The Polish Opposition and the Technology of Resistance
Michael Bernhard
Associate Professor of Political Science
The Pennsylvania State University
Anniversaries are good vantage points to reflect on momentous events because
hindsight provides us with an opportunity to evaluate their long term impact. The 25th
anniversary of the founding of Solidarity and its brief legal existence (1980-81)
represents such an opportunity. With a quarter century of hindsight, the most profound
and lasting impact of not only Solidarity, but the broader opposition movement in Poland,
is quite clearly its pioneering of a “technology of resistance” that undermined many
authoritarian regimes.
The Polish Opposition (1976-1989)
The focus of this is article is the Polish opposition (ruch oporu), the wider
political movement that antedates, encompasses, and was dominated by Solidarity. The
key frame of reference for this movement is from 1976 to 1989. It began in 1976 when
an organization known at the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR) took the first steps in
developing this technology of resistance. It began operations in the wake of the
suppression of wildcat strikes in Radom, Ursus, Płock, and many other cities in June of
that year.
KOR and a range other groups dominated the opposition until the next round of
strikes in the summer of 1980.1 KOR’s importance was quickly dwarfed by the
foundation of the Interfactory Strike Committee (MKS) in Gdańsk, and two kindred
bodies in Szczecin and Silesia. The most important of these was in Gdańsk because it
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negotiated the agreement that led to the creation of Solidarity. Solidarity was the most
powerful, extensive, and influential part of the Polish opposition. During the first period
of its legal existence in 1980-1, other large scale social movements also coexisted and
cooperated with it, notably an association of farmers, Rural Solidarity (Solidarność
Rolników Indiwidualnych), and an Independent Student Union (Niezależny Związek
Studentów). There was also a proliferation of smaller organizations and continued
activism by some groups founded in pre-Solidarity period. Solidarity also created
ferment in the party itself and many other regime-controlled social and professional
organizations (Kennedy 1991, Hicks 1996).
With the declaration of Martial Law in December 1981, Solidarity transformed
itself by necessity from an above-ground union-centered social movement into an
underground organization. When in the late 1980s, the communist regime abandoned its
failed strategy of normalization through coercion, and used the window opened by
Gorbachev to try to liberalize and co-opt the opposition, Solidarity again moved to the
forefront. It negotiated an agreement at the roundtable negotiations in 1989 that led to its
recognition anew in exchange for its participation in a liberalized regime in which the
communists were expected to continue to rule. Full democratization was initially put off
as a vague future possibility.
A catastrophic defeat for the regime in the partially free elections of June 1989 led
to the inadvertent and rapid democratization of the system.2 During the negotiations with
the regime and subsequent period of transition the opposition transformed itself into an
explicitly political organization concerned with the shaping of power and its contestation.
The most important political actors in this stage were the national-level Citizen’s
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Committee grouped around Lech Wałęsa, the activist network of local Citizen’s
Committees, and the union’s slate of candidates for the Sejm and Senat.
The discussion of Solidarity in this paper will end with the democratic transition
of 1989. There are two reasons for this. First, after 1989 the Solidarity legacy was hotly
contested by competing political actors. With the split between the followers of Wałęsa
and the Mazowiecki government in 1990, different Solidarity factions attempted to claim
the union’s legacy as their own. While different factions have done so with some success
-- notably Lech Wałęsa’s supporters and a short-lived political party, Solidarity Electoral
Action (AWS) – the unity of the movement has been long shattered. Second, after 1989,
the mode of politics in Poland changed and democratic competition replaced a war of
position between regime and opposition. Poland’s politics have become conventionally
democratic and communist-era oppositional politics have ceased to be relevant.
The Achievements of the Opposition
The next issue which needs to be addressed is why the legacy of Solidarity is best
understood in terms of a “technology of resistance.” Given the conventionality of
contemporary Polish politics as well as the post-1989 political formations that have laid
claim to Solidarity’s legacy, it is hard to argue that the Polish opposition has contributed
anything new to the substance of democracy as a political system. Rather its contribution
is that it pioneered an effective way to resist Soviet-type rule. This new type of politics
played an important role in the peaceful transitions to democracy in 1989. These tactics
also have been subsequently effective in promoting what can be called “liberalizing
electoral outcomes” in areas where competitive authoritarian regimes that have succeeded
Soviet-type regimes.3
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The first issue that needs to be addressed is why this account concentrates on the
technology of politics rather than its substance. The originality of the Polish opposition
is not connected with the transformation of the country, but in how it initiated the
changes. The nature of the new regime in Poland is highly conventional. After its fortyyear experience with Soviet-type rule, Polish society has ultimately moved in the
direction of Western liberal democracy and capitalism. These are not inconsequential or
negative accomplishments; they are simply unremarkable in terms of the kind of system
that replaced the Soviet-type regime. Contemporary Polish democracy is conventional,
and blessedly so. Its institutional configuration combines semi-presidentialism with a
highly proportional electoral system. It greatest weakness is a party system that exhibits
a high degree of volatility, with many parties rapidly disintegrating and disappearing.
None the less, it is a consolidated democracy which has now lasted for over fifteen years.
The Polish economy is also unremarkable. It is moderately developed and like
many countries of that type it has a fairly robust rate of growth due to an educated
workforce, low tax rates, good protection of property rights, enforcement of contracts,
and access to larger developed markets. There remain some daunting problems though,
including a high rate of unemployment and perceptions of corruption. The
transformation of the economic system has also been successful and in itself is a major
achievement, but the resulting system is unremarkable.
Finally, the Polish opposition created no novel political program or ideology. The
opposition spanned a wide ideological range, not unlike those of the political forces that
had supported the Home Army and the Polish underground state during WWII. It ran
from social democracy on the Left, to liberals, to conservatives on the right (both of a
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secular and a religious nature). All of these political forces preferred a democratic state
over a Soviet-type regime and a planned economy.
Initially Solidarity was seen as a novel and hopeful political development both by
the left and the right. For some Solidarity represented a resurrection of mass-based
working class politics. For some this was tinged in irony as the object of working class
rebellion was a Leninist state that purported to speak in the name of the dictatorship of
the proletariat (Connor 1980). For others, it held out the possibility of a return to a
progressive politics with a working-class base (Persky 1981), a working class-populism
(Laba 1991) or even hopes for a return to a true Marxism (Barker, 1986). And for others
it represented the emergence of a post-Marxist politics of social movements that offered
new ways to challenge social domination (Arato and Cohen 1992).
Some associated with the Catholic Church thought hope that Solidarity would
demonstrate the importance of faith in the modern age. The Poles with their high level of
belief and political activism not only represented a profound challenge to Soviet-type
regimes but would also help to demonstrate emptiness of the secular, materialist, and
hedonistic life-style of the West (Weigel 2003, Lustiger 2005). Despite these claims, the
Polish opposition, though at many junctures inspired and strengthened by the attachment
of many of its leaders and followers to Catholicism, was not directed at replacing Soviettype rule with some sort of Catholic neo-traditionalism.
Similarly, neither the working-class base nor the syndicalist thrust of its economic
program made Solidarity some sort of neo-Socialist creation either. The notion of
workers’ self-management in retrospect seems more directed at introducing elements of
decentralization and flexibility into a moribund economy. Its working class base had
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diverse political commitments and the sort of economy that exists there today hardly
represents an alternative to conventional forms of capitalist development.
Even if the Polish opposition did not create a new ideology, or new kinds of
democratic institutions, it still made a major contribution to the cause of global
democracy. It pioneered an effective technology of resistance to Soviet-type regimes.
What Solidarity had was a method, an effective means of resisting the power of party
state in its post-totalitarian phase. The contribution here was two-fold. First, Polish
activists changed the nature of politics in Soviet-type regimes. After the failure of the
Hungarian revolution in 1956, politics in the communist world, even contentious politics,
was dominated by the struggle between different factions of the party. The Polish
opposition shifted the axes of politics to a contest between the regime and opposition.
When mobilization along these axes became substantial, one could even talk about
politics becoming a struggle between the state and civil society itself.
Second, under this new political arrangement, the Polish opposition developed the
first set of effective techniques to resist the power of Soviet-type regimes. In its ability
to contest political power over a long period of time, the opposition eventually became a
means for the regime to escape the kind of political inertia that gripped Soviet-type
regimes in the 1980s. The regime’s overtures to the opposition was motivated by
attempts to broaden the dictatorship’s base of support, but ultimately the persistence of
both nagging problems and opposition led to a negotiated exit from the system itself.
The Conditions that Made Opposition Possible
The rise of an opposition in communist Poland and its success were linked to a
particular convergence of conditions in the 1970s. It is worthwhile recalling this and
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discussing each in some detail. First, this sort of oppositional politics was not possible
until Soviet-type regimes moved, in Linzian terms, from their totalitarian phase to their
post-totalitarian phase (Linz 2000). In historical terms this corresponds to the period
following de-Stalinization. De-Stalinization marked the end of systemic innovation and
wide-ranging institutional change in Soviet-type systems, and marked the routinization of
patterns of authority. This can be most succinctly characterized in terms of the mix of
instruments used in the exercise of power.
First and foremost, this meant a substantial reduction in the use of coercive forms
of power and the routinization of its employment. This marked an end to the use of state
violence as the ultimate means of motivating and mobilizing the population as it had in
the Stalinist period. This does not mean that the state came to be fully governed by law
or ceased to be a police-state. It just meant that it became much more predictable in
terms of when it would use violence against the population. Those who were apolitical
and concentrated on career, family, and conventional private life were largely left alone.
The wrath of the forces of order was instead reserved for those who resisted the regime.
In periods of stability this meant consistent and low-level of harassment of those who
opposed the regime, with periods of more extensive repression in response to periods of
instability. The kind of arbitrary arrest, repression and execution that had been
commonplace earlier was replaced by harassment, surveillance, material sanctions,
imprisonment, and exile (both internal and external). Still there were incidents where the
security forces got out of hand (e.g. in Poland the murders of Stanisław Pyjas, Jerzy
Popiełuszko, and Grzegorz Przemyk).
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Second, this also brought an important change in the ideational component of
state power. This meant an end to the highly charismatic, orthodox, and strident ideology
of the period of socialist construction to something in line with the institutionalization of
a mature authoritarian state. This was a change from a highly structured and chiliastic
ideology to what Linz describes as a “mentality,” a way of thinking about power that is
more common-sensical, emotive, and mundane. In Soviet-type systems this meant the
ascription of patriarchal, nationalist, and folkish values into Marxism-Leninism. This
was most successful in the imperial center, the Soviet Union, where it could manifest
itself as a cult of state power (derzhavost’). It also seemed to work in those states that
legitimated themselves in terms of a break or distancing themselves from the Soviet bloc
(e.g. Yugoslavia, Albania, and Romania) or those which had a tradition of Russophilia
(Bulgaria).
The greatest change in terms of the way in which power was exercised in this
phase was the increased reliance on material incentives. Material rewards had always
been a component of the system, despite its egalitarian rhetoric (Moore 1950). Though in
the earliest stages the differential rewards were concentrated at the highest levels of the
political and economic hierarchy. What changed in the post-totalitarian phase was the
attempt to extend the use of material incentives broadly in motivating the population to
comply with the system (Bunce 1983). This began with the unveiling of the New Course
in the Soviet Union and Hungary, and continued in a new guise even after Khrushchev
bested Malenkov in the post-Stalin succession struggle. The tendency towards
constructing a socialist consumer economy strengthened throughout the 1960s and 1970s
with Kadar’s Hungary becoming the archetypical Goulash communist state. The same
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sorts of tendencies were visible in Brezhnev’s incorporation of collective farmers into the
Soviet pension system, the failed export-led growth strategies of Gierek and Ceauşescu
(which made the early 1970s the epitome of consumer satisfaction in Poland and
Romania), and in the normalization strategy pursued by the Czechoslovak party
following 1968.
Second, changes in Soviet foreign policy and the West’s response to them were
quite important in creating conditions conducive to opposition. De-Stalinization also
meant a reorientation of foreign policy away from a hostile “two-camps” foreign policy
to peaceful coexistence under Khrushchev, and détente under Brezhnev. The new
relationship between East and West allowed for higher levels of cooperation within
rivalry.
The most important aspect of this for domestic polities of the bloc states was the
possibility for increased economic cooperation and cultural exchange. These contacts
gave the West important leverage particularly after the signing of the Helsinki Accord in
1975. While recognizing the territorial status quo that had existed in Europe since the
settlement of World War II, and facilitating economic and cultural exchange, it was its
provisions concerning human rights that strengthened the hand of oppositionists across
the East bloc. The linkage of human rights to security and economic issues gave Western
protests about the treatment of regime opponents more than symbolic impact and worked
to protect the opposition.
Finally, the post-Stalinist routinization of power proved to be unstable due to
problems with its model of economic reproduction. Beginning in the 1960s and
intensifying in the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet model of extensive growth proved to be
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the system’s Achilles heel. Its defects manifested itself in several ways including the
slowing of economic growth absolutely which made it difficult for the regime to meet its
commitments to domestic claimants on resources, weak technological innovation in an
era of technological transformation of the rest of the global economy, and economic
performance that lagged in relative terms to the bloc’s main international competitors
(US, Europe, Japan, China). All this created a substantial demand for reforms both on an
elite and popular level. These strivings in as much as they split the elite over reform and
made them receptive to real or tactical alliances with oppositional political forces,
periodically created political openings for the opposition.
Had it not been for these changes in the nature of Soviet-type rule, its orientation
to the outside world, or its economic failings, it is unlikely that the kinds of tactical
innovations made by the Polish opposition would have been an effective means to
combat the power of Soviet-type regimes. This however is not to diminish its
accomplishments. The conditions described above in no way made such innovations
inevitable.
Dismantling Monopolies of Power
The Polish opposition faced a form of routinized dictatorship that faced a
profound need to reorganize the economic basis of its domination. These late Soviet-type
regimes had been transformed into far more conventional forms of authoritarianism. In
understanding the nature of the dictatorial rule, it is useful to think of how it exercises
power as a set of overlapping monopolies. All forms of political dictatorship try to
monopolize political organization. Soviet-type regimes given their totalitarian origins
attempted to monopolize social life to a degree rarely seen under conventional
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authoritarianism. First they tried to monopolize the allocation of goods and services
through the process of planning. Second, they tried to monopolize the flow of
information through control of media, the educational system, and the cultural sphere.
The Polish opposition, beginning in the 1970s, developed effective ways to
contest these monopolies in two out of the three realms. It was its ability to contest the
monopolies of political organization and information that undermined the power of the
Polish regime. Further, the effectiveness of this technology led to its adoption in other
national contexts and it played a role in the dismantling Soviet-type regimes across the
region. Elements of this technology have been used since in the struggle with post-Soviet
forms of authoritarianism, albeit adapted to somewhat different conditions.
First, the Polish opposition of the 1970s and 1980s effectively ended the
monopoly of political and social organization of the party-state. This is what has been
referred to as the rebirth of civil society under communism (Ost 1990, Bernhard 1993,
Kubik 1994, Osa 2003). In this the Poles rediscovered the well-known fact of nineteenth
century political life that a flourishing organizational life was possible under relatively
mild or moribund forms of non-democratic rule, even modern authoritarianism (Bermeo
and Nord, 2000, Berman 2001). Second, they also dismantled the state monopoly on
information. The great innovation here was underground publishing, which created an
unregulated alternative public sphere. Another important aspect of this was the partystate’s attempt to monopolize the cultural sphere through control of education and
cultural production. Here the opposition waged a struggle over memory. Specifically,
they opposed the party-state’s attempt to control how the past was remembered.
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The one area where the opposition’s struggle to combat the party-state’s
monopoly was unsuccessful was in the allocation of goods and services. The most
comprehensive attempt to circumvent this monopoly was the work of the Network of
Solidarity Organizations Leading Enterprises, which culminated in the economic program
presented at the Union’s congress in fall 1981.4 Whether the idea of a self-managing
economy was truly a coherent alternative or whether it was doomed given the profundity
of the economic crisis will never be known due to the declaration of martial law in
December. Ironically, this part of the Solidarity program was the one area that had the
potential to improve the fortunes of the regime. Had economic reform succeeded, it
might have had a stabilizing the political situation, and provided the material basis for a
broadened form of dictatorship.
Solidarity’s most important technological contribution was the dismantling of the
monopoly of organization. On a fundamental level the Stalinist project was about the
abolition of civil society and its replacement with state organization (Kolakowski 1974,
Ogródzinski 1995). Soviet-type regimes were a particularly novel and comprehensive
form of dictatorship in that they tried to suppress plurality, even in non-politicized forms
as it stemmed from the diversity of society. And where it could not eliminate plurality
with a uniform model of culture and society, it suppressed the expression of difference
publicly. While this did not fully penetrate down to the level of the family unit or to
microcollectivities likes circles of friends, it functioned effectively on the macro-level.
With de-Stalinization certain organizations were depoliticized and thus subject to less
regulation (leisure time, sport), but the political realm, as well as social, cultural,
economic, and professional organizations were still subject to strict controls.
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What KOR and other oppositional groups of the 1970s initiated and what
Solidarity substantially completed was a change in the way in which resistance attempted
to create organizational space. Earlier attempts to change Soviet-type regimes took one
of two possible routes. First, there were conventional attempts to overthrow of the
regime. These were for the most part spectacularly unsuccessful because Soviet military
might defined what was possible within the confines of the bloc. The closest this came to
succeeding was in Hungary in 1956; however, the costs were not sufficiently high to
deter the Soviet invasion and the crushing of the revolution.
Second, there was reformist action within the confines of the system. There were
several varieties of this including in-party revisionism, human rights dissidence, and insystem engagement by non-communist political forces. In-party revisionism was
defeated in two acts in Poland (1956 and 1968) and its most prominent expression in the
bloc, the Prague Spring, was crushed in 1968-9. Revisionist social thought continued to
have a shadow existence in both Hungary and Yugoslavia through the Budapest School
and the Praxis group. While one could argue that the writings of these groups had some
effect on groups closer to power, they never were able to exert substantial influence on
the reform efforts of the party elite.
Human rights dissidents (like Sakharov or Solzhenitsyn in the USSR) moved the
nature of discourse outside of the party, but their primary tool of struggle was moral
suasion on the basis of an appeal to the party to pay attention to alternative standards of
what constituted human decency. While exceptionally brave and causing substantial
damage to the reputation of the Soviet Union internationally, these efforts had only
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marginal effect on changing the behavior of the Soviet regime prior to the era of
Gorbachev.
Finally, most attempts to create in-system space by non-communist political
forces were doomed from the start. Most organizations of this type were confined to
national front umbrella groups which used the ersatz plurality they represented for
legitimation and transmission belt purposes. Such parties were usually denied the
opportunity for meaningful participation in politics. There were several exceptions to
this. Social Democrats and Smallholders played important role in the events of 1956 in
Hungary and Social Democrats and other parties played an increasingly important role
over the course of the Prague Spring.
Sometimes in-system forms of resistance led to the politicization of certain
professional organizations, notably of writers, academics, and journalists. This seemed to
reemerge with each iteration of political strife in the bloc. Focused protests against
freedom of speech by professional groups, played important role in the liberalization
prior to and/or during the Hungarian Revolution, the Prague Spring, the Solidarity period
in 1980-1, and Glasnost’ in the USSR. In all of these cases, the effect of this was to limit
the scope of censorship rather than to eliminate it, and in the first three cases where
liberalization did not lead to regime change, such gains were reversed.
The last attempt to create an in-system political alternative in Poland came to an
end in 1975 when a independent Catholic caucus within the Sejm, Znak (Sign), largely
supported constitutional amendments which enshrined the leading role of the Polish
United Workers Party (PZPR) and the alliance with the Soviet Union. It was this failure
that marked the reactivization of the milieu of intellectuals and students who would form
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KOR and other opposition organizations. They proceeded to organize an open-letter
campaign against the changes in the constitution. When suppression of the strikes of
1976 occurred, it from this milieu that the organization of assistance for suppressed
workers grew.
It is the idea of opposition, a form of resistance organized outside the confines of
the official structures of state power that marked the emergence of a new form of politics
in Poland. It shifted the axis of political conflict within the country from competition
among factions within the power elite, in which reformists were only one and a fairly
unsuccessful faction, to struggle between the power elite and extra-systemic actors
(between regime and opposition). It is this shift in the axes of politics that made it
possible for the reemergence of civil society under communism.
The nature of these new politics was well-captured in what Leszek Kołakowski
(1974) described as “movements of resistance,” and by Adam Michnik (1976) as the
“new evolutionism.” Such notion also appear in the programmatic writings of Jacek
Kuron (1979) and is captured in his alleged dictum of “don’t burn committees, create
your own.”5 This new mode of politics originated around an idea of defense, specifically
of those repressed in the aftermath of June 1976. It involved the organization of legal
assistance, social relief, and publicity of their plight. It also levied demands vis-à-vis the
state for the end to actions seen as unjust or retributive in the cases of the repressed, as
well as amnesty for those arrested and convicted of crimes during the repression. The
struggle soon widened to include defense of those involved in the campaign to defend the
repressed.
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Organizationally KOR could be described as a social movement of which the
official committee itself was the public presence, necessary for the ability of the
movement to remain visible to society. Behind the small number of members of the
public committee were groups of activists (wspołpracownicy) and sympathizers who also
gave time and money to the committee. While the committee needed to keep a public
presence, the movement at large was better off being less visible and the capacity of KOR
as a movement to disperse when confronted with repression was an important part of its
ability to defend itself. Anonymous activists retained the ability to act despite repression.
The actions undertaken by the opposition movement in Poland in the 1970s and
1980s tended to be specific and goal-oriented, not programmatic. Rather than
commitment to an ideological vision or the transformation of the authoritarian state, it
focused on constraining state power and limiting its impact on citizens who attracted too
much attention by thinking or acting independently. Another important innovation that
began with the opposition of the 1970s was that activists did not demobilize after the
attainment of the limited aims of a particular campaign. They moved on to new
initiatives. The key juncture in this was the decision of KOR not to disband in 1977 after
securing most of demands via-a-vis the repression of workers and committee activists in
1976. This was critical in that the capacity of the opposition to defend itself and the
organizational and communicative space it had carved out.
The new politics of opposition was also designed to minimize violent
countermeasures on the part of the party-state. Oppositional tactics were explicitly nonviolent and wresting control of power from the state was not pursued. This latter aspect
has been described as “self-limiting” (Staniszkis 1984). These tactics were geared
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towards incremental, slow, and evolutionary, rather than rapid overnight, change. The
movement also tried to act within the letter of law even though it acted outside of the
norms of apolitical restraint that the security forces attempted to impose on the citizenry.
These tactics were geared toward constraining the party-state from using harsh repressive
measures.
The opposition expanded the scope of its activities with each new success. It
began with assistance to the repressed, the organization of publicity, petitions and open
letters, hunger strikes, and witnessing public events. It moved to include things like
demonstrations and public commemoration. The ability of the opposition to assert its
presence publicly was enhanced by the pilgrimage of the Pope to Poland in the summer
of 1979. While this event was religious, not political, it demonstrated the ability of large
masses of people to physically occupy large public spaces and express themselves openly
and peacefully. The ability of the broad-based opposition to stage small events in public
spaces also increased in 1978 and 1979. The real breakthrough in terms of political
action though was the strikes of the summer of 1980.
The ability to carry out large scale collective action that had the potential to
disrupt the economy was key to the next innovation in the technology of Polish
resistance. Previous forms of working class collective protest were made more effective
by using opposition tactics of staying organized and also by linking up both with other
factory strike committees and the opposition at large groups. The creation of interfactory
strike committees in several cities marked the pinnacle of opposition in Poland to that
juncture. Workers protected themselves more effectively by returning the occupation
strike tactics of the coastal areas in 1970-1. The physical occupation of large-scale
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economic assets meant that strikes become quickly publicized and their value gave the
authorities second thoughts about severe repressive strategies.
These innovations allowed the Polish opposition to move in new directions in the
summer of 1980. Enhanced defensibility and occupation of key economic assets gave the
Interfactory Strike Committees enough leverage to force the regime to the negotiation
table. This was obviously a major breakthrough for and expansion of the techniques that
had emerged in the previous four years. Once opposition had acquired sufficient strength
it chose to negotiate a set of liberalized constraints on freedom of organization. The
Interfactory Strike Committee (MKS) in Gdańsk secured the legal recognition of an
independent trade union and a large degree of latitude in its freedom of action (including
the right to strike). This was a milestone because it secured party-state agreement to a
breach in its monopoly on organization. While the Gdańsk agreement limited this to
sphere of labor, the opposition did not stop there. Throughout the period of Solidarity’s
legal existence from 1980 to 1981, the scope of the breach in the monopoly was
expanded both formally and informally. Legal recognition was also secured for Rural
Solidarity and the Independent Students Union. More ad hoc and unrecognized forms of
political and social organization also thrived during this period without legal recognition
due to the weakening of the power of the party-state.
The period of legal recognition and expanded organizational independence came
abruptly to an end with the declaration of martial law in December 1981. The party-state
rapidly and ruthlessly reestablished its legal monopoly of organization. Many
oppositional organizations including Solidarity went underground in the face of higher
levels of repression. Initially attempts to organize large public demonstrations met with
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some success but were never effective in securing a restoration of the pre-December
status quo ante. The period of the 1980s is when Solidarity waged a war of attrition,
hoping to retain some organizational capacity while waiting for the Jaruzelski’s
normalization strategy to falter.6 By the mid-1980s its profile was quite low and some
feared that Jaruzelski’s strategy had broken the opposition.
While normalization kept a lid on politics, the Polish economy never recovered
from the crisis that precipitated the birth of Solidarity in the summer of 1980. When the
regime used the opportunities made possible by the ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev to
power in the USSR to attempt to overcome the economic and political impasse, labor
unrest again emerged and the party state had no choice but to turn to Solidarity as a
potential partner. The intention of the regime was to liberalize its rule, not to fully
democratize. Solidarity in its negotiations with the regime worked tirelessly to restore its
legal status and when the regime tried to pull it into a partnership of responsibility
without giving it full power, it agreed only to enter into state organizations like
parliament through competitive elections.
While full democratization of the Polish political system was not Solidarity’s
explicit aim in 1988-9 prior to the June elections, its framing of its own participation in
power under the cloak of electoral legitimacy, made it possible for the extension of
dictatorship in liberalized form as negotiated at the roundtable into a full transition to
democracy when the Polish United Workers Party (PZPR) and its allies stumbled
electorally. When the Peasant and Democratic parties proved ready to defect from the
PZPR, a Solidarity-led government emerged as a solution. With this the party-state’s
monopoly on organization was not only broken but its hold on power as well.
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The second party-state monopoly that the Polish opposition dismantled was that
of information. The great innovation here was underground publishing, which created an
unregulated alternative public sphere. Prior to the operation the opposition in the late
1970s banned publications did circulate around Poland. The source of many of these was
émigré publishing houses.7 Locally, people also circulated manuscripts to each other and
well-worn copies of banned books.
Similar breeches of the monopoly on information were fairly common in a
number of communist countries in this time period. The most well-known publication in
the bloc at this time was the Chronicle of Current Events, which documented violations
of human rights and repression of activists in the USSR. Between 1968 and 1983, it
published some sixty three issues. Certainly the Chronicle was known to the Poles, but
their major inspiration came from older Polish traditions of underground publishing. For
this reason Polish underground publications were called bibuła (tissue paper) rather than
samizdat (self-publication) as in Russia. The Polish underground press picked up where
the extensive wartime underground press of the Polish resistance left off.
The underground press emerged during KOR’s amnesty struggle for workers
repressed following the events of June 1976. As KOR waged its publicity campaign it
began to issue regular Communiqués (Komunikaty) in which issued demands and updated
the public on the progress in the struggle. As KOR’s actions and those of other
independent initiatives broadened a need grew to publicize these activities as well. This
led to the creation of the Information Bulletin (Biuletyn Informacyjny) which chronicled
repressions against the growing movement and reported on a variety of independent
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initiatives. These publications were in turn joined by a host of other periodicals put out
by other political groups and new publications from the KOR milieu.
The creation of an alternative public sphere was critical to the mode of
oppositional politics. Because the official public sphere was both manipulated by the
authorities and subject to preventative censorship, effective opposition by nonconspiratorial social movements required alternative means of communication. If
repression was to be resisted the means to publicize its existence and efforts to counteract
it was essential. This was a fundamental component of self-defense.
Additionally, underground publications were one of the main ways by which
opposition recruited support. New members often first came into contact the existence of
opposition and its actions through receiving bibuła from friends or acquaintances.
Continued low-level contact with underground movements was possible in this way, until
people became motivated to undertake more elaborate forms of activism.
The existence of this alternative public sphere required an extensive underground
capacity necessary for printing and distribution. In time rudimentary stencil type printing
techniques gave way to offset printing on machinery bought illegally and hidden from the
authorities. A number of independent publishing houses were created and they began to
publish books (both previously banned and new), and periodicals of a specialized nature.
Publications began to circulate widely on the basis of a network of distributors
(kolportarz) particularly among intellectuals and among the crews in certain factories. In
the early period distribution was somewhat closed network, with copies going to trusted
individuals who distributed them to friends. In period just prior to the formation of
Solidarity, there were more conspicuous attempts to distribute bibuła publicly and openly
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at opposition demonstrations and in the locker rooms of factories with sympathetic crews.
By the late 1970s the monthly output of bibuła was several thousand pieces nationally.
Many of these circulated from hand to hand to several people.
In the period of Solidarity’s legal existence, the gains in the informational sphere
both magnified and deepened. The most important development was the legal
publication of a Solidarity Weekly (Tygodnik Solidarność). It was highly symbolic in
that it represented a legal breach in the state’s monopoly of information. The expansion
of the number of still technically illegal underground publications was spectacular.
Local, regional, and even factory-level Solidarity organizations all developed regular and
semi-regular bulletins, and attempts to repress the publications of the plethora of other
groups was minimal. This all had a liberalizing effect on the official media as well. As
Solidarity and other organizations broke the information monopoly, many editors, some
of whom were members of the union, also began to test the limits of censorship.
Journalists, whether sympathetic to Solidarity or not, took this also as an opportunity to
assert professional standards against using the press as an implement of political agitation
and socialization (Curry 1990).
With the declaration of martial law and normalization, underground publication
was one of the more effective forms of action as protest and other public activities
became more dangerous. The critical importance of the creation of alternative public
sphere under authoritarianism for resistance movements is attested to by this period in
Solidarity’s history. The ability of movement to reach its members when it was forced
underground between 1981 and 1986 was essential in its ability to maintain a public
profile and resurrect itself when opportunities presented itself later in the 1980s.
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The contestation of the public sphere went beyond the struggle for accurate and
uncensored information on a day to day basis. There was also an attempt to counteract
the way in which the monopoly on information had tried to control and shape content in
the social sciences, humanities, and artistic production. Here the actions of the
underground publishing houses were important. Most of them also published lines of
books, and some began to publish monthly or quarterly journals with specific foci. Many
of the books were classics that were banned. However, the availability of new outlets in
which to publish uncensored work attracted certain scholars to publish in the
underground under pseudonyms or even their own names. Another area of oppositional
activity of this sort was the organization of uncensored public lectures by the Flying
University (Towarzysztwo Kursów Naukowych) and other similar initiatives.
Much of this activity addressed blank spots in official discourse on historical or
cultural topics. This part of the struggle against the information monopoly was a fight
over memory. The party-state’s attempt to control the interpretation of the past was
intended to justify the existence of the state in its current form and its actions past and
present. By waging a struggle over national memory, the opposition carved out an
alternative national identity in Poland, one in which the underground state of the Second
World War, the independence of Second Republic, the role of Catholicism, and the crises
that punctuated postwar history (1956, 1968, 1970-1, 1976) were evaluated in a radically
different way. These alternative interpretations of the past led to different evaluations of
the present and what would be desirable in the future. While this part of oppositional
activity was geared towards contesting things as amorphous as memory and identity, it
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was perhaps its most radical action, because of its corrosive effect on the ideological
foundations of party-state power.
Solidarity and East-East Transfer
When the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Gdańsk Accord was held this
August in Poland, the guests included a number of important guests from the former
Soviet Bloc. They included Viktor Yushchenko (President of Ukraine), Mikheil
Saakashvili (President of Georgia), László Sólyom (President of Hungary), Boris Tadić
(President of Serbia), Václav Havel (former President of Czecho-Slovakia and the Czech
Republic), Jiří Dienstbier (former Foreign Minister of the Czech Republic), Zhelyu
Zhelev (former President of Bulgaria), and Sergei Kovalev (former head of the Russian
Human Rights Commission) and Gábor Demszky (Mayor of Budapest). The
representatives of Germany not only included president Horst Köhler, but symbolically
Markus Meckel, an SPD representative in the Bundestag who had been highly active in
the opposition in East Germany (Od Solidarności do wolności, 2005).
This cast of characters alerts us that the accomplishments of the Polish opposition
were more important than the replacement of an authoritarian system that a superpower
transplanted into a neighboring medium-sized state. The global importance of Polish
opposition came through something know as “East-East” transfer. While the Polish
opposition inspired many, it also had very practical ramifications as well. This comes
through powerfully in Zhelyu Zhelev’s speech last summer – “[I]t (Solidarity – mb) was
the long-sought effective means of struggling with the communist system” (Zhelev
2005).
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Absolutely the best account of how oppositionists from many countries in Eastern
and Central Europe took “Polish lessons” is to be found in Padraic Kenney’s book
Carnival of Revolution. His study does the best job to date of documenting the
phenomenon of East-East transfer. Specifically he discusses how activists from many
states came to Poland to study its model of effective opposition and learn the technology
used in underground printing and publication, and then put it into practice at home
(Kenney 2003). Gábor Demszky spoke about his own experiences last summer:
I got to know Karol Modzelewski in 1979 when he met with KOR’s Paris
representative in my apartment in Paris. At that time I learned Polish. When
Solidarity was formed I felt that it completely changed the situation in the region
and I consciously prepared to introduce the Polish experience into Hungary. I
decided to create an underground press. I bought tons of paper and hid it in my
parents’ basement. At the same time I tried to become an expert in Polish
matters… After László Rajk’s and Bálint Magyar’s short trips to Poland, I too
made one, one could say of a “scientific” character in May 1981. Armed with a
camera and a small dictaphone I conducted political and sociological research and
at the same time learned simple printing techniques (Demszky 2005).
The presence of the Georgian, Serb, and Ukrainian presidents points out that the
Polish technology of resistance has applications beyond the communist era. All three of
these countries had seen the fall of communist regimes and their replacement by
governments that initially seemed committed to democracy. However, in practice these
governments fell short of the minimum standards for democracy. These kinds of “frozen
transitions” eventually became institutionalized as a new type of non-democratic regime,
“competitive authoritarianism” (Schedler 2002, Levitsky and Way 2002, van der Walle
2002). This new kind of regime has become widespread in post-Soviet successor states.
In the three cases mentioned here, Polish oppositional tactics were used in a new
regime context. Specifically they were used to force what Marc Howard (forthcoming)
-25-
has recently called “liberalizing electoral outcomes.” In competitive authoritarian
regimes there continue to be elections even they though fall short of democratic
standards. Elections go on but they are not free and fair, access to the state-run media
favors those holding power, and the regime uses the resources of the state to mobilize the
population at election time (Darden 2001). Under such circumstances, the probability of
the regime incumbents losing an election is small and even when this occurs there
remains an option to resort to outright fraud as we saw in Ukraine last winter.
In the Serb, Georgian, and Ukrainian cases, opposition politicians formed broad
coalitions of political forces in an attempt to oust the parties of power at election time.
Expecting the incumbents not to accept the results if they lost, the opposition also
prepared extra-electoral forms of resistance in advance. This way, if the regime proved
unwilling to relinquish power, the opposition was prepared to contest electoral fraud.
The ability of the opposition to get our their message by alternative means, and mobilize
large numbers of supporters in order to contest the incumbents’ attempts to hold onto
power illegally made it possible to uphold the real outcomes of voting. In these cases the
kinds of resistance pioneered by the Poles became a means for opposition to enforce
electoral outcomes.
Here the tactics of non-conspiratorial movement-based mobilization that the Poles
pioneered proved to be useful in a more limited context. Competitive authoritarian
actually permits opposition political parties to exist, but places strong barriers in their
chances of winning elections. This requires solidarity of diverse forces to defeat regime
incumbents, not unlike how Solidarity brought together disparate political currents in
Poland. Actual oppositional tactics of public mobilization and organization of alternative
-26-
publicity proved to be indispensable when electoral fraud becomes the last refuge of the
party of power.
Conclusion
While the Poles pioneered this kind of oppositional politics, clearly the
Ukrainians, the Georgians, and the Serbs have adapted them to a new context,
competitive authoritarian regimes in a post-Soviet context. These more recent
democratic movements have been highly effective in adapting the internet as a tool of
communication and mobilization. The carving out of virtual alternative public spheres is
quite different from underground publishing, and clearly merits more in-depth study.
Despite these contextual differences, the ultimate lesson is that under mild or moribund
forms of authoritarianism the creation of an alternative public space and civil society
organizations remains a highly effective and peaceful way to effect democratic change.
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Notes
1
There were a large number of organizations that cooperated with KOR or were founded
and staffed by KOR members acting under different auspices. There were also a number
of organizations independent of KOR of different political persuasions. All this made for
a rather extensive set of movements in the late 1970s. To start there were several
important milieus within the movement after it became the Social Self-Defense
Committee “KOR” (KSS “KOR”) in 1977. This included underground publishing
operations, its Intervention Bureau (devoted to delivering assistance to the repressed), the
activists trying to connect to the working-class (around the newspaper Robotnik), and the
more nationalist group of activists who worked for the journal Głos. Committees to
found independent trade unions sprung up in Gdańsk, Szczecin, and Silesia. A number of
independent peasant circles were created, as were Student Solidarity Committees (SKS)
in a number of university towns. Another initiative in which many KOR members
participated was the Flying University (TKN), which delivered clandestine lectures on
banned subjects in many cities.
Activism was by no means confined to the KOR milieu. There were also a
number of independent organizations in KOR’s wake. The most notable among them
was the more conservative Movement for the Defense of Human and Civil Rights
(ROPCiO). Rightwing opposition in Poland suffered from a contentious spirit that led to
the creation of many splinter groups. Another highly visible and radical group was the
Confederation for an Independent Poland (KPN) which formally declared itself as
political party devoted the recovery of Polish independence in the near term. One of the
most effective groups in this milieu was the Young Poland Movement (RMP) in the
Gdańsk area.
2
The roundtable agreement was designed to allow the ruling communist party, the Polish
United Workers Party (PZPR) and its allies to continue to rule at least until the holding of
the next round of elections. The rules for those elections were never specified in the
roundtable agreement. Through preapportionment the ruling group was given control of
nearly two thirds of the more powerful of the two legislative chambers (the Sejm) which
made the election of their candidate to the new powerful executive (the presidency)
almost a sure thing. When the communists and their allies (United Peasant Party [ZSL],
Democratic Party [SD]) were almost swept in the contested seats and their uncontested
national list was rejected in the elections of June 1989, the ZSL and SD defected, giving
Solidarity the upper hand in forming a government (including all three parties) under
Tadeusz Mazowiecki. Solidarity then moved to dismantle the remaining limitations on
democracy.
3
The term “liberalizing electoral outcomes” comes from Howard (forthcoming).
4
For an excellent collection of original Solidarity self-management materials, including
the program promulgated at the Congress, see Persky and Flam 1982: 177-242.
5
For a recent very comprehensive treatment of underground political thought in Eastern
Europe, see Falk 2003.
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6
For a detailed account of the failure of normalization see Ekiert 1996.
The output of Instytyt Literacki (The Literary Institute) in Paris, notably the quarterly
Kultura (Culture), Zeszyty Historyczne (Historical Notebooks), and its line of books
(Biblioteka Kultury), was particularly valued. Also important in this regard was the
journal Aneks produced in London.
7
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