The first political
event in my lifetime to stir me, that moved me to follow it excitedly in the
newspapers, was the rise of Solidarity, starting in 1980 in the Lenin Shipyards
in Gdansk. Like a lot of people around that time I was thoroughly disenchanted
with politics and the general drift of public events. My state of mind hasn’t fundamentally
changed but Solidarity was different. For the first time, we could imagine an
end to Soviet tyranny and, naively, Communism. In his postscript to the third
edition (1999) of The Polish Revolution:
Solidarity (1983), Timothy Garton Ash offers a balanced evaluation of this characteristically
Polish movement:
“The Polish
revolution of 1980-81 was, in its methods though not in its outcome, the first
velvet revolution. Solidarity was a pioneering Polish form of massive social
self-organisation, with the general objective of achieving, by means of
peaceful pressure and negotiation, the end of communism. In this, it ultimately
succeeded. Some of the larger claims made for Solidarity, with a touch of old
Polish messianism, must be discounted. It did not offer a model of new politics
tout court. It was not the primary
cause of Gorbachev’s reforms. None the less, the impact of the Polish events on
Soviet policymakers and intellectuals was considerable. . . . Poland was the
icebreaker for the end of the Cold War.”
Elsewhere in
the book, Garton Ash quotes the concluding lines of Zbigniew Herbert’s “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito” (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter):
“repeat old
incantations of humanity fables and legends
because this
is how you will attain the good you will not attain
repeat great
words repeat them stubbornly
like those
crossing the desert who perished in the sand
“and they
will reward you with what they have at hand
with the
whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap
“go because
only in this way will you be admitted to the company of cold skulls
to the
company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland
the defenders of the
kingdom without limit and the city of ashes”
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