I think that, fortunately, it was Poland and Poles who started to make the beginning of the end of communism. I tried to describe how long was our struggle. Of course, our struggle was not the bloodiest, but not by chance. We were called the most enjoyable barrack in the camp, but that’s because even [Joseph] Stalin [leader of the Soviet Union from 1924-1953] was saying that communism for Poles is as a saddle for a cow.
That it doesn’t work with Poles to – the fact that in Poland, Poland was the only country in which agriculture wasn’t collectivized, wasn’t transformed into kolkhoz [Russian term referring to a type of collective farm] totally, was not because Stalin was so tolerant, or his governor for Poland, [Boleslaw] Bierut, was so tolerant, but because it wasn’t feasible. [Boleslaw Bierut was a Polish communist politician. He was president from 1947 – 1952.] There’s always a balance between the profits and the costs.
So I’m defending since years the idea to transform the Palace of Culture [an enormous building in Warsaw that was constructed in 1955 by the Soviets as a gift to the people of Poland], which is this boot – Stalin’s boot – put in the center of Warsaw. There’s a concrete desert because that’s not a desolate square, that’s a desert. And in the middle of it, there’s this Palace of Culture. By the lack of knowledge of history of art, protectors of listed monuments put this building into the list. That’s not a piece of art as architecture. That’s rather a document as Auschwitz barracks or Dachau camp [Nazi labor camps infamous for their role in the genocide of Europe’s Jewish population]. But I think there’s one big value of this building. This building is representing the spirit of communism.
Leviathan had to have something gigantic, something extremely eccentric, something terrorizing in form and in the scale. So I think this building is a fantastic piece of totalitarian architecture. We don’t need, as in Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which is a building built in – referred to the style of Auschwitz barracks and Auschwitz gates and Auschwitz lamps. We don’t need it. We need just to re-interpret this building. Just show how the facade is different from the caves in which Polish national heroes were tortured and murdered.
So using the entrance space to this building and creating an underground freedom forum with former tribute for leaders, dismantled and set up again on this freedom forum, and having a movie with communist leaders saluting crowds of manifestations 24 hours a day, we can create this contrast between the facade and the hidden struggle with those who were for independence and for democracy and for freedom. We can create this counterpoint between the official vision of communism and the hidden struggle against it. We have a joke: What’s the nicest place in Warsaw? That’s at the top of the Palace of Culture because we don’t see the Palace of Culture from this top.
So there’s so many jokes about this building, and the question of this building is as a challenge of totalitarianism. That’s a question of temptation of scale. What was Poland under communism? It was one single enterprise. What was a political system? All those – this ruling party with so-called free satellites. [Mr. Bielecki refers to the “Democratic Bloc” under the Communist system, where the dominant Polish United Workers Party had a theoretical coalition with three smaller, nominally independent parties.]
What was independence in Poland, in Poland which lost independence? When Mr. [Wojciech] Jaruzelski, as ruling general and general secretary of Communist Party [in Poland], declared martial law, he told us with this fantastic Soviet refreshing hypocrisy that he’s defending independence of Poland. [Wojciech Jaruzelski is a retired Polish military officer and Communist politician. He served as Prime Minister from 1981 to 1985 and head of state from 1985 to 1990.] So against whom? Against Russians. But he didn’t mention. He’s still saying that the Russians wanted to attack us, when now we know from archives of Politburo that they didn’t want, because they had him at place.
He was ready to do everything to be at power. And that’s what we called this lie, paramount lie mentioned by [Aleksandr Isayevich] Solzhenitsyn [a Russian dissident who helped raise global awareness of the Soviet Union´s gulag system from 1918 to 1956], which is the base of the system. That’s why falsification of the values, the imitation of the real virgin economic and political system is this killing factor for freedom.
Each falsification of the word, of the image, of the name, of the tradition is the real danger, is the real danger for freedom. But to come back to the real sense of the words, to real meaning, to real notions, we have to work hard because this falsified vocabulary is the biggest danger. That’s why I put into my new manual, Freedom: A Do-It-Yourself Manual, the short vocabulary of freedom, because I think, discussing it with Belarusians, Cubans, Russians, some Chinese dissidents, that the question is to what extent they internalized the vocabulary of freedom. Not the slogans, but understanding that there’s hard work to do when we want to be just normal.
Born in Warsaw in 1948, Czeslaw Bielecki is an architect who graduated from the Warsaw University of Technology in 1973 and received his Ph.D. from the Krakow University of Technology in 1997.
Under Communist rule in Poland, Bielecki was a freedom activist who joined the 1968 pro-democracy demonstrations. Despite harassment and imprisonment, Bielecki remained committed to nonviolent struggle throughout the 1970s. He joined the Solidarity independent trade union in 1980. Bielecki was a key figure in Solidarity’s clandestine publishing efforts, including the Solidarity Weekly newspaper. Bielecki also applied his experience and professional artistic background to the development and management of and independent underground publishing house, challenging official censorship and offering Poles alternative news to that offered by the regime. He was twice arrested for his anti-government activities and was held in prison for two years.
From 1997 to 2001, Bielecki was a member of parliament, during which time he served as the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. He also served as an advisor to President Lech Walesa between 1990 and 1995.
Bielecki has authored and coauthored a variety of publications describing strategies and experiences from Poland’s freedom movement including The Little Conspirator and Freedom: A Do-It-Yourself Manual. His writings offer advice on how dissidents can organize more effectively and maintain their resilience against tyranny.
Poland is a central European country bordered by the Baltic Sea, Belarus, Ukraine, Germany, Russia, Lithuania, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Poland has a population of 38 million people; nearly 90 percent are Roman Catholic.
Poles struggled against foreign dominance from the 14th century and the modern Polish state is less than one hundred years old. Polish borders expanded and contracted through a series of partitions in the 18th century. After a brief period of independence and parliamentary democracy from 1918 to 1939, World War II brought occupation by Nazi Germany and the near annihilation of the Jewish population. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Poland’s Jewish population went from over 3 million in 1933 to 45,000 in 1950.
After the war, Poland became a Soviet satellite state and a communist system was imposed. Farms were collectivized, basic freedoms curtailed, and a culture of fear developed under a Stalinist regime. The 1960s brought greater prosperity and some liberalization. Labor protests in the early 1970s tested the communist government’s resolve and prompted modest reforms.
In 1978, Polish Archbishop and Cardinal Karol Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II, the first non-Italian to hold the position since the 16th century. The pope’s triumphant return to Poland in 1979 saw massive outpourings of public support, shaking the foundations of the government and inspiring the opposition to press for peaceful change.
In 1980, shipbuilders in the seaport city of Gdansk united to confront the government. Their calls for greater political liberties and improved working conditions developed into the Solidarity movement. Solidarity’s leader, Lech Walesa, became the movement’s voice. Protests and unrest spread throughout the country and the communists replaced their leadership. General Wojciech Jaruzelski became prime minister and declared martial law on December 13, 1981. Solidarity was outlawed and Walesa and other Solidarity leaders were imprisoned.
While martial law was lifted in 1983, Poland continued to stagnate. Mikhail Gorbachev’s elevation to leadership of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985 brought new pressures for reform in Poland. A failing economy and continued repression incited workers to a new wave of strikes in 1988. A desperate regime agreed to legalize Solidarity and conduct semi-free elections. In the 1989 parliamentary elections, Solidarity won 99 of the 100 Senate seats and 160 of the 161 lower house seats they were allowed to contest. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a Solidarity leader, became Poland’s first non-communist prime minister in over four decades. In 1990, Lech Walesa was elected president with 74 percent of the vote. While Solidarity splintered as Poland democratized, a coalition government of anti-communist parties won fully free parliamentary elections in 1991.
Poland transitioned to a market economy and applied for integration into western institutions. Economic dislocation returned the former communists, now social democrats, to power in 1993. Free elections and peaceful transitions in the following decades solidified Poland’s multi-party democratic system. Reforms eventually led to a more robust economy and Poland joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1999 and the European Union in 2004.
In Freedom House’s Freedom in the World 2013, Poland earned the status “Free,” (as it has since 1990) receiving the best possible rankings in the categories Political Rights and Civil Liberties.
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