Thank you very much for this introduction, and thank you very much for inviting me to this conference.
And first, I would like to apologise. Please excuse my coughing.
And if you start coughing yourself tomorrow playing promise of smoke.
My you have seen some film footage, some pictures of this least spectacular revolution of all times,
which we had 25 years ago, and indeed the death of the maybe innocent.
And despite the lack of expected quality, I still love it.
Not only because it made me a free man. If I had not been before 1999, I couldn't leave the country I wanted.
But also, I like it as a historian. I like it. I love it because it's so messy.
It's being so circumstantial, so contented.
Messy, indeed. It's very difficult to put it into a coherent, highly curated narrative.
But I will try nevertheless, how I have heard the differing interpretations of 1989 in Poland mostly result from attempts
to reinterpret today to change legitimacy or to delegitimize some aspects of the present.
But I would like to stay in my historians hat and think about the revolution.
It was 1989 as a tool to understand.
They use it for not to shed light on the price of the president of Ukraine, but to understand a little bit more the communist regime.
For me, what happened between the summer of 1988 and the summer of 1989.
Of course, it was a longer process which ended sometime in the summer.
Was not the beginning of a new free market, democratic Poland's future member of the EU and NATO's unexpectedly high.
As would be strongly a historical thing in steps that no one fought.
In the steps. No other plan. No unexpected surprise.
Even the victors. The victors. We are actually more surprised than most.
But as a stage in a history of the People's Republic of Poland, the president, the final stage as we know it today.
But nobody knew it at the time. So a stage is something is a part of a process.
And I would like to have this process full perspective on this history.
And we have a process between the summer of 1988 when the Communist Party leaders decided to negotiate.
But these decided to make a radical turn in their policies because for the past seven years,
beginning with the martial law in December 1981, they did the opposite.
They kept arresting opposition leaders.
And after 1986, 1987, when a policeman noticed and could recognise a member of the opposition, he had a very simple answer what to do arrested.
And in the late 1980s, with those first timid steps towards inventing a way outside of the chop,
which then to by the policies of the martial law and then radical decisions to recognise
the Opposition as such important as the term opposition that he had at that time,
a different meaning than in this country. Because in this country you have Her Majesty opposition in Poland, opposition party illegal,
which is which cannot be present in the public space of its present is just temporary before the police arrives.
So the party leaders decision in the summer of 1988 to start talking to the
symmetric was it was a radical choice and that was a step in a longer process,
which I would try to now offer you just to put some order into this massive story, this contingent circumstantial story of the Polish revolution.
So what was my framework of what happened between the summer of 1988 and the summer of 1989 with the final decomposition?
Well, we know that it was fired at that time. Just the composition of a future of the communist regimes.
Whatever we were on are the model centric system, a system where every organisation, the final result reports to the Politburo.
Or to put it on the other end, I have to research the finances of the Communist Party.
The Communist Party was the only organisation in Poland, Slovakia, Hungary's Soviet Union, which approved its own budget.
Every organisation be the state owned company association or trade union had its budget approved by the party.
So that was the only one that was the Senate. And what happened between the moment when the parties decide to talk to the people,
like got to make our muscle or some other deputies of the opposition, that means they recognise there is a place for them outside of prison.
The second vessel was a private, ostensibly a private person citizen.
The vote was no ex cermak of the ex trade union, which had existed a long time ago.
But the matter of the past.
So this is for me the key feature of the process from the point of view of the history of Communist Poland in the couple's path,
how the compose as the centre of the regime,
what regime is much more than the political system is a social order, is the set of institutions, practices,
how things happen, how do you buy bread, whether you work, what you can watch on TV, what you can write and read in public?
And here I am very glad to use a framework provided by one links who revise the
old totalitarian regime theory and to produce just three elements in the central.
One was number one was monastery system.
He calls the monastic centre of power.
Second was, and I call it an exclusive ideology, kind of a north northeast, which offers salivation that explains and modulates in God.
And the third component was a tendency, a desire and capacity for mass political mobilisation.
And the combination of the three was, well, something that distinguishes communist dictatorships from other dictatorships.
Franco, Spain, in the 1960s and seventies, didn't want to have an ideology for everyone or to mobilise the population.
Usually dictators want the citizens or subjects to stay away from politics.
The communists, like the fascists, wanted to mobilise them.
So when you take into account the spread of features, what you see that the communist regime,
Poland gradually lost them and the final stage was losing the moral centric order of the society, economy, the political system.
And this happened sometime between summer of 1980.
So small are mentioned when an alternative, separate, independent force emerged.
But that was suppressed. Solidarity was effectively suppressed with the martial law in 1981, 1982.
The two other components. The ideology that ignores this political analysis and the capacity and the world to mobilise the regime.
In lost ILIR, the first victim of the revolution, the regime was the ideology which in Poland was effectively dead after 1968.
I spent 25 years of my life in communist Poland, but the first company that I met was in New York at the New School,
and I was really very glad to meet such person.
It was a great experience for me as a historian because I wanted to understand the Communists and I could not compare them coming to me.
So I really ideology was there as a motivating force and as something which can explain everything.
I promised salvation in the future, a personal salvation. So it was Greg.
Of course there was that that language of Marxism.
Of course, relics remain because people who are trained to perceive the world in some categories capital city work in some categories,
but there's nothing like it. So there were some Marxist-Leninist rituals, but actually it was no longer the binding force,
and it was also no longer a language to distinguish between those who are in and those who are out.
There were no communist. There were just party members as well that mention the capacity for mass political
mobilisation and the willingness of the party leaders to mobilise and effectively in 1980,
because they realised that if someone else was much better in political mobilisation, the martial law,
what the General Jasinski did in the 1980s, since December 13, 1981, was the great exercise in demobilisation.
He did his best and the party did his best to politically demobilise the poles.
And in the sense the regime of results in the 1980s is a post-communist authoritarian regime.
They wanted to mobilise the people because they know Solidarity's much better in mobilisation, and they did it.
And actually, we think today, one of the causes of civic passivity of poles and the very limited distrust of the government.
We should look back into that. I dream how the government, using extensive violence, was grooming people into passivity,
especially refraining from taking a political position in the public.
And yet the martial law was a very good prototype.
It was very effective. We must give justice.
However, it came as a prize yourself to save the party rule, which is the model centric system in Parliament.
But the party paid the price. Namely, it was no longer the role of the Politburo.
It was the role of us to capacity.
The key decisions were made by him and his closest associates, and the Politburo was just rubber stamping the decisions.
And that was, I would say, maybe not a mortal blow, but it changed the nature of the system.
It was not the system which Lenin and especially Stalin built eight years before.
It was something different, which of course, was useful when you have to make fast decisions, suppress and so on in extraordinary circumstances.
But the fact that the Soviets wanted to proof at general as the head of the party, that was the most unusual president.
He was not a party member. He didn't he had not made career as an operative.
He was a man from outside. And actually, initially, party apparatchiks didn't like him very much.
He brought a number of generals into the state administration, to the party administration.
And this way the role of the party leader was marginal, but it was no longer the central yakuza, the party of two little girls.
US was the centre of this monosyllabic system, no longer the Politburo, which made possible the events of the 1988.
It's not because when.
Yaroslavsky and his colleagues in the Politburo in late November and December 1988 have reached the point that they may accept solidarity legal again,
which they had not thought possible just a few weeks before when they started negotiations.
They had a very clear plan not to accept solidarity as a massive trade union or to accept that in some distant, unspecified future.
They were ready to open the process, make the opposition into responsibility for the state and for the economy,
but not to accept and because of some contingency, a silly, overambitious claim by a legal trade union leader,
Comrade Davis, who thought he's smart enough and he is a good trade union leader,
and he will all to do so in public, and he would like to have all in support of public debate.
So only under such circumstances, no one planned it.
It was an obvious mistake, but partly it is understood it was a mistake of the after months.
And then he realised if I wasn't socialist, of course, like socialist.
And they decided yes, to accept the solidarity.
And they had a very strange way of thinking. I wanted to find out sometime ago what was the mental horizon of that time.
And I found it. One of the Politburo members said at the time, yes, in 96 we have accepted the Catholic Church,
which in the early 1950s was to be to disappear, completely controlled by the party of the security.
We accepted. It was a pain in the ass. But at this moment, it stabilises the country.
Maybe we can have solidarity. Something to have the opposition, like the Roman Catholic Church in Poland,
relatively autonomous, but can take and taking blame for the cost of economic reforms.
That was the matter. They made a decision that it was too late to evolve and we have a whole series of policies.
But before they declared they accepted, so did that.
They called the Central Committee plenary session and other the Central Committee plenary session.
Jaruzelski met with the vocal opposition,
but all the characters who understood the property much better than him that they are going approaching a disaster with this.
And then he was asked personal. Fresh with his resignation from the seat and only under pressure.
He was asking a few friends of him. Did the Central Committee accept the decision?
Otherwise it was better like so and the party point of view.
Yaroslavsky saved it during the martial law, but the centre of power relocated into his body from the collective body and a body of yours that
guaranteed the party approval for this dramatic decision to reverse all the policies of the 1980s.
Because the party policies since the martial law in 1981 was never acted in solidarity.
So they made this dramatic turn, maybe not a U-turn, but a dramatic turn.
And this greatly contributed to what we know was the final collapse, because what was the result?
That was the most dramatic decision about the role. So many others, such as that Politburo members talk to oppositionists.
Now, of course, non-person. Just a few months before these decisions made by the party leaders publicly announced and seen on TV created confusion.
Amongst them, loyal party members, among the party apparatchiks, among the security officers.
So what is the. What is the future? If something we vote for, we risk our authority.
Our neighbours don't like us. Maybe our children will play for something which we are now going to abandon.
So what's the future? So we started with confusion, followed by demoralisation and eventually demoralisation.
By the end, a bank run to steal as many moral and material assets from the regime as possible.
In the summer of 1989. So this is a kind of a short story.
However, when you look at the mass events by many people in the fall 1988, in summer 1989,
why they are missing, because they are a growing number of relatively independent actors.
Comrade Moldova to the head of the legal trade unions that were invented to replace to substitute
for solidarity in the during the Marshall she was a Politburo member she was a party member,
but he behaved independent. In fact,
he was also terrible of the wrong decisions of the Department of Representation because he defended figures he had not consulted with the Politburo.
At one crucial moment,
he almost completely destroyed the negotiations because he demanded to speak as the third person in the final meeting of the whole thing.
And no one could convince. Why? Because he wanted to be independent.
And in this sense, he was effective because the trade union he was leading at the time survived the party and is now bigger than solidarity.
So he was effective in saving the trade union and himself, but equally effective in destroying the moral centric system.
Because if she can oppose the Politburo to some extent much, much greater than anyone could imagine in the past, why not the obvious?
And we have plenty of reports in spring and especially the summer of 1989 that bureaucrats,
state administrators, economic operators, trade union leaders,
the satellites, partly because Poland didn't have a multi-party system in a hegemonic system with two small satellite puppets,
politics united with the Communist Party. But they are increasingly assertive and they start behaving as if they were independent.
Well, that was exactly what the article quote on advice to the Poles in the 1970s behave as you were asked if you were free.
Of course, all of them had been appointed, moved out of the Communist Party.
But in the period of confusion, they started to behave, at least some of them, as if they had been not.
And by this fact, they eroded the power to the point when.
Party leaders fret in opposition of the potential backlash of some hardliners.
But there are no longer this hard liners culpable of an organised action.
The now because I think I have just a few minutes left, but let me add another item.
I have a little bit younger than the other speakers today and I didn't have a hillside the head,
but I think I got a unique person in this room who in 1989 had the privilege of
proudly standing on the guard of socialism in the uniform of the Warsaw Pact.
I was drafted to the Army at the end of 1988.
So in June, during the elections, I happened to be in the Polish army, the Polish People's Army at the time,
and I could watch this institution from the third in the two moments which gave me a knowledge which produced least Connecticut.
One was in February 1989, in a forgotten garrison town in northern Poland.
Every week on Monday morning, we had a hide hour, a meeting of all the political office.
There was a battalion police officer and at the beginning of my service to that political indoctrination.
But I remember this day when he came. He was a graduate of the fighting.
Risky, political, I can imagine.
And he came to the room and 200 of us, a company of men, and he said, oh, you know, soldiers, maybe multiparty democracy is not what happens.
Okay. He was a political officer, a graduate of the Catholic Church, his cousin.
Could you imagine what things defence people feel at the moment?
And the second moment is two days before the June the fourth elections, and that was in different garrison.
And I was assistant to the company commander.
And we have in Poland the military vote in separate polling stations and polling stations in the barracks.
So, of course, during the electoral campaign, some party candidates were coming over posters encouraging everyone to vote for the candidates.
But two days before the elections, on the morning roll call, I was standing with a little of because the company commander in front of this,
hundred men and boys, most of them didn't have any communication actually was not only through the bookshop.
And at the end of the roll call, he said, you know, soldiers today, we are about to have elections.
This is an important moment. And still, I will tell you something about it. He didn't dismiss the roll call.
And he gave me 5 seconds to invent what I can tell these guys.
100 of 19 year old. Peasant farmers from eastern Poland who were standing in front of me.
And I had 5 seconds to invent what to tell them in 5 minutes in this crucial moment.
And I don't remember what and I don't know how effective it was, but I know that the day after the elections, the first thing I did,
I run to the polling station and read the photo and realised that solidarity won all the seats it could win in this electoral committee.
And I realised that most of the soldiers voted for solidarity.
But I didn't cross the meaning. I was so happy until lunch and only when he gave me a horrible monetary food.
You can imagine the Communist Army. I realised what was the meaning?
Their meaning was the military option was no longer because the army revolted and
the soldiers knew how the revolt and the officers knew how the soldiers voted.
Get to make the default. Buy me a 25 year old soldier of the Polish People's Army.
I realised that the general you cannot use the army as we had used in 1981 because something happened in all of this 19 year old peasant salts,
some green uniforms knew it. I don't know if that was a consequence of my five minute speech,
but I know that the decision of the multi year officer of the Communist Army who took
a risk because he knew what I may be talking about in this 5 minutes and he left,
which was a message for me. Do what you wish. I don't know why.
For me, this is an example of this. The. If such film could happen in a communist on political offices.
Considers the positives of the multi-party democracy and the young lt allows me to make anti-party.
Subversive activity in the gutters of this regime was about to die.
Thank you very much.