CDN – that’s an acronym for ‘To Be Continued.’ And we took as the logo of CDN a Polish flag, the national flag, from the walls, because people were writing CDN – it will be continued, to be continued, as graffiti; the fight has to be continued. But we – our logo – because there were some other organizations called CDN, which was very good for us because of the political police research that they mixed, they didn’t know who is who in the underground to the end. But our logo was very characteristic, because it was made with fonts discovered by [Jerzy] Janiszewski [a Polish artist best known for designing Solidarity’s logo] in the Solidarność logo [Solidarity – the most prominent Polish opposition movement under communism].
We were using three letters from this logo, with N, so independence, niepodległość [Polish translation of independence]. Our logo was just an abbreviation of this classical logo-type by Janiszewski. Our program was very short, two words slogan: Sovietology applied, sovietologie appliqué [French translation of ‘sovietology applied’], sovietologia stosovana [Polish translation of ‘sovietology applied’]. It was our political program.
So sometimes we were publishing prose or poetry, for instance, by a famous poet, [Stanislaw] Barańczak, who was a professor at Harvard, sometimes some letters from jail by [Adam] Michnik [a prominent anti-communist activist and Solidarity leader]. But generally, we wanted to prepare the general public for the future. So actually, when I wrote my first essay, Freedom in the Camp, I was convinced that this break between fear and terror was not final in ’79, when I was writing my essay. But we were close too, because we had in this time our own free distribution network which could communicate [our concept of] future civil society.
That was a general code of the text. And my position in the underground was in between. But I was this manager of a big firm, because our firm had 150 people, permanent staff, had divisions. We had as well an insurance company between different publishing houses. So we were using regularly secondhand cars not to lose too much. They were always registered for an innocent person not involved in the underground. This person knew only one, the owner of the car, that when police will come to them, they will say, “I don’t know, the car was stolen, I don’t know.” And when really the car was kept by the police, our insurance company, in which we were paying each month a certain amount of money, was giving us money to buy back another secondhand car to have regular production going ahead. So we met in this time the question of cash flow, not only the question of how to make conspiracy efficient, but how to maintain cash flow, how to protect copyrights, how to connect with the West, how to connect with the authors.
That’s why this patriotic business, the history of CDN Publishing house which appeared last year, was a kind of study how, without freedom, without independence, civil society well organized can promote future freedom and future organization as well of society, as economy, as free political life. We were financing as well two reviews which were our conspiracy within a conspiracy. We were publishing – Godnosc – Dignity – for police and we were publishing a review for the army – for armed forces, Reduta – Redoubt. And that’s how we were pursued so systematically by the regime’s counterintelligence. We were one of the biggest producers of Solidarity Weekly Mazowsze in this region. We were printing between 10 [10,000] to 13 [13,000], I guess, thousand copies of the weekly.
To let you envision what it represents, that’s the full capacity of a big automobile, of a big car, the full capacity, very heavy. So to distribute it – we were distributing in gross only. Our smallest unit of distribution was for 500 copies because we couldn’t go down because down on this popular level police could observe and go – come from the bottom to the top.
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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