The Moral Perils of Being Polish

Lech Walesa, Poland’s legendary dissident, may have been a communist informant, but that makes him neither hero nor villain — only complicated, like his country.

BY EMILY TAMKIN-FEBRUARY 29, 2016

Lech Walesa was the leader of Poland’s 1980s opposition movement, Solidarity (Solidarnosc), a national hero, and the country’s first post-socialist president. Until a few days ago, when he became a Soviet spy.

Earlier this month, accusations emerged that Walesa was a paid communist informant from 1970 to 1976 (four years before the emergence of the Solidarity party). This is not the first time such accusations have been made against Walesa, who was cleared of similar charges in 2000, and who has long maintained that the communists falsified such documents to besmirch his reputation. This time, however, the documents were taken from the home of a former communist interior minister and, according to Lukasz Kaminski, head of the Institute of National Remembrance, a government-affiliated research organization, appear authentic.

The news has shaken Poland — there has already been talk of renaming Gdansk’s Lech Walesa airport, and some have even called on Walesa to returnhis 1983 Nobel Peace Prize — and reverberations have been felt throughout the former Eastern Bloc (even the Russian media have joined in, sayingWalesa worked for the KGB as well as the Polish secret police). The 279 pages of documents, released on Feb. 22 to a long line of journalists and historians, may or may not show that Walesa was indeed a paid informant; they seem to, though he has denied the charge. But they have already shown how those who shaped Poland’s political past and, in turn, its present and future were not pure and perfect souls, but imperfect humans.

To be sure, if true, Walesa could have been helping an organization ruin people’s lives. The Polish United Workers’ Party, via the secret police and the help of those who provided it with information, could censor and silence, blackmail and bribe, torture and tear families apart. Gen. Czeslaw Kiszczak, from whose house the files were turned over to the Institute of National Remembrance, was one of its most feared operatives.

But the other reason the accusations are so serious is because of how central Walesa, and Solidarity in general, has become to the self-image of post-communist Polish society. Most opposition movements in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc were, up until the very end of the 1980s, composed of intellectuals (i.e., Russia) or small bands of patriots (e.g., the Baltic States). They may have had moments where they managed to tap into the power of the masses — in 1978, for instance, Georgian dissidents brought thousands of people to the streets to protest against changing the special status of the Georgian language in the constitution — but they were, for the most part, made up of a small, exceptional portion of the country’s population.

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