov, said that he saw no problems with the planned project. The planned 1,110-metre-tall building is set to be a part of a larger project called Khazar Islands, an island complex in the sea in the vicinity of Sahil. Construction of the complex, which will include luxurious hotels, shopping and recreation, is scheduled to begin in 2013. The situation in Baku reminds me of a quote from the Polish classic,Przedwiośnie (The Coming Spring), written by Stefan Żeromski in 1925: “And what will you say to glass schools! To churches blossoming on hills, as artists dreamt them up, so beautiful that everything else will fade…?” The words describing these glass houses were meant to encourage the character Cezar (who was living in Azerbaijan) to return home, to Poland. Who would have thought that 90 years after these words were written, it better describes Baku? Translated by Bogdan Potok

Wojciech Górecki is an analyst for the Centre for Eastern Studies and a regular contributor to the Polish bimonthly, Nowa Europa Wschodnia. His books include Planeta Kaukaz (Warsaw-Poznań 2002, Wołowiec 2010) and Toast za przodków (Wołowiec 2010), which were both reviewed in the first issue ofNew Eastern Europe. A European from Drohobycz: Discoveries in the life of Bruno Schulz Brian R. Banks

This year marks the anniversary of both the birth and death of Bruno Schulz, an inspirational Polish writer from Drohobycz. It is also the year in which his writing comes out of copyright and the right moment to answer some questions about the writer.

Historians today consistently accept that Polish, and to some extent Eastern Eu- ropean, literary modernism had its first and richest harvest during the 1930s with writers such as Stanisław Witkiewicz (Witkacy) (1885-1939), Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969), and Bruno Schulz (1892-1942). However, this was never a specific group or movement. Gombrowicz and Witkiewicz disliked each other when Schulz introduced them in Warsaw. It was only through Schulz, their mutual friend, that they shared a common strategy: the recognition of Polish culture within the new international vanguard of experimentation. This material is still being analysed in books and conferences worldwide from the “fluctuating borderland between Russia and western Europe”, as described by Joseph Conrad’s father (Conrad’s father was the Polish poet, playwright and political activist, Apollo Korzeniowski – editor’s note).

European pantheon

Schulz, Gombrowicz and Witkiewicz are the usual starting places for non-Polish readers via translation, although one or two other contemporaries have been recognised abroad: Aleksander Wat and Bolesław Leśmian in the 1960s, Stefan Grabiński and Stanisław Przybyszewski more recently, but national classics such as Julian Tuwim and the Nobel laureates Henryk Sienkiewicz and Władysław Stanisław 130 History Brian R. Banks, A European from Drohobycz: Discoveries in the life of Bruno Schulz

Reymont elude wider interest. Witkiewicz and Gombrowicz first established their reputations in France in the 1920s and 1960s respectively, while Schulz entered the European pantheon due to a flurry of European translations in the 1960s and later in Japan, Taiwan, Israel and South America. Some American writers have exploited his work but others as diverse as Bohumil Hrabal, Danilo Kiŝ, V.S. Pritchett, and John Updike have registered homage to this shy, hyper-sensitive teacher whose attempts at foreign recognition were thwarted in the interwar period. Schulz, first an artist and later a writer, concentrated on the more private domain of short stories, or more accurately, prose poems, of which only two collections survived his tragic death in Drohobycz in 1942. It is notable that much of Schulz’s literary influence comes from German writers, a language which he learned fluently in the Austrian-Habsburg Empire. Rainer Marie Rilke, Franz Kafka, and Thomas Mann all lived between 1875-1955, although the first two died in the mid-1920s around the time Schulz turned to writing. Like Schulz, Rilke and Kafka both publicly questioned the religions of their upbringing (but not God). However, Schulz’s writing was more personal, in the failed hope of marrying a convert, Józefina Szelińska (her family still refuses to give any assistance to scholars, although visitors say their home displays Schulz’s art). His inner world was a complex amalgam of Thomas Mann’sMagic Mountain and Joseph and His Brothers, Kafka’s Trial and Metamorphosis (Transformation would be a closer translation), and Rilke’s poems and Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge based on Inwardness, the writer’s creativity which returns the things of the world back to the world. This is not to say that Schulz, being a deeply-Polish author, didn’t read and respect the literature of his first language. Recent memoirs confirm that he met (and in some cases memorised the work of) Aleksander Wat, Józef Wittlin, Mieczysław Jastrun, and Emil Zegadłowicz (the latter’s family still retain two of Schulz’s drawings). Novelist, Zofia Nałkowska’sDiary strongly suggests a much closer, intimate relationship of several months, but this was ignored by Schulz’s first biographer, Jerzy Ficowski, in all of his texts, and Ficowski avoided the subject in interviews with me. Overlaid onto this canvas were Schulz’s art studies, explored in sporadic travels across the border. We now know that these excursions happened more often than his biographer allowed, in spite of personal confirmation by Schulz’s grand-nephew, his last direct relative.

Unhappy in the capital

In 1917-1918, exactly ten years after he created his earliest surviving piece of art, Bruno Schulz studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, staying with relatives who, less successful abroad than Kafka’s family, have eluded research. Unlike Brian R. Banks, A European from Drohobycz: Discoveries in the life of Bruno Schulz History 131 his brother, Bruno was not conscripted. Without a grant from his local Jewish community, the family’s oral tradition relates that he was unhappy in the capital, despite the fact that Polish artists and writers had formed their own Ognisko club. Biographies say this was his only visit to Vienna, but Paolo Caneppele’s research has revealed that the student-artist was there several times. This had always been known by Schulz’s heirs, but oddly didn’t find its way into Polish discourse. At least four earlier periods are recorded in Austrian visa documents, from November 1916 to August 1917, prior to the academic year. He travelled south from Drohobycz via Hungary, and it is plausible that Schulz was in Vienna for most or even all of the First World Schulz was first an artist and War because of the overlap in dates. later a writer; only two written In this new light, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that Schulz actually passed Franz collections survived his death. Kafka on a boulevard or station platform where Milena Jesenska and Ernst Pollak, friends of the Prague writer, were discussing him in Vienna’s famous artistic cafés. Rilke also did his war service in Vienna. Impor- tantly this was the zenith of place and moment for Expressionism that shows partial reflection in Schulz’s art, at a time when the bohemian world had been rocked by the funerals of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele (it is known that their art was being collected by oil-rich Jewish families in Drohobycz) and the controversial writer Frank Wedekind, a competitor of Stanisław Przybyszewski in most of the capitals of Europe. A personal, never-discussed possibility also arises: this period may, in fact, coin- cide with the unemployed student being away from home when his father died in 1915, and which could (if true) have had a crucial impact on his later prose. Members of Schulz’s family also spent some time in Vienna, including his mother (six months after her husband died) and his brother, Izydor, who had three visas between 1915 and 1919 when he was serving as an Austrian army officer, and accompanied by his wife (who appears in the stories). Izydor, oddly absent from his brother’s stories, was an entrepreneur and the only member of the Drohobycz family to have a job. His earnings saved the family from impoverishment after the Schulz family closed their textile shop on the market square in the centre of Drohobycz, one of the few premises that boasted a German sign, as Martin Pollack revealed in his fascinating book Galicia.

New finds

Jerzy Ficowski tells us that the shop burned down without explanation during the war. My research found a declassified British government report, dated April 1915, by an Englishman working in the local oil industry stating that the Austrian army retreated when confronted by 12,000 Russians and a Cossack advance guard, 132 History Brian R. Banks, A European from Drohobycz: Discoveries in the life of Bruno Schulz

taking the contents of the banks with them. A three-week blockade resulted in food being sold on the black-market and the looting of shops. Jews who hadn’t fled (to Prague, for example, where they were met by Franz Kafka and Max Brod) were accused of “treachery” and spying by the Russians, and in retaliation, a number of Jewish-owned buildings were burnt, almost certainly including the Schulz’s shop. Stefan Zweig visited Drohobycz at this time, although his autobiography, The World of Yesterday (1943), has no mention of war damage to the town. Bruno Schulz revisited Vienna at least twice more in the 1920s. In May 1921 the earliest surviving letter shows that the 28 year-old was in Warsaw armed with a portfolio of his art looking for a job. Another Bruno Schulz’s writing new find, by a scholar in Israel, is a letter by method was a poetic Charlotte Richman, the daughter of Schulz’s cousin from his mother’s side. It is undated interpretation of life via but says that the artist visited Berlin in 1920 symbols and metaphors. or 1921 with his Booke of Idolatry series, which partly reflects the decadence of Weimar Ber- lin and late Habsburg Vienna. The family lived off Wilmersdorfer Strasse in the Charlottenburg district, newly incorporated into the city’s boundaries in the autumn of 1920. In my new edition of Muse and Messiah, I discuss the culture and events Schulz was exposed to prior to becoming a teacher (where he had been a pupil two decades earlier). Also discussed in the book is the limited Judaism of Schulz named after the Polish (but not Roman) Catholic name of Saint Bruno of Querfurt, a martyred missionary working in Kievan Rus’, Lithuania and Poland. Such elements are crucial for locating the identity of one who, like his country in its difficult geo-linguistic position, always looked West, not East for inspiration. His nearest preferred cultural centres were Lviv and Warsaw, but not the Kraków of the post-romantic Young Poland movement which had embraced Jungendstil/ Art Nouveau. Visits were often made to see Stanisław Witkiewicz in Zakopane, the southern mountain resort made famous by Henryk Sienkiewicz in the 1890s, as well as Joseph Conrad. In the late 1930s Schulz travelled to Paris and Stockholm in a quest to make contacts, as well as sending letters to an Italian editor and French translators. Yet Drohobycz and the neighbouring spa-resort of Truskawiec formed the chromosomes of his blood, an internal republic that could never be relinquished. Just like Adam Mickiewicz’s borderlands of Lithuania and Poland, creativity there was the one potent antidote against despair after his temporary, dearly-won travels. His mantra-like prose is comparable to an induced trance-like state confess- ing an odyssey. Through the motifs of night, dusk, dawn, seasons, storms, sleep, dreams, transformation of people and nature in a territory of isolation, a domain of introversion, the short-term effect fed the art of this cosmopolitan of culture. Brian R. Banks, A European from Drohobycz: Discoveries in the life of Bruno Schulz History 133

Hidden enchantment

Bruno Schulz’s method was mytho-poesis, a poetic interpretation of life and its events via symbol, metaphor, allegory and emblem. Mythology is formed on the assumption that an event literally happened, in some kind of reality (however ob- scure it may seem later), but we cannot perceive the world’s meaning so we need to create it. For Schulz, a lover of mathematics, it was a vector of overlapping spheres, not based on the restrictive nostalgia of the Romantics, but hidden enchantment kept alive like a flame awaiting “maturity into childhood”, similar to the concept of Marcel Proust’s times’ past or W.B.Yeats’ Isle of the Blessed. The concept of cultural geography called nationhood may be a sub-text. Ger- mans prefer vaterland like the first Slavs of Bulgaria, the French la mère patrie, Dostoevsky’s Mother Russia (rodina), and the vlast/otčina of the Czechs. The Jews called Poland “the place where one can lodge”, while Latvians prefer the “place of birth”, and the ancient Persians used both fatherland and motherland. Schulz, who wrote a now-lost Die Heimkehr (The Homecoming) in German, saw his region as the land of his ancestors. His separate story Fatherland (rather than the Polish Macierz, motherland) does not equate with the term’s normal meaning but the feelings of a traveller returning to his hometown, thereby giving a new sense to that emotive word: the life he had once known was in the land of the father. The patriarch (sharing the same Latin root as homeland and patriot), with life before and after his devastating death, is a major key to his tales, especially in Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937), wonderfully evoked in W.J. Has’ classic film which won the Cannes Prize in 1973. Its “other life” reflects Drohobycz before and after his father’s demise. Is the imbalance of the father (the mother only appears fleetingly) in his stories due to Schulz’s guilt at being absent during the last days before his death?

Posthumous reputation

Bruno Schulz’s senseless murder by a Nazi, who was never caught, took place only 200 metres from the building where he was born. His world encompassed only a very small area of the town behind the shop where he was born. From there to the school at which he later worked as a teacher, to where he painted frescoes to stay alive under Nazi occupation, literally on the same side of the road as his last home, were all within a 15 minute walk. Only the famous “street of crocodiles”, the main shopping street next to the town’s bazaar, was on the other side of the square, near the unmentioned neo-Renaissance Great Synagogue. Today, the latter’s ru- ined frescoes resonate with Schulz’s scenes that once decorated the bedroom of 134 History Brian R. Banks, A European from Drohobycz: Discoveries in the life of Bruno Schulz

two German children which later became a post-war Ukrainian kitchen. Twenty- nine stories, a few reviews and essays, a much-curtailed correspondence, one oil painting, and about 300 drawings, is the entire Bruno Schulz was senselessly life-work which has so far been passed down murdered by a Nazi to us from those terrible times. Every writer chooses a commonwealth of who was never caught. fellow creators who reflect their self-image. For readers, posthumous reputation is shaped by biographers, but the true first witnesses are those who met the subject. These three inter-locked factors: influences, personal contacts, and biographers, are a confused, unquestioned sequence by commentators today (a laudable exception was his friend Artur Sandauer), which is both surprising and regrettable (if not unique) since Bruno Schulz achieved recognition from UNESCO for his centenary in 1992, and was commemorated by a special stamp issued by Poland. Fortunately, Bruno Schulz’s copyright ends this year because the English versions are one of the worst possible, with illegal deletions, additions and changes including the first book’s title from Cinnamon Shops (1934) to The Street of Crocodiles. The removal of his last artworks from Drohobycz to Jerusalem raises further the question of identity during his life-time. The present only has validity if it retains, and does not cut off the past. Memory is the core of experience and a natural mine-shaft for writers. Schulz’s past was both his family and the borderland he inhabited. From the farthest eastern frontier of Poland and Europe, the reader is invited into the world of a Polish-Jewish-Galician European witnessing the end of a way of life. This vivid experience and attempt to comprehend it is of universal interest. It transcends nationality, upbringing, creed and, ultimately, borders that were arbitrarily imposed without the agreement of those who were there. Like all true art, the results are timeless yet very much part of their period, and thus an inspiration for fellow explorers today.

Brian R. Banks is the author of Muse & Messiah: The Life, Imagination & Legacy of Bruno Schulz (1892-1942) published in 2006 by InkerMen Press. Advertisement What is Unusual about the Borderland?

Mayhill Fowler

Fundacja Pogranicze, located in the small Polish town of Sejny, is an example of how to carry out a dialogue of cultural identity with your neighbours.

Czesław Miłosz is perhaps best known in the West not for his poetry, but for his incisive 1953 analysis of the seduction of communism for writers entitled The Captive Mind (Zniewolony umysł). If Miłosz is right, then the question naturally arises: How does one liberate the mind? How does the artistic imagination become un-captive? On a more practical level, the question of how artistic institutions should emerge from the arts-state-public matrix which was particular to the former socialist So- viet Bloc can be asked? One answer and success story is Fundacja Pogranicze – the Borderland Foundation, in Sejny, Poland. The story ofFundacja Pogranicze carries profound implications both for culture throughout the post-Soviet space, as well as more generally in Europe (the Borderland Foundation and the Centre “Borderland Arts, Cultures, Nations” are two separate institutions. They are linked through personnel and goals, and are discussed together in this article – author’s note).

Art as utopia

I will begin with a utopian image. Late in summer 2010, I visited Pogranicze in the little town of Sejny, way up in the far corner of north-eastern Poland, on the border with Lithuania and near the border with Belarus. Sejny may be a small town, but it is also a microcosm of 20th-century Eastern Europe in the borderlands: the region belonged successively to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, to the Rus- sian Empire, to Poland (contested by Lithuania), and to the People’s Republic of Poland under the Soviet sphere of influence. Poles and Lithuanians fought over Sejny, and of course, Sejny’s Jewish community was destroyed during the Second World War. Multiple layers of war, occupation, Mayhill Fowler, What is Unusual about the Borderland? People, Ideas, Inspiration 137 ethnic violence, shifting demographics, imperial and political borders have seemingly left little trace in this charming town located near lakes, excellent hiking and outdoor summer concerts. Sitting in the apple-strewn garden of the summer- house where I was staying, I could hear Jewish klezmer music wafting across town. I knew that the young local students, part of Pogranicze’s Sejny Theatre Klezmer Orchestra Students at Pogranicze create (Orkiestra Klezmerska Teatru Sejneńskiego), a magical sense of a lost were practising for the evening concert, which would be performed at sunset outside the world through art. former synagogue. In the sunny late-summer afternoon the music floated across the town from one end to the other. Immedi- ately, I had a sense of the aural environment of the pre-war world and a frisson of the long-gone multicultural past of Poland. That moment is pure Pogranicze: young students creating a magical sense of a lost world through art, transforming the local environment and restoring its place. Of course how Sejny residents themselves would have heard that music, back in the pre- war shtetl days, is another matter. The multiple cultural strands making up the local aural landscape – so intriguing to the 21st century historian – would have been so commonplace that it is quite likely locals would not have even registered that Jew- ish musicians were practising. Moreover, music can only evoke the past – it cannot recreate it. What Pogranicze has achieved, however, is important in the present.

Dawn of a new Europe

Pogranicze is a renaissance institution: an educational and cultural organisation, a documentation centre and a publishing house. It operates a jazz festival, a klezmer orchestra, a theatre workshop, and an exhibition space. They organise music exchanges, tours for the theatre and orchestra groups, as well as conferences on dialogue and inter-ethnic cooperation for scholars and cultural practitioners worldwide. In 1990, at the dawn of a new Poland and a new Europe, four young artist-idealists, Krzysztof Czyżewski, Małgorzata Sporek-Czyżewska, Bożena Szroeder, and Wojciech Szroeder, moved to Sejny and began working with students and the local community. Over two decades later, they are still there, all grown up, but still idealists. Now a part of the local community, the founding members of Pogran- icze have raised children here, shaped the local culture and brought visitors to Sejny. Czyżewski writes and travels around the world speaking about Pogranicze and inter-ethnic communication. The theatre and orchestra also tour, and I, for one, first discovered them at LaMaMa Theatre in New York City in spring 2008. 138 People, Ideas, Inspiration Mayhill Fowler, What is Unusual about the Borderland?

One of the central programmes of Pogranicze is the theatre workshop. Children of different ethnic backgrounds (Polish, Lithuanian, and Russian Old Believer) come together and make art. The piece is called The Sejny Chronicles (Kroniki Sejneńskie) and is based on images, songs, and stories of pre-war Sejny. Songs and stories alternate throughout the piece and at the centre of the stage stands a model of their town built by the students at the workshop. The process is what lies at the core of the performance, because all the students have to learn each other’s stories. Lithuanians learn the Polish stories, Poles learn the Old Believer songs, and vice versa. All children learn about the Roma and Jewish members of the Sejny community through talking to relatives, and learning stories and songs from Sejny’s past. The result is a powerful evening, even for someone in far-off New York City. The power of stories simply told is electric. The production demonstrates the ability of applied arts to build bridges between communities and seems not only to have given the audiences, but also the actor-students themselves lessons and models for thinking about local communities, the transformative power of the arts, and inter-ethnic communication. Pogranicze has also benefited from the interest, generosity, and spiritual patronage of Czesław Miłosz. Based primarily in buildings that formerly belonged to the Jewish community in Sejny, Pogranicze now also works out of Krasnogruda, Czesław Miłosz’s mother’s former estate. The work of Czyżewski, et al., resonates perhaps most clearly with Miłosz’s Rodzinna Europa (Native Realm), because this memoir of Miłosz is so much about this particular place on the borderlands at the corner of empires, and its experience in the brutal 20th century. But Pogranicze is also profoundly resonant with The Captive Mind. Pogranicze promotes a radical vision of culture and of Europe, and their key success, in my mind, has been in emerging from the captivity of Soviet socialism.

The socialist layer

What was socialist Sejny like? Interestingly, the Sejny Chronicles never connects with the immediate socialist past of the People’s Republic of Poland. There are no stories, songs or images of Solidarity, martial law, 1968, or any of the key moments from the last 60 years. Rather, they have chosen to take the multi-cultural pre-Soviet and pre-war past as their foundation. It is a mythical Chagall-inspired place they conjure, one out-of-time with no mention of Polish-Lithuanian violence, and an oblique mention of the Holocaust. The stories in the show could have taken place in the early years of the 20th century, or the mid-1920s. Time is unimportant. What is important, however, is place. In this sense, they are following in the tradition of the cultural turn towards the kresy, the swampy borderlands between Mayhill Fowler, What is Unusual about the Borderland? People, Ideas, Inspiration 139

Europe and Russia; lands with multi-ethnic villages and few cities, lands contested by various empires and states, and ravaged by war. Innovative interwar Polish theatre director Juliusz Osterwa looked to the kresy for cultural inspiration, as did the avant-garde Gardzienice theatre company, with whom Czyżewski and his colleagues worked in the late communist period. The turn to thekresy and the omission of the Soviet socialist past actually somewhat hides Pogranicze’s particular success. First of all, the town of Sejny offers a perfect paradox of the socialist Soviet Bloc: in promoting minorities, socialism actually built walls Pogranicze involves the local between ethnic groups. Soviet socialism was community, making them not about building bridges. In the “Friendship of Nations” ethnic groups did not speak to each a part of the production. other, even though they lived together in a one- street town. Soviet culture promoted sameness – “socialist in content, national in form”. But Pogranicze promotes difference. In fact, Pogranicze stakes its success in the very creativity produced by difference. Business manuals, cultural economists, and postcolonial theorists all write of the productivity of diversity, but the arts have tended to fall into national or ethnic categories, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Secondly, Soviet culture focused on centre and centralization: Warsaw or Mos- cow. Pogranicze, however, directs its energy away from the centre, towards the peripheral borderlands. In fact, Pogranicze puts the centre of European culture precisely in the periphery. Czyżewski defines a goal for today’s European culture as powrót do prowincji, or the return to the provinces. Rejecting centralization marks a distinct move away from the centripetal force of Soviet socialism. Finally, partially because of the centripetal force of Soviet socialism, Soviet culture was rarely focused on local community concerns, that is, a local audience. Pogran- icze has entirely placed itself in the hands of the audience. Of course, Pogranicze is unfortunately dependent on grant organizations such as the European Union, the Polish Ministry of Culture, and the Ford Foundation, in order to continue their work. But full state funding under communism implicitly placed the state as a middleman between the audience and the artist. Pogranicze is re-creating the relationship of the arts with its audience through excellence, through community involvement, and through listening to the audience. Far from any épater le bourgeois rhetoric of avant-garde theatre, or enveloping the artist in a concept comprehensible only to himself, Pogranicze’s creativity has an impact on the local community. The result is that cultural production becomes not about the perform- ers, but about the people in the audience. This is profoundly new. With the return to the local, the borderlands, and the audience, Pogranicze has been able to move out of the paradigm of the captive mind. 140 People, Ideas, Inspiration Mayhill Fowler, What is Unusual about the Borderland?

The Pogranicze model

Is there a Pogranicze model? What makes Pogranicze possible? Could you have a Pogranicze in Russia, Ukraine or Belarus? If so, what factors would contribute to the model’s success or failure? One answer, which Czyżewski himself has explained, is the excellence of their cultural offering. Also, of course, Sejny and Pogranicze are shaped by the Soviet socialist legacy differently than, say, Ukraine or Geor- gia. For places that were in the USSR itself, not just in its sphere of influence, and places that experienced the early years of forg- Europe today is defined ing communism, the reality of emerging from by its borders, its minorities, the “captive mind” phenomenon requires, perhaps, other institutions, practices, and skills. and its borderlands. Twenty more years of being in the Friendship of Nations makes the ethnicisiation harder to overcome. More importantly, Poland belongs to the European Union, and Pogran- icze dovetails well with the EU’s project of exploring what constitutes European culture, and what it means to be European. Diversity, plurality, and dialogue are (if fraught!) topics of conversation in the EU. Compare Pogranicze to Russkiy Mir (www.russkiymir.ru), a Kremlin-sponsored cultural organization aimed at exporting Russian-language culture abroad. Russian- language culture, no doubt, is rich and well deserves to be shared with the rest of the world. But the Russkiy Mir model implies the dominance of Russian culture world-wide, as opposed to embracing the various diversities and tensions within Russian culture itself. Pogranicze is about dialogue while Russkiy Mir is about the excellence of the monologue. If we look at other countries of Eastern Europe, we also don’t see a model similar to Pogranicze. Ukraine, for example, has not embraced the idea of the “other” as central to its cultural identity. At the heart of the Pogranicze model is the belief that art lies in the “other”, not the “self”. Culture only exists as refracted and reflected through multiple others. This model would require Ukrainian culture to embrace not only the wild Cossack steppe, but the Ashkenazi Jews (along with their historical leaders and communities), the Poles themselves, the Russians, the Armenians, the Germans, and the Bulgarians, etc. It would require embracing Paul Celan, Bruno Shultz, and Vasily Grossman. It would mean taking a Pogranicze approach to culture, inclusive and dependent on the “other”. Could students not only learn and present “our own” stories of underground fighters, nationalist rebellions and death in famine, but also stories of the “other”, of the Jewish population, of the Red Army, of the expelled Poles, of the many different peoples who lived, worked, suffered, rejoiced in the region that is today Ukraine and whose legacies still exist today? Mayhill Fowler, What is Unusual about the Borderland? People, Ideas, Inspiration 141

Europe as East?

It is in this embrace of the “other” (and promoting the identity of the “self-as- other”) that Pogranicze is most radical. This radicalism lies not only in its rejection of the Soviet legacy, but also in its stance in Europe today. Last autumn I had the pleasure of participating in Pogranicze’s Nowa Agora conference, a multi-day event in Brussels attended by applied artists, cultural practitioners, writers, and scholars all engaged in the question, whether scholarly or practically, of how to resolve agora with diversity, that is, how to promote multiculturalism without ignoring and eroding difference. According to Zygmunt Bauman, to be European is to be different, because in Europe difference has always been close. The “other” lived next door. (Bauman writes of these ideas frequently, most recently in his book, Culture in a Liquid Modern World Cambridge: Polity, 2011). Most of the New Agora conference took place at East Poland House, an institution determined to represent the interests of Poland’s east, that is, the kresy, in the European Union. The very existence of the institution shows the urgency of this representation. In other words, were it not for specifically advocating the borderlands, Europe’s and Poland’s east, these interests might fall by the proverbial way- side. In other words, East pushes the definition of Europe. Europe today, however, is defined by its borders, its edges, its minorities, and its borderlands. Pogranicze, in fact, takes a cultural and intellectual genealogy not of the Western Enlighten- ment, such as Voltaire, Rousseau or Goethe, but Herman Hesse, Ivo Andric, Czesław Miłosz; they take Europe not from France, but from Poland: a Europe with others, and a Europe with an East. Pogranicze’s success is not only related to its music and theatre. It embraces the East as Europe’s future, placing the centre in the periphery and emerging from the paradigm of captive minds. The Pogranicze model may not work everywhere, but it proves the benefit of diversity for creativity, and art itself for the teaching of diversity.

Mayhill Fowler holds a PhD in History from Princeton University and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. The Woman who Foresaw the Collapse of the Soviet Union

Ludwika Włodek

With the blood of Russian aristocrats and Georgian intellectuals flowing in her veins, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse foresaw the fall of the Soviet Union at a time when the West was terrified about its power. However, had it not been for the skeleton in her family’s closet, she could have become a leading French politician.

In the early 1990s, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse was already a well-known French historian. She had already educated generations of students, many of whom have had their own successful academic careers. Many of her books were on bestseller lists, including the widely-read biographies of the Russian tsars, and she was a member of Académie Française. Jacques Chirac, the president of France at that time, wanted her to be the first person to representRassemblement pour la République (Rally for the Republic, or RPR, set up by Chirac and which became France’s main right-wing party – editor’s note) in the European Parliament. In June 1994, Carrère d’Encausse, indeed, did become a member of the European Parliament where she found herself in her element, involved in projects relating to EU-Russia relations. In France, there were even rumours of her suitability to become the Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Past trauma

However, a marginal chauvinistic newspaper called Présent, published an article suggesting that Carrère d’Encausse’s place was actually on the extreme right of the political scene rather than in the Gaullist party. The article stated that her father was a collaborator during the Second World War and fell victim to purges performed by radical supporters of the French resistance movement after the war. Ludwika Włodek, The Woman who Foresaw the Collapse of the Soviet Union People, Ideas, Inspiration 143

Carrère d’Encausse never made any public comments about the article published by Présent, although she gave up her engagement in politics and after completing her term as a member of the European Parliament she didn’t run for re-election. Years later, in 2007, her son, the French writer, Emmanuel Carrère, wrote an autobiography called Un roman russe (A Russian Novel). He wanted his book to help the Carrère family get out of the past trauma for which none of the living family members were actually responsible. “Nobody reads Présent, and nothing happened afterwards, but I saw my mother cry like a little girl when she read the article,” he wrote. “We are trying, in vain, to explain to her that even if her father had been the most disgraced collaborator, she had nothing to do with it: but she still believes that the past, which does not belong to her, can destroy her.” The publication of the book caused some years of tension between Carrère d’Encausse and her son.

Noble ancestors

Hélène Carrère d’Encausse was born in Paris in 1929, although she claims that for the first four years of her life she was convinced that she was living in Russia. “The immigrant community that she grew up in only spoke Russian. Thus, Meudon was Miedonsk while Clamart Kliemar” Emmanuel wrote. Hélène’s father, Georges Zurabishvili, came from a family of Georgian intelligentsia. When it turned out that Georgia was no longer able to keep its independence from Bolshevik Russia, they left the country. Zurabishvili set out to study philosophy in Berlin and it was not until 1925 when he joined his parents in Paris. Hélène’s mother, Nathalie von Pelken, was born in Italy. Her father, Hélène’s grandfather, was a German aristocrat. Her mother, Hélène’s grandmother, came from the noble Komarovski family. Also Hélène Carrère d’Encausse included among her ancestors were some of the most prominent representatives of Russian was born in Paris in 1929, aristocracy and civil servants. but spoke Russian for the first “My relatives took part in a coup against Paul I, Catherine the Great’s son. One of my ances- four years of her life. tors took part in the signing of the law abolishing serfdom in Russia. Another one is buried right across from Nikolai Gogol, at the Novodevichy cemetery, he was a poet and a friend of Alexander Pushkin himself,” Carrère d’Encausse proudly told me. “My mother’s family was very cosmopolitan too. At the house in Tuscany, where she was raised, the languages spoken were German, Russian, French, English and Italian. At that time the cost of domestic aids was very low. Hence, my mother had a few private teachers, each one of a different nationality.” 144 People, Ideas, Inspiration Ludwika Włodek, The Woman who Foresaw the Collapse of the Soviet Union

However, when Nathalie arrived in Paris in 1925 she was just as poor as her future husband Georges. Her parents’ marriage had fallen apart after Nathalie’s brother was born, as it turned out that he was not, in fact, the son of Baron von Pelken, but of the family’s gardener. At first, Hélène’s mother lived off her family’s fortune in Russia, but lost this source of income after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. “My grandmother first let the domestic aids Carrère d’Encausse is most go, then she sold the house and later poorly invested the money. In a few years she became famous for her prediction completely impoverished,” Emmanuel Carrère of the collapse of writes in A Russian Novel. Hélène describes Paris: “In Paris, my mother the Soviet Union in 1978. moved into the same hotel where my father’s family was living. My Georgian grandmother, despite being poor, did not give up her old habits. She turned her tiny hotel room into a place of social gatherings. Every week she would invite guests for dinner even though at times all she could offer them was a glass of water. Once she met a charming young girl in the hallway and decided to invite her in for one of those social get-togethers. That’s how my parents met”.

Lost for words

In 1990 as an accomplished academic, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse was elected to become a member of Académie Française, and in 1999 she was nominated to become its permanent secretary. And even though she was the first woman in history to take on this role, she decided not to use the feminine form of her title. It is hard to imagine that the woman in charge of the works of a respected institution which was set up in the 18th century in order to “protect the French language” and whose members include the most prominent creators of French culture, didn’t speak a word of French until the age of four. “My parents, although they both spoke perfect French, decided that it was natural to address me exclusively in Russian,” she explains. “When they didn’t want me to understand what they were talking about, they would switch into German. Every Sunday we would go to Meudon where an Eastern Orthodox priest ran an orphanage for Russian children. My mother would attend a service and drop me off there. She wanted me to be among Russian kids, and it wasn’t only because of the language. She also wanted me to catch all the infectious diseases in order to become immune against them.” “It was not until I was four that my parents found me a French nanny. It was one of their friends who I had never seen before, but she was a great lady, a member of the French bourgeois. They put me on the train with her and told me that this was Ludwika Włodek, The Woman who Foresaw the Collapse of the Soviet Union People, Ideas, Inspiration 145 a very nice lady and I was a very well-mannered girl, and that I should listen to her and not cry. Off we went to her house in Brittany. There, I spent three months playing with other French children. When I returned to Paris I spoke fluent French and could recite the fables of La Fontaine.” Today, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse speaks better French than Russian, although her Russian is, indeed, impressive. “When I speak Russian I am sometimes lost for words, but I think and dream in both languages,” she admits. Hélène Carrère d’Encausse is most famous for her prediction of the collapse of the Soviet Union. She was encouraged to study the history of tsarist and Soviet Russia due to her complicated family history, which – as she says – was not much talked about at home. In 1978, when the Soviet Union seemed to be at the zenith of its power, she published a book with the prophetic title, L’Empire éclaté (The Broken Empire). “Apparently the title was coined by the publisher, Flammarion, to increase sales?” I ask her, repeating gossip I heard from one Russian historian. “Complete nonsense.” She responded, “I came up with the title and the publisher thought it was idiotic. I was told that it was generally too strong and unclear. But I was stubborn.”

A closer look at the demographics

Carrère d’Encausse started her research a decade before the book was published. She was interested in Muslim minorities in Russia and the Soviet Union, an issue which not many people were interested in during the 1960s. Western Soviet specialists naively accepted Moscow’s rhetoric that the whole country was undergoing a process of merging the different nations together. The outcome of this merging was meant to be the “Soviet man”. This new being – as it was then believed – would look at the world in a progressive, Soviet way, and treat all nationalist sentiments as history. Carrère d’Encausse knew the Soviet world far too well to believe that. Future problems of the Soviet empire were to be seen not only in an absurd economic system or an ideology which was completely unadjusted with reality, but also in the demographics. Year after year, since the middle of the 20th century, the population of ethnic Russians and other Slavs had been decreasing, while the population of Southern nations, mostly Muslims, had been increasing. And as Carrère d’Encausse noticed, these nations accepted the Soviet culture very superficially. “My first visit to the Soviet Union was very funny,” she told me. “The French ministry of foreign affairs helped me with the travel. An international congress on the diseases of cows was taking place in Almaty, which back then was the capital city 146 People, Ideas, Inspiration Ludwika Włodek, The Woman who Foresaw the Collapse of the Soviet Union

of the Kazakhstan Soviet Republic. The French ministry suggested that I should go there as an interpreter for two French specialists. “This was extremely risky because, obviously, I had no clue about the topic of the congress. The Russians knew that too. Once they asked me to interpret something, and if it wasn’t for the help of a very friendly Russian interpreter who understood my situation and agreed to give me some hints, I would have been called a spy. Yet, I managed to use this trip to my advantage. As the topic of the congress was domestic animals, the guests were shown some villages in Central Asia. The French experts were most interested in the health of the sheep, goats, and cows, and I talked to the villagers. I asked them about their traditions and customs. How they got married, who did what at home, and how many children they had.”

“Like a man”

Carrère d’Encausse visited the Soviet Union on many subsequent occasions. In France she became more and more recognised as a Soviet specialist, and in 1969 opened a centre of Soviet studies at the prestigious Sciences Po. One of her students was Jerzy Mink. For the French, “Hélène was like a man,” recalled Mink, today a well-known French sociologist. “Back then there was no other way to make an academic career. Back then academia was very sexist. She had to be the best, she had to know much more and much better than her male colleagues. Indeed she was very bright. She was a great speaker and could explain everything in a very logical way. And she was a beautiful woman, all of us students, were somewhat in love with her,” smiled Mink who, with time, not only became Carrère d’Encausse’s student, but also a personal friend. Although nobody has ever questioned Hélène Carrère d’Encausse’s profession- alism, her Soviet studies programme made many feel quite uncomfortable. Part of the leftish intellectual elite was not happy with her negative assessment of the Soviet regime which, they hoped, would one day evolve towards a liberal social- democracy. On the other hand, the hardcore right-wing believed that the researcher, who showed the Soviet Union as a country torn by internal problems, was acting in the interest of the communist government and weakening the West’s alertness in its rivalry with Moscow. “I was never fascinated by Marxism,” she told me. This is probably a diplomatic understatement. She hated the Bolsheviks. However, despite her work on dispos- ing all absurdities of the Soviet Union, she was never close to any Soviet dissidents. Even today her commentaries about Russia reveal a slight tone of a Great Russian patriot. But she never goes too far. Ludwika Włodek, The Woman who Foresaw the Collapse of the Soviet Union People, Ideas, Inspiration 147

Diligent and elegant

Carrère d’Encausse does not like open confrontations. She prefers to live life in agreement with everybody. Not because of any opportunistic tendencies, but because she likes people. “In her youth Hélène was a supporter of Pierre Mendès France, the charismatic socialist prime minister of France. Later, probably under the influence of her husband, Louis Carrère d’Encausse, a conservative lawyer, she moved towards the right,” Mink told me. “In the autumn of 1968, a group of intellectuals set up an experimental university in Vincennes. Among them were such icons of the French left as Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. Hélène obviously knew them all from her socialist youth. She was even friends with a few of them. Hence, she promised them that In 1999 Carrère d’Encausse she would lecture there. But quite soon she realised that the whole project was too leftish became the first female as far as she was concerned. But she did not permanent secretary of the want to say ‘no’ directly.” “She wrote them a letter stating that she would Académie Française be very busy during the next academic year and mentioned that she had an extremely talented assistant who, with great pleasure, would run the course in her place. That person was me. At that time I was not her assistant. I was a student but I could not say no to her. The course was to be about the history of Russia’s nations. I had no knowledge on this topic and I had to read a lot to prepare for this course, but I decided to take the challenge,” Mink continued. Carrère d’Encausse is diligent and hard-working, but also very elegant and concerned with her image. Mink remembers a meeting at his house on the Pelopon- nese peninsula in Greece. Carrère d’Encausse arrived on a boat with a group of Frenchmen to whom she was supposed to be giving a history lecture during the cruise. Some mutual friends convinced her to stay for a meal. “As always she was wearing her suit and high heels. It was 30 degrees Celsius around midday and she decided to go on a tour of the ancient ruins. When she returned after a few hours, there was not one mark on her flawless image. Not one dishevelled piece of hair, not one hole in her stockings, nothing.”

What do you think about?

While talking to me about her parents she stopped at the period of her childhood. “My parents were quite poor. When I mention this to my children, they laugh at me, saying that I feed them with populist fables. They cannot begin to imagine 148 People, Ideas, Inspiration Ludwika Włodek, The Woman who Foresaw the Collapse of the Soviet Union

the harsh conditions my family lived through.” This is how she ended the personal part of the interview. I did not ask any more questions, as she clearly preferred to talk about her academic career, the problematic Soviet demography and the power of nationalism in Russia today. I read more about Georges Zurabishvili in her son’s novel. If I am to believe Emmanuel Carrère, his grandfather (Hélène’s father) was a failure and eccentric, but not a scoundrel. After arriving in France, he took on jobs that were below his qualifications and ambitions. He became a taxi driver and later a travelling sales- man. During the Second World War he moved to Bordeaux with his family. He got a job as an interpreter, first with a car workshop which was collaborating with the Germans, and later with the Germans themselves, in the Nazi commercial services. After liberation in autumn 1944, Georges was kidnapped by some unknown men, leaving no trace behind him. Most likely he was executed. One of the neighbours must have identified him as a collaborator. Emanuel learnt his grandfather’s story not from his mother, but from his uncle Nicolas who is seven years younger than his mother. Hélène never told him about this. It is not a story that would match a perfectly dressed and styled, witty but distanced Madame Secretary. At the end of the Emmanuel’s book, he addresses his mother directly: “Your days are filled from seven in the morning until midnight: meetings, lectures, travels, books to write, grandchildren, whom – I don’t know how you find time for that – you take care of with so much love, the Academy, parties, important dinners, and with not one moment for solitude and peace in your fully packed calendar. Your mind is constantly busy and I think that if I was doing even a quarter of what you are doing, I would collapse with exhaustion after one week. I always wonder: after you come home and go to bed, what do you think about before you switch your light off and fall asleep?” Translated by Iwona Reichardt

Ludwika Włodek is a Polish journalist with Gazeta Wyborcza. From A to Zadra Sł awomira Walczewska

The Polish feminist magazine Zadra is like no other in the entire post-Soviet Bloc. The magazine allows us to trace Poland’s feminist movement along side the transformations and contemporary history of Poland.

When Poland joined the European Union in 2004 it took on the responsibility of implementing one of its major policies: the equal status between men and women. However, it is hard to find a single Polish feminist organisation which can confirm that any subsequent Polish government has fulfilled this obligation adequately. For almost 20 years since 1993, Poland has had an extremely restrictive anti-abortion law, which is in stark contrast to other European nations and clearly retains the unequal status between men and women. According to current law and medical practice, a legal abortion is virtually impossible in Poland. The law does not consider the social aspects of unwanted pregnancies, while doctors tend to interpret health issues to the disadvantage of a woman. Such was the case of Alicja Tysiąc who wanted to abort her pregnancy legally due to the fact that giving birth to another child would cause her to go blind. However, medical malpractice and the postponement of the decision to terminate the pregnancy resulted in her giving birth to the child, even though it was clear that her sight will deteriorate. Tysiąc appealed against the decision of the Polish courts and finally she won the case against Poland in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Despite the reality exemplified by Tysiąc’s case, as well as a widely available underground abortion market and the fact that it remains no secret that many Polish women undergo abortions abroad, the legal situation remains the same.

Negligence and procrastination

Statistical data indicates a 20 per cent difference in the earnings between men and women and a disproportional representation of women in economic and political decision-making. All this proves that subsequent governments have done 150 People, Ideas, Inspiration Sławomira Walczewska, From A to Zadra

little to improve the situation of Polish women and fulfil the obligation of ensuring the equal status of men and women. Serious negligence and procrastination seem to better describe the current state of affairs in Poland, which didn’t even have a legislative act guaranteeing the equal status of men and women for a long time. Nor did Poland have the structures in pub- Subsequent Polish lic administration to implement the provision governments have done of such a law. After over a decade of continuous delays in new little to improve the legislation counteracting discrimination and pro- situation of women. viding equal opportunities in Poland, a law was finally introduced in January 2011. The law was nonetheless quite abridged and varied from initial proposals. The implementation of the policy of providing equal opportunities to both men and women now lies, according to the new law, in one office which operates at the central government level, equipped with the resources which are disproportional to the needs, and which is responsible not only for gender-based discrimination but also other forms of discrimination. This office has no branches or counterparts at a regional level, despite calls by feminist organisations demanding regional offices. There are very few signals from the government that it is interested in engaging wider social consultations in the issue of policy of equal opportunities of women and men. In the last 20 years, feminism in Poland has developed through different forms of activities evolving into a significant intellectual and social movement. Today’s Polish feminist discourse is based on non-governmental organisations, gender specialisations and post-diploma studies at liberal arts university departments. It has its own experts and theorists and holds a position, albeit narrow, in the mass media, as well as being present on the internet. Public opinion polls also reveal that the role played by feminist newspapers in Poland is significant. The oldest and most established among them, Zadra, is celebrating its 13th birthday this year and the summer of 2012 will see the 50th issue of the magazine. The first feminist papers in Poland were published as fanzines in the late 1980s. They were usually xerox copies made up of only a few pages and distributed among friends. In 1993 the first issue of the periodical, Pełnym Głosem (roughly translated as “In a Full Voice”– editor’s note), was published. It included texts written by authors from Poland’s major universities and became a live forum of dialogue between Polish feminists. Both the authors and the topics covered focused on the situation in Poland and the paper rarely included any articles translated from other languages. One of the few, but very important, exceptions, was the translation of Shana Penn’s article about the forgotten activists of the underground Solidarity movement, which initiated a wide discussion within feminist circles and universities. Sławomira Walczewska, From A to Zadra People, Ideas, Inspiration 151

Pełnym Głosem was published by the Feminist Foundation eFKa, and the editor was the author of this article. Only five issues of the magazine were published and a certain vacuum was created when the paper ceased to exist in 1997. Its absence was mostly felt by the activists themselves, as well as the growing number of feminist organisations, students and instructors of gender studies operating at that time.

Feminist perspective next to an anorexic model

The vacuum was first filled by Biuletyn OŚKi – a newsletter published by the Warsaw-based feminist organisation, Ośrodek Informacji Środowisk Kobiecych (Information Centre of Women’s Organisations) until late-1997. During the five years of its existence, the magazine published mostly texts written by authors who were related to the organisation in some way. Originally made up of around 12 pages, it had grown to 72 pages by the time it finally stopped being published. And despite the reach of the bulletin being quite limited, it generated great interest among feminist circles in Poland. It was distributed for free and wasn’t available to buy on the market. Two years later there was another breakthrough bringing feminist literature to a wider Polish audience. Starting in April 1999, Gazeta Wyborcza, the most popular liberal Polish daily newspaper at the time, began publishing a supplement to its weekend edition devoted to women’s issues. Wysokie Obcasy, was a noteworthy achievement in many feminist circles, and texts by feminist authors started to be published on a mass scale for the first time. However,Wysokie Obcasy also irritated some people due to its unclear profile. Some examples: an article unmasking the terror of beauty was published right next to advertisements for cosmetics, plastic surgery and fashionable clothes; an analysis of the causes of anorexia among women written from a feminist perspective was published right next to a picture of an anorexic model advertising the latest fashions; and a feminist critique of burdening women with housework was followed by a recipe section (showing complete thoughtlessness) managed, of course, by a woman. The title of the magazine Wysokie Obcasy, which means “high heels” in Polish, was both provocative and pretentious. For those dedicated feminists looking for a real feminist paper, the title was quite repulsive. In fact, even today, texts written by feminist authors make up the minority of the magazine’s published articles. Nevertheless, in 1999 the fact that Wysokie Obcasy existed was enough of a reason to be happy. We all knew that the texts were being published among adverts that were characterised by disrespect towards women, but they were in mass circulation and widely available to readers once a week. The problem was that Wysokie Obcasy wanted to yoke everything: a magazine for elegant, cultured women, an 152 People, Ideas, Inspiration Sławomira Walczewska, From A to Zadra

attractive advertising place for the cosmetic and textile industry and a feminist weekly. As a result, Wysokie Obcasy was never to become satisfactory reading, especially amongst feminists.

No adverts, no models, no recipes

Soon after Wysokie Obcasy entered the press market an alternative appeared, and although it wasn’t in mass circulation, it did contain a uniform, feminist profile. The first issue of the Polish feminist magazine,Zadra , was published in Octo- ber 1999. The magazine was initially published as a quarterly, however, it has been published bi-annually over the last few years. Zadra is published by the Women’s Foundation eFKa, which is one of first femi- Zadra plays an important nist organisations created in Poland after 1989. role in shaping the feminist Beata Kozak is the current editor-in-chief of Zadra and eFKa board member. The magazine discourse in Poland. has around 120 pages with a colour front page and a black and white inside. It is available for sale in most Polish cities but can also be bought by mail and through subscription. Although the formula of the magazine is quite open, there is a stable group of contributors, among which are both well-known and up-and-coming authors (almost 30 per cent of the authors in each issue are new names). With a circulation of 1500, the magazine does not reprint articles and only publishes original texts. The magazine is non-profit and is published mainly through contributions, initially from Germany Foundations such as Frauen Anstiftung and Heinrich-Boell-Stif- tung, and now from the programme of the Network of East-West Women “Book & Journal”, as well as contributions from private individuals. Despite its small circulation, Zadra plays an important role in shaping the feminist discourse in Poland, and provides an opportunity for a bottom-up articulation of opinions and views. The initial reaction by the Polish mass media to the emergence of a feminist magazine was that of great interest. Zadra contained no adverts, no models, and no culinary recipes; and this kind of magazine had not seen the light in Poland before. The Polish weekly,Polityka , nominated Beata Kozak for its annual Paszport Polityki (Polityka’s Passport) award, given to those creating the most interesting initiatives in culture. Other papers, such as Życie Warszawy and the magazine, Przekrój, published long interviews with her, while Gazeta Wyborcza published a short, yet very enthusiastic, note about the publication of Zadra. A few months later, Gazeta Wyborcza also reprinted excerpts of an article from Zadra containing a critique of the Polish political parties, as well as a polemic between two leading left-wing female politicians and the author of the article. Sławomira Walczewska, From A to Zadra People, Ideas, Inspiration 153

In 2000, Poland held a presidential election, followed by parliamentary elections in 2001. The feminist voice, which expressed political support, created a great deal of emotions. Among the many authors was Wanda Nowicka, an activist fighting for a more liberal abortion law. In October 2011, Nowicka won, for the first time (after earlier attempts) an election giving her a seat in the Sejm (the Polish parliament – editor’s note) and was later chosen to be vice-speaker of the parliament. The first years of the publication of Zadra overlapped with the emergence of gender studies in Poland. The first gender studies were initiated in 1996 at War- saw University by Bożena Chołuj and Małgorzata Fuszara. At the same time the need for a feminist “revindication” of studies programmes was more and more visible. Avoiding or belittling women’s contributions to science, literature and art was being more and more discussed and amended. Zadra took an active role in this process by publishing texts on the form and structure of these studies in other countries, as well as discussions between students and academics on how they imagined these kinds of studies at their own universities.

“Menstrual literature”

The late 1990s also saw a new wave of women’s literature with new types of heroines, free and independent, emerging in Poland. Misogynistic critics coined the term “menstrual literature” to describe this new genre. Feminist critics responded by using the equally non-sense term “nocturnal emission literature”. Za- dra emerged at a time when the wave of prominent literature created by women was growing and had a significant contribution in creating space for women to freely express their views. Each issue of Zadra contains reviews of the latest books written mainly by women, although books written by men are also published if relevant to the feminist discourse. Soon after the first publication of Zadra, another feminist paper appeared in Poland, published by the University of Warsaw gender studies programme. It was called Katedra and was edited by Bożena Chołuj. Between 2001 to 2004, five issues of this interesting and much-needed journal were published, and attempts are being made to reactivate this paper for the sake of gender studies in Poland. The landscape of feminist and gender magazines published in Poland is completed by the feminist-lesbian paper, Furia, which was published as a zine between 1997 to 2001 and renewed in 2010, although not on a regular basis. Four issues of this paper have been published. Another online paper, a feminist-matriarchal one, called Trzy Kolory (Three Colours) has been published on a quarterly basis since 2010, with plans to expand to a printed version in the near future. 154 People, Ideas, Inspiration Sławomira Walczewska, From A to Zadra

Point of reference

Zadra has, without a doubt, created a stable position for itself in the Polish feminist discourse and has become one of its strongest pillars. The magazine’s first issue was published 22 years after the publication of the first issue of the German feminist magazine, Emma. It was also published six years after the British feminist magazine, Spare Rib, stopped being printed after 20 years on the market. Despite a much smaller circulation, Zadra can be compared to these magazines because, like Emma and Spare Rib in Germany and the The late 1990s saw United Kingdom, it is an important and unique point of reference for the feminist discourse a new wave of women’s currently available in the Polish language. literature with new heroines, Surprisingly, compared to other post-socialist countries, Zadra has no equivalent. Even today free and independent. there is no other such feminist paper which has been created on a grassroots level, published continuously and regularly for 12 years, and which is present on the wider press market. The only closest comparison that could be made is the Slovak feminist journal, Aspekt, published by Jana Cvikova and Jana Juranova, between 1993 and 2004. The paper primarily focused on publishing translations of articles by prominent western feminist authors, and by doing so played a very important role in popularising feminist language and western feminist thought among women in Slovakia. Currently, a fanzine called Aspektin is being published online, which although it refers to the previous magazine, is of a completely different nature. Pub- lishing short articles rather than longer analyses, Aspektin focuses on the current situation in Slovakia, the world, and the feminist movement. There was no feminist magazine in Ukraine during the 1990s. However, in 2000 the independent cultural journal “Ї”, published in Lviv and edited by Taras Woz- niak, published a feminist issue called Gender Studies, edited by Oksana Kis, which also had a German language version. Subsequent gender-focused issues of “Ї” were published in 2003 and 2004, and included articles written by Ukrainian authors and Ukrainian translations of feminist texts. Since 2002, a Kharkiv-based organisation called Krona has published the only feminist journal in Ukraine today. The editor of the journal is the director of Krona, Lyudmyla Guslyakova. The subtitle of the magazine does not say “feminism” but “gender” which seems to have become quite a popular tendency on the eastern side of the EU border. Croatia is another example of a country which has “gained” a feminist paper, with two journals being published at more or less the same time in Zagreb. Tre‘ca was published between 1998 to 2010 by Centar za Żenske Studiuje once or twice Sławomira Walczewska, From A to Zadra People, Ideas, Inspiration 155 a year and each issue was made up of around 160 pages of an academic nature. The second magazine, Kruh i Ruze, published texts different in nature and size. Pub- lished between 1994 and 2005 by Zenska Infoteka, the magazine initially appeared on a regular basis with two to three issues per year, although it was later reduced to one to two issues per year. In 2009 the last issue of the paper was published. Clearly, there is no feminist magazine in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc that is comparable to Zadra. Reading its current and previous issues indeed is a deep source of knowledge not only on the contemporary Polish women’s movement but also on the system transformation that has taken place in our country over the last twenty years. Translated by Iwona Reichardt

Sławomira Walczewska is a Polish feminist, activist and philosopher. She is the co-founder of the Women’s Foundation eFKa, a member of the editorial board of Zadra and author of numerous publications on women’s emancipation in Poland. Books and Reviews

Who Can Fathom Such a Crime? years and can definitely be called a masterpiece. What makes the film so interesting are both the Elena. A film directed by expert casting (especially the two young actors, Andrey Zvyagintsev. Russia, Ivan Dobronravov and Vladimir Garin, chosen 2011. from a group of 600 unprofessional actors), and the plot which has all the hallmarks of an almost In 2003 Andrey Zvyagintsev, biblical parable, unfolding in such an original a little known graduate of way. The Return has all the typical features of the drama school in Novosi- the Zvyagintsev’s other films: acting which is birsk, was acclaimed with the understated but not without emotion, a slow- Golden Lion for Best Film and the Best First Film paced plot, purposefully slowed down with at the 60th Venice Film Festival, thus becoming painterly images of landscapes and interiors, recognized as one of the most promising directors a focus on the everyday and the ostensibly of the younger generation. The Return won him mundane activities of the main characters. numerous prestigious awards in 2003, includ- Using universal symbols, biblical references ing a Golden Lion in Venice and the European as well as emphasising the psychological as- Discovery of the Year award in at the European pect in the storyline, focusing on interactions Film Awards. We should also remember that between people and, in particular, on family Russian critics hailed the film when it was re- relationships, are all an inherent part of the leased, and 2003 became a triumphant year for poetics of his films. Russian national cinematography, with the film The Banishment (2007) was received less by Zvyagintsev, only 39 years old at that time, enthusiastically. Russian critics gave it a cold being its culmination. reception calling him a “one-hit wonder”, even The Return premiered nine years ago and though this kind of attitude seems a little bit since then, the director has made two other full- unfair. Still, this Bergman-esque story about length films:The Banishment and Elena, as well a husband and wife relationship earned him as two short films, includingApocrypha , one of further recognition at international film festivals. the 13 segments of New York, I Love You. His The film was nominated for the European Film segment, however, along with the one directed Awards and it also received two Palmes d’Or by Scarlett Johansson, was eventually cut from nominations in Cannes. One of the nominations the final version of the film. Zvyagintsev made was secured by the lead, Konstantin Lavronenko, his directorial debut rather late and takes his who is also known from The Return. time to make a film: it took him two years to Zvyagintsev’s latest film, Elena, won inter- make The Return, with The Banishment and national acclaim even before it was screened Elena taking just as long. in cinemas. The script of the film received the The Return is a story about a “prodigal father” Sundance Institute Award as one of the best who returns home after being absent for several promising film projects.Elena is a continuation Elena, A film directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev Books and Reviews 157 of the female theme started in The Banishment, in two separate worlds. Every month she visits and critics have called it Zvyagintsev’s “most her family in the suburbs of Moscow to give Russian” film. them her nurse’s pension. He goes swimming, It is not only the formal assumptions that are supports his adult daughter and wants nothing the common features of Zvyagintsev’s films,Elena to do with his wife’s relatives. has another recurring element which dominates This is the first time that the director has set all of his films – family drama. Zvyagintsev was one of his films in a specific time and place: brought up in a single-parent family and did everything happens in contemporary Moscow. not really know his father, something which Elena and her husband live in a luxurious has undoubtedly left a mark on his work. As apartment in the centre of Moscow while her viewers we see this drama unfold on the screen son and his family live in a bedroom suburb, between a father and his children (The Return) with its characteristic housing estates and or a husband and wife (The Banishment and factory smokestacks, where drinking beer Elena). Zvyagintsev sets human drama against on the balcony and playing violent computer the background of a primeval, frightening and games are the only entertainment. Zvyagintsev powerful nature which becomes the silent wit- draws a clear line between these two worlds, ness of people’s struggle. the two milieus. Thus his film becomes an Another clearly noticeable element charac- inherent part of the discussion about social teristic to Zvyagintsev is contrasts, such as stratification in Russia, the eternal differences nature-culture or city-countryside. The city is between rich and poor. At the same time the a place where appearances have to be kept, director stresses the fact that such divisions and where tragedy strikes when the heroes exist in every European country and the fact leave town. The director always emphasises that the story portrayed in Elena could have the duration of a journey. We have a transitional taken place anywhere in the world. experience when we leave one sphere and enter The title character becomes a link between another, both literally and symbolically. these two worlds, even though in reality she The contrasts in Elena seem to be of a different does not belong to either of them. Her ungainly kind. It is not primeval nature but the incredible silhouette, modest attire and unsophisticated emptiness of a luxurious apartment contrasted hairstyle do not fit the luxurious apartment. with the cluttered and squalid rooms of a typical On the other hand, she could also be seen as Soviet block of flats which becomes the back- alien due to her social status (she is educated drop for family drama. The title character of the and only advanced socially by marrying a rich film, Elena, a retired nurse (Nadezhda Markina), man). However, when confronted with a choice lives in a Moscow flat with a much older and she opts for the world she comes from: Elena wealthier husband, Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov). decides to kill her rich husband so that her son The cold decor of the flat perfectly reflects the can keep drinking beer on the balcony and father relationship between them: equally cold, official, more parasites for the chain of procreation to and devoid of feelings. Elena carries out her remain unbroken. nursemaid/wife duties submissively, wakes her Focusing on the social roles that Elena fulfils husband up every day, prepares porridge for (she is at the same time a wife, a mother, a step- him, makes his bed and cleans the flat. In fact mother and a grandmother) makes us look at they don’t live together, but next to each other, Russian culture from the angle of its matriarchy 158 Books and Reviews Elena, A film directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev

which, according to critics, becomes a kind of Zvyagintsev depicts the moment of transforma- parody of western European feminism. Elena tion perfectly by resorting to the popular device of has been hailed as Zvyagintsev’s most Rus- a mirror (also used by Dostoyevsky). In the key sian picture, and quite justifiably so, not only scene of the film, when Elena decides to kill her due to themes such as social stratification in husband in order to receive the lion’s share of the Russia and women’s role in society. The film fortune and make it possible for her grandson to triggers an avalanche of symbols and references go to university, she is sitting at a dressing table. which make us interpret the story as a kind of The camera shows her blurred face, multiplied universal parable set in a Russian context, just by its reflection in the mirror which symbolises like Zvyagintsev’s other films. the complexity of her nature and dilemma. After Elena becomes the symbol of “Mother Rus- a moment, her face comes back into focus and sia”, a stereotype of a Russian woman who is she looks at her own reflection with determina- both docile and strong – one who can assume tion. A single moment is enough to make the the role of a submissive wife obeying her hus- integration of these two spheres possible, for band, but who changes into a Raskolnikov (the the docile to turn into a Raskolnikov. Elena does fictional protagonist of Dostoyevsky’sCrime and not kill for the sake of any lofty idea, but does Punishment – editor’s note) administering justice so for her family to be able to live, or rather lead when her children are in danger. However, it is a life full of apathy. In fact, the hero is very unlike difficult to say who is the chosen nation and who Raskolnikov and resembles a lioness defending the unnecessary louse, as it is both the cynical her cubs much more. and rich as well as the inhabitants of Moscow’s The name of the main hero, Elena, also points suburbs who deserve punishment. to Helen and suggests a connection with Helen of Photo courtesy of Zeitgeist Films. Kiev 1941: Hitler’s Battle for Supremacy in the East, David Stahel Books and Reviews 159

Troy. It may seem there is no link between these Greatest Triumph or Mistake? characters except for their name, and Elena is far from being the world’s most beautiful woman. Kiev 1941: Hitler’s Battle for However, Zvyagintsev’s hero in a sense becomes Supremacy in the East. the cause of death and destruction, leading one By: David Stahel. Publisher: to think of a Trojan horse, a treacherous trap. Cambridge University After all, this seemingly docile nurse who is Press, 2012. trained to help and comfort, turns into a ruthless � murderer, she deals the enemy a blow at the “The greatest battle in world least expected moment. The image of a dead history.” This is how Adolf horse that we see as Elena travels on a tram Hitler called the battle for Kyiv, which lasted from is not without meaning. The animal becomes July until September 1941. Today, the inhabitants a symbol of the Trojan horse. of the Ukrainian capital hardly think much about At the same time, it also brings to mind a scene the scale of the battle and it is hard, therefore, to from Crime and Punishment. In Dostoyevsky’s expect the same from western historians. And novel the image of a beaten horse haunts Raskol- suddenly, a book published in Cambridge has nikov in the dream preceding the murder of the become the most comprehensive study of this old pawnbroker, while in Zvyagintsev’s film this battle for Kyiv: “Hitler’s biggest triumph in the happens only after the husband’s funeral. The Second World War.” director does not focus on this scene, which The ruins of Kyiv’s fortified area and stories only lasts for a brief moment, like the shadow written by witnesses have recorded the facts but of a prick of conscience that disappears as fast do not tell us much about the scale of events. as it appears. Going down into the darkness of an abandoned Critics have described Zvyagintsev’s latest concrete fortification or listening to the words of film as being a harrowing story about the prob- those who survived the Second World War in lems of contemporary Russia, its class divides, Kyiv, the contemporary man can only see a frag- injustice and the erosion of values, including ment, a small piece of that reality. The witness’s family values. It is also one of the director’s perspective is the immediate “here and now”, most gloomy and bitter films. Two worlds are a street of the city and its neighbouring districts, contrasted in Elena, although there isn’t much of which cannot look beyond the horizon. The a difference between them. The concentration of inhabitants of Kyiv were able to see the battle references and understated acting make Elena as it approached their homes, although these a universal, ambiguous film which touches on were nothing but fragments of the complete Russia’s many problems. The act of killing and picture. Collecting evidence of these events social stratification are just some of the themes several years ago, I also looked at them without in this multidimensional story. realizing the scale of the operation. Ewa Maria Kaźmierczak Here is one of the pieces of the puzzle. There Translated by Bogdan Potok was an air battle over Kyiv in July 1941. A Ger- man soldier shot down a Soviet aircraft, but the pilot managed to eject just in time and landed somewhere in the vicinity of Lviv square, where a marketplace stood at the time. People gathered 160 Books and Reviews Kiev 1941: Hitler’s Battle for Supremacy in the East, David Stahel

to provide help, or at least ask whether the pilot have become a reality. Instead, Hitler directed was injured. A member of the militia happened the most substantial part of it forces to the South. to be one of the first to arrive, however, and as Hitler won a great battle, but lost the war. This the pilot touched down, the militiaman shot him. was primarily because the German command Of course, everyone who saw the event was did not manage to calculate the resistance of shocked. “What was the reason?” they asked. the Red Army. According to David Stahel, the “He was a spy,” the militiaman said. “Our pilots Wehrmacht’s losses of military equipment dur- cannot be shot down!” ing the battle for Kyiv were so significant that This story seems to be a symbol of that time, the German military industry had never been and since hearing it, I have been searching for able to recover. It is difficult to say whether a book which describes the events that happened the German command was aware of the fatal in Kyiv during the summer and early autumn of consequences of this victory in September 1941 from four different points of view: a Soviet 1941. However, such thoughts could already be soldier, a member of the militia (or a party leader heard among German soldiers during the first or any other representative of authority), a normal days of their occupation of Kyiv. Stahel quotes citizen of Kyiv who witnessed the events, and a letter written by a soldier on September 22nd a German pilot. It would be really interesting to 1941, two days after German troops entered the learn about the same events from these four capital of Ukraine and exactly three months after different perspectives. the beginning of the German-Soviet war: “This Stahel’s Kiev 1941 provides a look at these campaign against Russia started exactly three events through “German eyes”, despite the months ago. Everybody was convinced that fact that the title of the book promotes the idea the Bolsheviks would give up in about eight to that it is about everything that happened in the ten weeks. However, this assumption ignored city in 1941. Instead, the book’s subtitle (The the Russians’ military capacity. For example, battle for supremacy in the East) says more we have learned this morning, that 600 units about its content. The book allows the reader of heavy armament and 150,000 people have to look at the battle from the remotest perspec- been seized near Kyiv. These are incredible tive and to capture all the events over a huge numbers! Russia seems to be inexhaustible!” area stretching from Smolensk in the north to The problems with logistics were yet another Dnepropetrovsk in the south. Stahel provides factor that resulted in further losses and, ultimately, the whole story, from the beginning of the battle in the Wehrmacht’s final defeat. “The God of until the end of war, when the consequences weather is not on our side,” Goebbels wrote of the 1941 battle for Kyiv became clear. In in his diary on September 13th 1941. Roads this context, Stahel comes to a paradoxical turned into canals full of mud after heavy rains. conclusion: Hitler’s greatest triumph became But road conditions, which had been a serious his biggest strategic mistake. The Third Reich obstacle for the army since September 1941, were did not lose the Second World War in Moscow not the biggest problem for the Wehrmacht. It in 1942, nor in Stalingrad in 1943, but in Kyiv had already become clear during the planning in the summer of 1941. If the Wehrmacht had of operation Barbarossa, that the logistics of concentrated its forces in Moscow, then plans tank warfare could only be effective within to seize the capital of the Soviet Union three or a 500 kilometre strip, running south to north, four months after the beginning of the war could inside the Soviet Union. Within this area, the Kiev 1941: Hitler’s Battle for Supremacy in the East, David Stahel Books and Reviews 161

limited capacity of reinforcements, equipment, be effective. For example, he cites a letter from ammunition and fuel transportation became a German officer: necessary. However, this failure of planning was “Official propaganda and its’ stories about also ignored, and thus, planning mistakes, the a quick end to the war had a negative effect. unexpectedly stiff resistance of the enemy and It is not true from the perspective of soldiers’ weather conditions led to the triumph, which personal experience.” then ultimately became a failure. Some felt compassion and horror looking David Stahel wrote his book having two at the chaos of destroyed equipment, dead objectives in mind. Firstly, he wanted to make horses and human bodies. Others were satis- the first major research of the battle for Kyiv in fied. The war as seen through German eyes is 1941, and secondly, he wanted to describe the strikingly different from Soviet and post-Soviet German army’s military experience of the battle. stereotypes: there is no space for a German As mentioned earlier, the book looks exclusively capable of compassion for victims of the victori- at these events from a German perspective, ous army in them. and the research was largely based on German However, it would be wrong not to mention archival documents. However, it does not mean the fact that Kiev 1941 distorts some fragments that Stahel has written a “pro-German” book by of reality. Only three paragraphs mention the any means. His writing is a good example of murders at Babi Yar, where the Nazis killed impartiality. There are no “ours” and “Fritzs” or 33,771 people in the first two days of the oc- “Ivans”, there is no “us” versus “them”. cupation (about 100,000 died at Babi Yar dur- The Germans themselves are very different in ing the whole war). And there is yet one more this book. Some of them were intoxicated with textual clumsiness connected with the Babi Yar Nazi ideology and full of ruthlessness, both to tragedy. It is known that there was a mistake the armed enemy and anybody else on the con- in the German announcement calling Jews to quered land. The pages of the book demonstrate places of gathering. Dokturivska Street was er- a soldier taking away a three-year-old child’s roneously mentioned instead of Dekhtyarivska coat just to protect himself from the September Street, the proper name. Obviously, this mistake evening chill, not even a real frost. But at the has migrated from German archival documents same time you can read about an officer who (and made it into Stahel’s book). considers such acts as dishonourable. Of course, being more than 400 pages long, There were Germans who called their enemy the text should also provoke other criticism. “our Russian brothers” in their notes: “The Rus- However, no reviewer would dare to accuse the sian war is much harder than the French one! author of a lack of diligence and perseverance. Nobody could ever think that our Soviet brothers Major pieces of information are real terra incog- would be able to resist in such a tough way!” nita to Ukrainian or Russian readers, while at the The reader can find some attempts to under- same time, the book brings back the memory stand the sources of hatred and the conqueror’s of yet another “forgotten battle” to English and inhuman attitude to the conquered. Stahel American readers. From the Polish perspective, demonstrates a number of eloquent examples the book may even have some psychotherapeutic of propaganda which explain a great deal, effects. According to research in 2009 by the while at the same time also drawing attention Museum of World War II and Pentor Research to the moments when propaganda ceased to International, the majority of Poles believe that 162 Books and Reviews Myśli o Rosji… i nie tylko, Adam Daniel Rotfeld

it was Polish people who suffered the most dur- is basically the same thing. It was ADR to whom ing the Second World War. The book Kiev 1941: we owe the building – in the Albright report Hitler’s Battle for Supremacy in the East shows which became the basis of NATO’s 2010 Lisbon that, luckily for Polish people, this not quite true. strategic concept – of the balance between the Thus, Hitler called the battle for Kyiv the great- three missions of the NATO Alliance: collective est one in history. David Stahel says that it was defence, crisis management and cooperative his greatest triumph, and in this respect, he is security. This balance reconciled two visions right, and Adolf Hitler is wrong. There were even which seemed irreconcilable: the first, of NATO greater battles after Kyiv, however, these were not as a military bloc focused on the defence of the triumphs for Hitler, but rather for his opponents. territory of member states and their populations, Oleksandr Zinchenko and the second, of NATO as a security organisa- Translated by Igor Lyubashenko tion managing local conflicts in its neighbouring areas (southern ones predominantly). It is also thanks to the ADR method that it was possible to transfer the Polish-Russian conflict over history – especially about the genesis and A Wiseman’s Voice aftermaths of the Second World War – from a never-ending exchange of diplomatic notes Myśli o Rosji… i nie tylko into an international scientific debate. The Polish- (Thoughts about Russia… Russian Group on Difficult Matters which was and not only) by: Adam co-chaired by Rotfeld, has led to the publication, Daniel Rotfeld Publisher: in Poland and Russia, of a large collection of Świat Książki, Warsaw, 2012. articles by Polish and Russian academics on controversial 20th century events. Quite soon the volume will be published in English and considering the international interest in the work of the Group on Difficult Matters, it is sure to find a readership. However, it can only be lamented W cieniu. 12 rozmów that Russia’s public administration and courts z Marcinem Wojciechowskim have not yet – in the painful case of the murder (In the Shadow. of thousands of representatives of the Polish 12 Conversations with Marcin intelligentsia known in the world as the Katyń Wojciechowski). By: Adam massacre – been able to choose honestly what Daniel Rotfeld. Publisher: the Russian members of the Rotfeld’s group Agora-PISM, Warsaw, 2012. have done. This was confirmed by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg on April Professor Maria Frankowska pointed out at 16th 2012. a Warsaw presentation of W cieniu, one of the In this way, the past – in a typically Central two books published by Adam Daniel Rotfeld and Eastern European way – gets mixed up with this year, that for English speakers ADR stands the present and the future. The story about this for “alternative dispute resolution”. In Poland, region and its nations was taken up by one of its however, it means “Adam Daniel Rotfeld”, which typical representatives: a descendant of Polish W cieniu. 12 rozmów z Marcinem Wojciechowskim, Adam Daniel Rotfeld Books and Reviews 163

Jews, saved during the Second World War by 1990 to 2002), Rotfeld was able to capture Ukrainian monks, an adviser to the Polish com- people’s attention. This was, in some sense, munist governments, who after the victory of the due to his skills of presenting the sad truth in Solidarity movement, became Poland’s Minister a way that didn’t hurt, but at the same time not of Foreign Affairs, and experienced the evil and avoiding contact with groups which couldn’t find blessings of the 20th century. Rotfeld’s powerful a common language. Myśli o Rosji… includes position, however, is also a result of something interviews with both the liberal daily newspaper, that is very unique about him: a world-renowned Gazeta Wyborcza, and the conservative magazine, academic who throughout his whole life has Teologia Polityczna, during which ADR doesn’t been in close proximity to the world of politics. limit himself to one side of the political scene. His reflections are, hence, a consequence of an And with graceful stubbornness, he doesn’t always productive collision of broad theoretical allow anybody to bring him down to the level of knowledge and diplomatic practice. This possibly inter-party discussions, but carefully analyses explains why Rotfeld’s story, swinging between the statements of leaders, without revealing his the past, the present and the future, is a story own political preferences. of a common – for better and for worse – fate At a time when we like to label experts as of the Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Lithuanians, having political affiliations, ADR is a hard nut to and Germans which is comprehensible to the crack. When he talks about internal affairs – like outside world. the compromise reached in Poland in 1989 as Within the space of a few months in 2012, the a result of the Round Table Talks – he sounds Polish reader was able to read two collections like a liberal or a social democrat. On the other by Rotfeld. The first collection, Myśli o Rosji… hand, in his readiness to take up security issues, i nie tylko (Thoughts about Russia…and not only) human rights, historical identity, and international comprises interviews with Rotfeld and essays relations, including those with Russia, he is much published in the Polish press over the last few closer to conservatism. years. The texts have been thematically arranged This is the reason why most readers of Myśli and make a fascinating expedition into discus- o Rosji… and W cieniu will probably have sions about the main issues of Polish foreign a problem answering the question of which and security policy. These were during times government Professor Rotfeld served in as of domestic rivalry between the conservatives Minister of Foreign Affairs – the post-communist and liberals, Russia’s internal consolidation and or post-Solidarity one? economic crisis in the West. Rotfeld rarely talks about his interesting life and W cieniu (In the Shadow) is a series of conver- very little about his adult life. When he touches sations with Marcin Wojciechowski, a journalist upon these issues it is usually in answer to al- from Gazeta Wyborcza. The extended interview legations about his cooperation with the Polish is organised in the form of questions referring communist secret police, which appeared in the to the legacy of 20th century leaders such as Polish press in 2008. Unfortunately, ADR is not John Paul II, Czesław Miłosz, Jerzy Giedroyc, writing a memoir, because he doesn’t belong Henry Kissinger, Mikhail Gorbachev and others. to the intellectuals concentrated on themselves. A long-term director of the prestigious Stock- And with due respect to Rotfeld’s views on holm International Peace Research Institute Russia (and others) – the younger generation (which Rotfeld held for a record time between would most benefit from representatives of 164 Books and Reviews Lotem gęsi, Mariusz Wilk

his generation reflecting about themselves. It decided to abandon his urban life and moved to is especially important to hear the stories of the Solovki Islands, where his book, The Jour- people like ADR, who has participated in the nals of a White Sea Wolf, was written. Years later, Polish decision-making process in the area of this wanderer of the north, as he calls himself, foreign policy since the early 1970s, and had moved to Lake Onega where he started writing an opportunity to confront his concepts with the his diary, and where subsequent parts of his most renowned world experts. diary were written: Dom nad Oniego (House Should Myśli o Rosji… and W cieniu ever be on the Onego) (2006), Tropami rena (Following published in English, the abbreviation ADR, will the Reindeer) (2007) i Lotem gęsi (Following the undoubtedly gain a new meaning in the West. Path of the Geese) (2012). Wilk’s books have Bartosz Cichocki been translated into many languages, including Translated by Iwona Reichardt English, German and French. Lotem gęsi comprises three stages of a story. It starts in Petrozavodsk, the capital city of the Republic of Karelia, and at some point moves to The Northern Path Canada and follows the path of Kenneth White’s novels (a Scottish poet and writer – editor’s note), Lotem gęsi (Following the ending up back in Konda Bierezna, a place Path of Geese). By: Mariusz described in his Dziennik północny. Wilk. Publisher: Noir Sur We travel through Petrozavodsk following the Blanc, Warsaw, 2012. steps of his research notes, the traces of city tours, and Wilk’s own walks. In the capital of Mariusz Wilk, Polish writer the Republic of Karelia, Wilk seeks the traces and wanderer, does not of Charles Longseville, an engineer with the write his diaries like oth- French artillery who, during Napoleon’s march ers do. Wilk has a different towards Russia was captured and imprisoned intellectual perspective in writing: for him what by the Cossacks. In Petrozavodsk, Longseville matters is space and place, and to follow Wilk, builds canons and becomes the model of the reader needs to take his path. In his travels a hero. The story of this man, which, in fact, sits Wilk does not just follow a specific route. Neither somewhere between reality and fiction, involves does he chase excitement. He wanders. And nobody else but Maxim Gorky (an early Soviet he’s been wandering for years, with his thoughts writer credited with promoting the idea of Social- and mind. This style of travel is also reflected in ist Realism – editor’s note). The investigation, his latest diary, Lotem gęsi, which has recently which is almost criminal, provides a surprising been published in Polish. solution, which cannot be revealed in this review. Wilk has friended the north and has been Nevertheless, this is just one of such stories. living there for the last 20 years. He has traded The book includes many more. his life as an oppositionist, co-author of Kon- The next stage of the diary brings the reader to spira (a book published in 1984 in Paris which Canada. Wilk takes us there to follow the path of became prime reading for the Polish communist La Route Bleu, a novel written by Kenneth White opposition movement) and journalist, for the about a journey to Labrador (in the far north of life of a writer/wanderer. During the 1990s, Wilk Canada). Wilk makes his travel from Karelia to Lotem gęsi, Mariusz Wilk Books and Reviews 165

Canada to confront White’s geopoetics, and to at home when he is in his Konda Bierezna, not personally witness the place, which a few decades only physically but also in literary terms. Konda before him, the Scottish writer explored to find is the ghost village of the north where in the space and, as he writes, “to make [his] way out winter nobody even ventures to deliver mail. of the Jehovian occupation of the world”. Wilk’s Here, one can sit, read, and reflect, or simply tribal sense of connection with White takes him work. Emigration and correspondence with the into the unknown. However, this path brings him outside world from a place which is hard to more disappointments than enjoyment. find on a map take on a new meaning. But this Page after page, we travel 6,000 kilometres Russian settlement also gives him an impulse to by car and 2,000 by boat. When experimenting tear away all labels of being a Pole, a Catholic, with La Route Bleu, Wilk clearly and consciously and many others. To lose them, Wilk encounters cannot keep up with his pen and constantly the “other”, his nomadic spiritual journey. He makes quick notes. Short, touristic “glimpses”. does not want to be a tourist-writer. In Konda But he does not find comfort in such travels. Bierezna he tries to devour the reality and pay In following White’s footsteps, Wilk, is in fact, attention to every detail. Going deep to record searching for the history of the places he has the truth of a given place, don’t we get, in fact, visited. This is not an easy task for somebody who deeper into ourselves and find our own truth? is not attracted to the reality cut out of a guide Perhaps yes, but by writing about such small book. Hasty travels do not allow much more fragments of reality, Wilk provides his reader than a post-card type reflection, and modern with a paradoxically large part of Russia. This tourism takes over old-fashioned travel. Only is not bait for readers who are fans of reports, in literary terms does Wilk not lose his breath. like those of another Polish writer and reporter, However, this dream journey does not seem Jacek Hugo-Bader, but rather an inspirational to give him as much joy as he initially thought it offer for those who spend their lives wandering. would. Surrounded by empty lakes and empty Wilk writes his diaries by catching “traces”. scenes of other tourists, Wilk tries to compare However, each new experience on his path his own experiences with what White described can change these traces. Wilk doesn’t seek in his book. At each step, however, he returns individual experiences which can be caught unconsciously to his own northern experiences in a hasty manner, such as tourist attractions with his pen and his thoughts. We learn that his and an idolatrous admiration of the countryside. own experiences are dearer to his heart than the Looking deep into Russia, Wilk looks deep into foreign land of Labrador. On his path of whales, his own soul. If he traces history, it is based on unable to avoid the literary association with a solid literary foundation. And to document it, Herman Melville, he comes to the rather grim he only needs words, not photography. There is conclusion that Canadian restaurants don’t also a new trace in his life: his young daughter. serve fresh fish. Her arrival, as Wilk himself admits, has changed In Konda Bierezna, Wilk returns to the voice his life entirely. If it wasn’t for her, the book would which the reader can easily recognise from his probably not include a reflection on Cormac other works, such as Dom nad Oniego. After this McCarthy’s The Road. She becomes a new point, his clear writing returns – a mix of irregular, direction in her father’s nomadism. but witty rhythm, which is so characteristic of Lotem gęsi isn’t a hasty piece of prose. Its Wilk’s style. The wanderer, clearly, feels most story is similar to the people who want to visit 166 Books and Reviews Testament, Baruch Milch

Wilk in his northern house: many promise to tragic situation in which the author found himself. come, but few ever make it. Others who come Lying in the attic of a barn belonging to some to visit can’t tolerate the silence. The select sympathetic people, with a death sentence in few who do reach it have a powerful conversa- his pocket just like every Jew at that time, any tion – in silence. second might have brought about his end. In Łukasz Wojtusik such conditions, Baruch Milch, a Jewish doctor Translated by Iwona Reichardt from Podhajce (now Pidhaitsi in Ukraine – editor’s note) hid from the Germans between July 10th 1943 and March 24th 1944 at a Polish farm. How did he find this place and manage to survive? And what did it mean for him to live Everything is almost Too True… when his loved ones had all perished? Baruch Milch describes his life from his youth Testament. By: Baruch Milch. by aptly interlayering socio-political issues of Publisher: Ośrodek Karta, the pre-Second World War Eastern and Central Warsaw, 2012. Europe into his personal experiences. In this part of the book, the dominating theme is the fate Whilst reading the notes, of Jewish young people and the dilemmas that diaries, and memoirs from accompanied them in their life choices during the Second World War and these difficult times. A burden which young Jews the Holocaust, we often ask experienced at the time was increasing anti- ourselves the question of whether anything more Semitism, which not only limited their choice of drastic or more moving could ever possibly friends but also the opportunities to study and happen? Could there possibly be something develop professionally. Milch not only describes else with a deeper record of the tragedy and circumstances in which he directly experienced a deeper attempt to analyse it? Testament, by anti-Semitic behaviour, but also shows how Jews Baruch Milch published recently in Poland by tried to navigate around both the formal and Ośrodek Karta, is hard to forget and doesn’t informal bans in different ways. To him, family leave its reader indifferent. was just as important as both his studies and Baruch Milch planned to describe his life by social and political engagement were. This is dividing his work into two volumes: the period why he was faced with a difficult choice: study of his youth where he gains professional and in Poland or emigrate to Palestine? private independence (until 1939), and the period Milch chose neither and eventually, after com- of the war. What makes his plans unusual is that pleting secondary education, went on to study he wrote his book in hiding at the height of the medicine in Prague where he was introduced German occupation. The state of constant danger to and became involved with organisations con- didn’t allow him to work regularly and calmly on nected with the communist movement. Milch’s the book, hence the disproportion in the details early career as a young doctor was also full of individual parts of the book, and the quick of challenges and obstacles, and he started transformation to the section about the war. making preparations to emigrate – this time to The first note (published as an introduction) Bolivia. The description of this stage of his life dated July 15th 1943 gives a foretaste of the gives us some quite thoroughly analysed and Testament, Baruch Milch Books and Reviews 167

important information about the situation of the Crucifixion and then forced to wander the Jews in Lviv and Warsaw, as well as the small earth until the Second Coming of Christ – editor’s Galician towns which the doctor visited. Baruch note). The latter is a kind of political manifesto Milch, however, lost the opportunity to see if life and a return to Milch’s Zionist ideals of his early in South America would be better for him and youth. In his analysis of the fate of the Jewish his wife, and was never able to emigrate. nation, Milch returns to the conclusion that was “September 1st 1939, the day of the eruption made by the Zionists at the turn of the 20th cen- of the Second World War,” is the first sentence tury – only by having its own land and state will of the second part of Milch’s memoirs. “This is the safety of Jews be guaranteed. Milch himself, the beginning of the end of my only-just-started as part of She’erit Hapletah (in Hebrew meaning life”. Germany’s attack on Poland and later the the “surviving remnants”) saw an implementation Soviet invasion, irreversibly changed his reality of the idea of the Jewish State. and plans. Milch didn’t hide the fact that he was Baruch Milch wrote over 60 notebooks in Polish, initially quite content with the Soviet incursion and before his departure to Germany in 1946 into eastern Poland, but soon the flaws of the (and then, from there, to Israel), he presented Soviet system, in which he had hopes of bringing them to the Central Jewish Historical Commis- not only survival but also a better future, would sion (Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna) also ruin his own life. The financial and social in Katowice, currently the collection is a part of decline of his family, and the forced departure the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. The from his hometown into hiding in nearby Tłuste manuscript and its value were discovered by (now Towste in Ukraine), are the beginnings of historians in 1988 and published thanks to a family tragedy. Both extirpation and a need to the efforts of Ośrodek Karta. Unfortunately, by find a way through the new conditions are what the time the family of Baruch Milch was finally Milch considered to be the misfortunes that had found in Israel, it was too late; too late to give befallen him. The death of his wife, denounced the author the joy of his discovered memoirs, during the German occupation, was the height which he had sought with great stubbornness of these misfortunes. albeit without success. Milch, himself, managed to survive, stay in hid- After the war, Milch had actually rewritten his ing and write. However, as his daughter, Shosh memoirs for a second time – from memory, in Avigal (Milch remarried after the war and had Hebrew. Both their content and their construc- two daughters), wrote – he was a strong and tion is identical in many sections. They were wise man but also, dead. When living in Israel published in English in 2003 by Yad Vashem, he taught his children that what he wrote in the Jerusalem as Can Heavan be Void. The 2012 memoirs was a form of his personal Decalogue: edition of Testament includes two parts: the “Have faith, but only in ideals … don’t be gullible printed text, and more valuably, a digitalised and don’t trust anybody.” version of the author’s manuscript (added to The completion of the author’s memoirs and the book as a CD-ROM). In this form, Baruch reflections play the role of a last will. They include Milch’s memoirs, which have been additionally a letter to a cousin in Palestine and a description complemented with family photographs, are of a recurring dream of a journey and dialogue even more personal. with the Wandering Jew (a medieval folklore figure Testament by Milch Baruch is not an ordinary who was believed to taunt Jesus on the way to autobiography or a simple last will. The author’s 168 Books and Reviews Gen ryzyka w sobie miał…, Joanna Podsadecka

reflections are much more universal in their One of these colleagues, Janina Ochojska- content and aspiration. Often writing in haste, Okońska, the founder of the Polish Humanitarian out of fear or tiredness, and sometimes a little Action, has confessed: “For quite some time chaotically, Milch was fully aware of this. “Not I’ve had a feeling that we who knew Turowicz, only the fate of the Jewish people but also the did little to keep the memory of him alive. We’ve good of the whole of humanity is the main motif kept him for ourselves and made no effort to of these pages, as on them one can read the tell the younger generation why we loved him meaning, the causes and the effects of the so much. This is something I am embarrassed war,” he wrote. about and something I would like to change.” Edyta Gawron� This is what makes this collection so different. Translated by Iwona Reichardt Joanna Podsadecka, the interviewer, has done her homework well and was superbly prepared for the interviews, with her questions showing a thorough knowledge of Turowicz’s writing. In fact, she hasn’t created a loose collection of Sharing Turowicz memories but rather an introduction to a biog- raphy of the many people who worked for or Gen ryzyka w sobie miał… with Tygodnik Powszechny. The book allows us (He Had the Risk Gene…) to read about the path Turowicz took when he By: Joanna Podsadecka. established the Catholic weekly in 1945 with the Publisher: Wydawnictwo help of Cardinal Adam Stefan Sapiecha, one of Naukowe PWN, Warsaw, the most important figures of the Polish Catholic 2012. Church in the first half of the 20th century. Tygodnik Powszechny has, without a doubt, This book is about how attracted the leading thinkers of post-war Poland friendship and high standards contributed to with Karol Wojtyła (who later became Pope John the creation of a paper that is considered to Paul II – editor’s note), who made his debut in have been one of the most important peri- the paper writing as a priest, being among its odicals in Poland’s post-war history: Tygodnik authors. Other authors have included: Władysław Powszechny. The founder and longest serving Bartoszewski, Stefan Kisielewski, Zbigniew Her- editor-in-chief of the Kraków-based weekly was bert, Stanisław Lem, Czesław Miłosz and Father Jerzy Turowicz (1912-1999), whose life and work Józef Tischner. Also very close to the paper was is the subject of this recently published collection the Nobel-Prize winner, Wisława Szymborska. of interviews called Gen ryzyka w sobie miał… Tygodnik Powszechny has always attracted the (He Had the Risk Gene …). In the book, Joanna greatest names in Polish culture and the most Podsadecka discusses Turowicz with his former noble in Polish Catholicism. High moral standards colleagues and friends: Józefa Hennelowa, and friendship were always more important for Krzysztof Kozłowski, Stefan Wilkanowicz, Father its editorial team than any ideology, and this Adam Boniecki, Janina Ochojska-Okońska, Anna does not mean that the paper was ever “vague” Szałapak, Andrzej Szczeklik and Adam Michnik in terms of its ideological viewpoint. (members of the Polish intellectual and cultural The message put forward by Tygodnik elite – editor’s note). Powszechny was very clear. The fact that, despite Gen ryzyka w sobie miał…, Joanna Podsadecka Books and Reviews 169

its Catholic orientation, the paper was published the government led by Tadeusz Mazowiecki, and legally in communist Poland inclined a certain later a senator. Jerzy Turowicz, himself, delivered acceptance of the reality of a non-democratic an important speech during the Polish Round state. The challenge was, as Antoni Słonimski Table Talks. He was honoured with Poland’s once wrote, “to not bend too easily”. Krzysztof highest award – the Order of the White Eagle. Kozłowski, who worked for Tygodnik Powszechny This was one side of the coin. The other for over half a century explains it this way: “Our side of the coin is that the team of Tygodnik discussions during communism were always Powszechny had to pay a high price for their concentrated on the question of what ‘too choices. Political engagement, although based easily’ means?” on very honest motives, was criticised by many Adam Michnik, editor-in-chief of Poland’s main readers and friends of the magazine. An open daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, and a main opponent of dialogue regarding the role of the Polish Church the communist system, points to the following resulted in Pope John Paul II, one of the paper’s characteristics of Tygodnik Powszechny: “First greatest friends, penning a letter for its 50th an- of all, there is a deeply thought-out Christian niversary. In it, the Polish pope admitted that he philosophy, one that exceeded the changes felt that the Church did not feel loved enough by introduced by the Second Vatican Council; Tygodnik. Today, the Polish Catholic Church lacks secondly, a sense of political realism, which a voice such as the one which once came from allowed legal work in Poland to be as it was at Tygodnik, a paper of deeply believing Catholics the time, and which was a result of the post-Yalta who were also open to dialogue. division of the European continent; and thirdly, The most important interviews in this book, unquestionable moral integrity.” namely the one with Józefa Hennelowa and The strong backbone of Tygodnik Powszechny’s Krzysztof Kozłowski, reveal many of these editorial team meant that it didn’t publish a eulogy dilemmas. They also allow us to understand for Stalin after his death in 1953, and as a result the complex context in which Tygodnik had to of this decision, the editors were deprived of operate in – both before and after 1989. Above their paper for three years. The same moral all, they allow the reader to understand the backbone was the reason why Turowicz wrote: values that bonded this unusual editorial team. “Anti-Semitism and Catholicism cannot acquiesce They show the great friendship that people because anti-Semitism is hatred towards a hu- who worked for Tygodnik shared with Jerzy man being only because this person is Jewish. Turowicz. It was these relations, which were so Catholicism demands hatred of evil but does much based on mutual trust, that have, in fact, not allow for hatred of another human being.” allowed for such a great paper to be published The high moral values that characterised the in a non-democratic regime in which the secret editorial team of Tygodnik Powszechny was also police were always keeping close tabs on the the reason for their political engagement in the intellectual elite. aftermath of the change of political system in The story told by Joanna Podsadecka’s inter- 1989. At that time, Józefa Hennelowa, a long- viewees resembles a simple truth: regardless of time writer for Tygodnik, became a member of circumstances we need to believe in something parliament, and Krzysztof Kozłowski, another of and stay with the people we love. The interviews the main figures of the magazine, became the published in this collection show that relations first non-communist Minister of Internal Affairs in of trust and friendship can become the basis 170 Books and Reviews Poland and Palestine: Two Lands and Two Skies

of the work of an editorial team. The interview the opposite. The photographs have been very with Stefan Wilkanowicz covers the topic of the well-selected with the prints being made out of continuity of Tygodnik Powszechny. Wilkanowicz perfectly prepared scanned negatives. However, talks about a letter which Jerzy Giedroyc, the for anyone who has seen earlier exhibitions of editor-in-chief of the Paris-based Kultura, an Aleksandrowicz’s photography, such as the influential émigré paper, wrote to Jerzy Turowicz ones hosted by the Galicia Jewish Museum and which read as follows: “You’ve succeeded and the Manggha Centre of Japanese Art and in managing a generation change and preserv- Technology in Kraków, and for anyone who ing the continuity of the paper, something which knows that Aleksandrowicz’s archives include I could not achieve.” The book does not discuss 15,000 negatives, this exhibition is an interest- this issue too much. Has the continuity of the ing, although again partial, presentation of this paper indeed been preserved since Turowicz’s artist’s incredible photographic skills. death in 1999? Is it actually possible now with Quite likely our hunger for more of Aleksan- Krzysztof Kozłowski no longer a member of the drowicz’s photography will be satisfied by the editorial team? Clearly not. catalogue which is currently being published And yet there are still the archives of Jerzy and which will include many more photographs. Turowicz which include a large collection of However, until the catalogue’s publication, correspondence, manuscripts and other docu- the internet site of Israel’s National Library ments among which, as Kozłowski points out, in Jerusalem, which presents 415 pictures is an unknown poem by Czesław Miłosz. Adam in digital form, remains the best source for Michnik believes the deepest insight will be anyone who wants to have a broader picture found within Turowicz’s unpublished archives. of Aleksandrowicz’s work. Jakub Halcewicz-Pleskaczewski Ze’ev (Wilhelm) Aleksandrowicz was born in Translated by Iwona Reichardt 1905 to a well-known Cracovian family of paper wholesalers. Going against the family tradition and despite his studies at trade schools in Vienna and Basel, he never showed any interest in business, including taking over the family business. Photography is a Worthy Profession Biographies suggest that Aleksandrowicz received his first camera, a very simple one, in Poland and Palestine: Two Lands and Two Skies. the 1920s from his aunt Róża (his father’s sister) Galicia Jewish Museum, Krakow, Poland. who managed a shop selling art supplies, and who was connected to Kraków’s artistic circles. The exhibition of Ze’ev (Wilhelm) Aleksandrow- In the early 1930s Aleksandrowicz became the icz’s photography called Poland and Palestine: owner of two Leica small-format cameras which Two Lands and Two Skies hosted by the Gali- undoubtedly influenced the quality of his pictures. cia Jewish Museum and organised together Significantly, financial independence, which he with the Centre for the Study on the History enjoyed due to him being from a wealthy family, of Culture of Kraków Jews at the Jagiellonian allowed Aleksandrowicz to both travel and do University in Kraków, may cause a certain sense photography. His pictures were published in of insatiability among its viewers. And it is not Polish and Jewish dailies such as Ilustrowany because the exhibition has some flaws. Quite Kurier Codzienny and Chwila, as well as many Poland and Palestine: Two Lands and Two Skies Books and Reviews 171

other magazines in Poland and the United father’s and grandfather’s photographs until States. However, after the Second World War, the discovery of the suitcase. Aleksandrowicz’s name was erased from the Researchers of the history of Polish photog- history of Polish photography. raphy often indicate a deficit of photographic In a way, the reason why Polish post-war his- documentaries from before 1939 and regard the torians did not speak much about Aleksandrow- photo of Jewish residents taken by Benedykt icz’s photography was due to the photographer Jerzy Dorys (Kazimierz nad Wisłą: 1931-32) himself: after what we could call a very intense as the first example of a family photo report. period in terms of his work as a photographer However, had these academics only spent a bit in the early 1930s, and his “journey around more time carefully going through the pre-war the world” which included a visit to the United press, especially Jewish newspapers, both in States, Egypt, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Polish and in Yiddish, they would have come Yemen, Japan, and three trips to Palestine, across a large number of pictures representing Aleksandrowicz quit photography in 1936 and this deficit, including the pictures of Ze’ev Ale- married Lea Chelouche, whom he had met in ksandrowicz. This group of photographs would Palestine. It wasn’t until 2003, thirteen years include such pictures as the one taken at the after the photographer’s death, when a suitcase wedding of a Tzadik from Borowa, and Rabbi with aluminium boxes full of hidden rolled-up Remuh’s Yahrzeit prayer at the old cemetery negatives was accidentally discovered by Ale- in Kraków (Szeroka Street), as well as a large ksandrowicz’s grandson. This came as a big collection of photographs from Palestine. surprise to the Aleksandrowicz family who had The picture taken at the Remuh cemetery, which no idea about the number and quality of their in 2007 was shown at the collective exhibition, Photo courtesy of the Galicia Jewish Museum. 172 Books and Reviews Poland and Palestine: Two Lands and Two Skies

namely “Świat przed katastrofą. Żydzi krakowscy as his son, Or Aleksandrowicz, stated in one w dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym” (The World of the earlier exhibition catalogues: “Close Before Catastrophe. Krakow’s Jews beetwen the family did not regard photography as a worthy wars) organised by the International Cultural profession.” And, on the other hand, it would Centre in Kraków is a flawless presentation of the be difficult to imagine the enthusiasm towards subject, the reporter’s verve, and the unforced his work amongst the masters of photography simplicity of the composition. Is it, in any way, who all belonged to Fotoklub Polski at that time. surprising? Probably not, especially when we look His Polish peers clung to their archaic pictorial more closely at Aleksandrowicz’s other work at style, and the organisation which they operated the Galicia Museum, as well as his earlier work in clearly had an ethnocentric nature. taken in Kraków, some of which were made in After almost eight decades since the artist a square format (possibly with a Rolleiflex), and gave up photography, Ze’ev Aleksandrowicz his later work from Palestine, which were taken and his pictures are on the light side of the exclusively with a 35mm Leica. force of the history of Polish (and not only) All these works reveal the same approach. photography. And this, surely, is due to the Interestingly, the photographic convention documentary nature of his work and the complete which Aleksandrowicz applies so aptly should lack of complexes in fine arts. The work which be described as “documentary”. It falls into has been selected for the exhibition hosted by a broader category of work associated with the Galicia Jewish Museum may surprise the other photographers also working with a Leica viewer with its very “contemporary” or “mod- at that time, including such artists as: André ern” shape of film frames. This is most visible Kertész, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Roman Vishniac, in the case of the portraits made in Palestine and a group of American photographers who, and Kraków where the historical context is not during the Great Depression, worked for the always easily recognisable, and the pictures Farm Security Administration. give the impression of being “transparent”, Ze’ev Aleksandrowicz never took pictures meaning closely related with the technology upon the request or orders of others. He always of photographic registry. worked on his own. His family’s wealth allowed In terms of innovation in the selection of mo- him to make two expensive journeys to Japan tifs, the form of presentation and composition and purchase two Leica cameras. It also al- of pictures, as stated earlier, can probably be lowed him unlimited expositions of the film and seen best in the digitalised collection presented although Aleksandrowicz’s photographs were, on the website of Israel’s National Library in Je- indeed, published in newspapers, it wasn’t the rusalem. Despite the fact that Aleksandrowicz’s sales of his photos that allowed him to travel contemporaries were also conscious users of and do photography. light-weight Leica cameras which allowed for the Most importantly, Aleksandrowicz’s work pre- photographer’s greater mobility, Aleksandrowicz sented at the exhibition in the Galicia Museum himself went one step further by taking pictures reveal a photographer of great talent. A master without a tripod, giving him the opportunity to of all: the portrait, the documentary, and the dy- catch the “decisive moment”. namic photo report. And yet these extraordinary Wojciech Wilczyk skills did not bring Aleksandrowicz recognition Translated by Iwona Reichardt among his contemporaries. On the one hand, Gdansk_tancerka_165x235_ANG.pdf 1 11/21/11 4:47 PM

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