When the Polish authorities declared martial law in 1981, one third of the members of the Communist Party resigned. Members of the Artists’ Union, Writers’ Union, Journalists’ Union, and Architects’ Union were also faced with a simple choice: stay in and support the government, or quit. Most quit. Most, in fact, immediately joined boycotts of state-funded museums, galleries, newspapers, periodicals, and cultural institutions. Parallel institutions sprang up: art exhibitions in churches, underground newspapers, alternative theaters. A friend of mine, an art critic, remembers the immediate post-Solidarity era as one of clarity. “It was all very easy then. The lines were drawn, you knew who was who,” he says, not without a certain nostalgia.
Seven years later, the political blacks and whites have turned disturbingly grey. Intellectuals of all types have drifted, not always gracefully, across the barriers which originally divided betrayers from betrayed. Some lost interest in toeing an “opposition line” more quickly than others, and the latter usually accused the former of collaboration. But as time goes by, and the political situation is no longer defined by the simple dichotomy between Solidarity and the government, it grows more difficult to distinguish the two sides. The artistic community has handled the problem quite rationally, by establishing a de facto system of gallery rankings. It is politically acceptable, for example, to show your paintings in the state-owned Foksal gallery, because its manager has maintained a reasonably good distance from the state. But the community looks askance at those who show in the state-owned Zacheta gallery, because its curators obligingly put on exhibitions of Polish military art when asked to do so. Private galleries, of which there are a handful, are subject to the same criterion.
The case of publications used to be even easier. Anything published officially was automatically suspect, since all decent journalists and editors quit official journals in 1981. With one or two exceptions, most notably the Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, the intellectual level of the official press sank so low that no one would write for it anyway. What to do, however, when one of the illegal journals applies, and receives, legal status? This was the situation that Res Publica magazine created in 1987, and the arguments over its decision to come up from the underground continue today.
Res Publica, was born in the late 1970s, in the same era as most other opposition journals. The magazine was the brainchild of Marcin Krol, an intellectual historian who is best known as the chronicler of Polish conservative thought. (He denies that this interest reflects his own beliefs: “So many people write about the Left here. I just wanted to provide some balance.”) Krol always conceived Res Publica as a kind of cultural antidote for the Polish obsession with politics. Its very name is a kind of pun, which echoes the name of a government newspaper, Rzeczpospolita: both mean “republic,” but while the latter refers to the Polish People’s Republic, founded in 1945, the former connotes the more universal, Latinate term for “commonwealth.” The magazine’s focus is art, literature, theater, music, the philosophy of ideas, and the contemporary Polish situation seen from a non-practical perspective. Krol says that Res Publica is “for people who are interested in the life of the mind . . . people who recognize that the geopolitical situation will not be changed within the next six months.”
In 1985, when post martial law Poland began to thaw once again, Res Publicans editors realized that if the magazine was truly to de-politicize itself it would have to lose its illegal status. This idea was then a novelty in Poland—now, a whole roster of political and economic groups are applying for legality—but it fit in with a certain philosophy of reform. Don’t continue breaking the laws, this philosophy goes; breathe some life back into them and give them meaning.
But when Krol’s two-year battle to legalize Res Publica, finally came to an end, he found that he had gained some unwanted supporters along the way. Because the government was then looking for friends in the intellectual community, Res Publica’s application was approved with the express assistance of the Ministry of Culture, and of government spokesman Jerzy Urban, who is a longtime confidant of General Jaruzelski. Some of Krol’s former supporters became hostile. Urban is one of the most disliked men in Poland, and the Polish Ministry of Culture, which played a more significant role in the Stalinist era, is hardly a body one wants as a sponsor. Adam Michnik, one of Poland’s leading political theorists, complained that Res Publica’s legality could only be accompanied by dishonesty. Did Krol really not care that his magazine would be censored? Did he really believe this would not effect the quality of the writing?
Krol persevered, and the magazine began printing twenty-five thousand copies per month, financed by donations, subscriptions, and extremely successful newsstand sates; Krol says he can count on the man who watches the cloakroom at the university library to sell at least one thousand copies. Traces of the censor did appear, always accompanied by a polite reference to the law governing the offending passage. Often these do very little to change the original meaning, as when a specific reference to the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 is excised from a long article dealing with Poles who migrated westward in the same year for obvious reasons, and replaced by dashes and a bureaucratic phrase indicating the applicable law.
Now, however, the critics have a new complaint. Res Publica, is all very well, they say, but somehow it seems to have lost its relevance. Its appeal is rather narrow, rather elite. While social unrest threatens to tear the country apart, while the economy slides from bad to intolerable, Res Publica, only manages to publish very nice theater reviews. An editor of one of the main underground newspapers told me she finally got fed up with how late it arrived and canceled her subscription. Besides, it was always lying around on someone’s coffee table, she added, somewhat disparagingly.
Krol says he doesn’t care. “If they say it’s irrelevant, that’s okay, that’s good, that’s what we want.” Michal Komar, Res Publica’s literary editor, observes that Polish politics are like a mirror, with the government and the opposition often sounding frighteningly similar: “Solidarity propaganda is the child of Communist propaganda. We wanted to re-establish the language of the Polish liberal tradition, which not surprisingly sounds strange to untrained ears.”
But there is a more serious side to these complaints about Res Publica. In Poland, elitism and irrelevance are serious accusations if the accuser implies that they add up to political neutrality. For years, the government has been trying to gain the support of intellectuals, particularly talented and popular writers, and it counts neutral intellectuals in its favor. In fact, anyone who doesn’t directly oppose the Communist Party is considered an ally. In such an atmosphere, it is impossible to avoid choosing sides.
Yet it is even more impossible to avoid making a comment. Because the country has no political parties and no institutionalized way to express political dissent, so-called “independent” Polish intellectuals take on the role of elder statesmen. They are obliged to make statements during crises, and are expected to offer opinions on every major political development. Res Publica’s editors are simply too well known to withhold their opinions from the public, and indeed many Poles turn to the magazine in search of “independent” thoughts. In this situation, any real aloofness would be tantamount to switching allegiances in what is still essentially a two-sided battle. Res Publica’s critics worry that the magazine is straying too far in this direction, although its editors vehemently deny it. They cite their willingness to publish the opinions of activists like Professor Bronislaw Geremek, one of Lech Walesa’s longtime advisors, and their continual focus on Poland’s many historical controversies, including Polish-Jewish, Polish-Soviet, and Polish-German relations in the twentieth century.
Because of Poland’s political polarization, the future of independent journals like Res Publica is still dependent on the development of other political associations and institutions, as well as other independent publications. If these get stronger, the pressure on the magazine will probably lessen. Res Publica’s voice will be one of many, rather than the sole legal beacon of independent thought. Complaints will then focus on the incompetence of its film critics, as they would anywhere else.
While Res Publica’s story makes a good alle gory (moral: it is impossible to escape politics in Poland), its attempt to establish a thoroughly independent cultural sphere is not unique. Other Poles have gone to far more drastic measures. Zbigniew Makowski, a leading Polish painter, decided to cut himself off completely from the divisiveness of contemporary Poland, and has literally refused to leave his Warsaw apartment since martial law was declared in 1981. He periodically issues suitably abstract canvases to the outside world, but speaks to no one and allows no influences to reach him.
One of the most exciting Polish drama companies, the Gardzienice Theater, has fought politicization through actively seeking to re-establish links with prewar Poland. The group is based in a village in eastern Poland, where the actors live and work alongside the few remaining traditional peasant communities there. Using Old Slavonic liturgy and music, Polish-Ukrainian mythology, and an almost Artaudian “Theater of Life” style, the troop tries to give an avant-garde twist to traditional Central European themes.
The list of independent cultural actors could go on and on. With the possible exception of Hungary, Poland has the most diverse cultural and intellectual life in the socialist bloc. Stalinism never grew very deep roots in Poland, partly because the Poles hate the Russians so much, and partly because they hate each other. Successful totalitarianism requires cohesiveness on the part of the rulers, and fear on the part of the ruled. Poles, even Stalinist Poles, could never agree long enough to make their country men truly afraid. Systems designed to terrorize were and are constantly breaking down. Government officials participate openly in the black market, border guards wink at illegal photocopiers and computers, and secret police leak information to the opposition. Even when officials cared to enforce them, norms of social realism were simply ignored by artists and writers. Today, it rarely makes sense to talk about a “school” of Polish painters, for example. Individual ism seems to be the only thing that the myriad of good Warsaw painters have in common.
In fact, the greatest danger to Polish culture now is not Communism but emigration. More than fifty percent of young Poles now say they want to leave the country in search of jobs and money. For the moment, many emigre Poles maintain tightly knit communities in Paris, Berlin, London, New York, or Chicago, the major centers for this new diaspora. But their fate will eventually be the same as for any travelling nation: assimilate or perish. It would be sadly ironic if the Poles, who held themselves together despite being divided between three empires for a century, who somehow lived through a war which destroyed a third of the population, who defied Communism more successfully than any other nation, who even now refuse to let the battle between the government and the opposition ruin their intellectual life, should finally be defeated by the lack of economic opportunity and the powerful lure of the West.
