My family comes from Warsaw. My parents were born and lived there until the outbreak of World War II. They are Polish Jews, for whom the adjective is no less important than the noun. They never denied their Jewishness, in the face of considerable and sometimes violent Polish anti-Semitism. Unlike most Jews, however, but like many other middle-class urban Jewish intellectuals, they felt profoundly Polish—in language, culture, and nationality. They have not forgotten what it meant to be a Jew in prewar Poland, but they were and remain Polish patriots. Their Jewishness may well have influenced their politics—my mother was a member of the prewar Communist party and my father was a left-wing socialist—but it did not diminish their attachment to Poland, its poets, its past, or, for that matter, its people. Against Polish anti-Semites and in contrast to prewar Zionists, they denied that Jews were—to use a delicacy recently uttered by an Australian Pole—“guests” in Poland. It was their home and they were deeply attached to it.

After considerable time, and through a rather robust Antipodean sieve, these attitudes and values seeped into my soul more than I knew and more, I suspect, than anyone intended. (I was scarcely conscious of this until I was in my late twenties.) As I suppose often happens among the children of refugees, for whom cultural and traditional attachments cannot be simple givens, the land of my parents, its culture, language, and people, came increasingly to occupy my thoughts and sense of self. Particularly over the past ten years, I came to read Polish and about Poland, to seek and enjoy conversations and friendships—some of my closest—with young Polish refugees, and to think of myself, in somewhat confused but important part, as Polish.

So Poland and “Polishness” have dwelt rather vividly in my imagination for some years, as they have in my parents' since 1940. But my parents have never been back, and until September 1985 I had never been there at all. Since the war my father, Richard Krygier, the publisher of Quadrant magazine in Australia, has been a prominent and effective anti-Communist activist, publisher, and writer in Australia, primarily in the wider Australian community but also within the Polish community there. He is well known to the Polish authorities. He has not believed that it would be safe for him or his family to travel to Poland and until this year the proposition was never put to the test.

I visited Poland in late September and early October, for the two weeks preceding the recent “elections.” (Polish, by the way, has two words for elections: one, glosowanie, literally means “voting”; the other, wybory, means “choices.” One philosopher explained to me that while in its omnipresent pre-“election” propaganda the regime used the second word, Cardinal Glemp, the Polish primate, in an unusually forthright speech, spoke only of glosowanie. There was, of course, no choice.) My original purpose was simply to visit and absorb impressions of the land of my forebears and my imagination. I was also keen to discuss some academic work with several distinguished writers in my field. As it turned out, I met Poles at European conferences held shortly before my trip to Poland and was asked to give some seminars in a number of universities. This somewhat changed the balance of my visit. Since, however, there is only one subject of conversation in Poland—Poland—and since everyone participates in that conversation—taxi drivers, passengers in elevators and trains, people in queues—my second purpose deviated from my first less than it might in countries with less urgent and pervasive obsessions.

I had apprehensions of a directly political sort about visiting Poland. I carried what the regime must regard as a suspect surname and my own comparatively few and insignificant political activities would tend to confirm any genealogical prejudice they might bear. And I was aware that Communist regimes are not beyond bearing such prejudices. My family was quite anxious and sought to dissuade me from going (though as the visit approached I suspect that their fear was tempered by excitement that I would actually be staying in a Warsaw which they had not seen for forty-five years). When it was clear that I would be going, my mother warned me sternly that in Poland “you must mince your words.” I had no heroic aspirations and I was not concerned that anything dramatic would happen. I had been assured by knowledgeable people that once I was granted a visa I would be quite safe. Yet when I came to make decisions about, say, what to take across the border or what to say or to whom within Poland, I realized that notwithstanding my not inconsiderable book-learning about Communism I really had no idea of how to behave in an unfree country, particularly one in which I was intensely interested. Even my mother's sage warning did not take me very far. This cut both ways: I might, rashly, not mince words enough; or, equally unsettling, I might mince too many words and manage to demean myself and learn little but platitudes at the same time. Similarly, though I knew well that certain things should be said and done only among those one trusted, I was not at all sure that I would be able to tell the difference.

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As it turned out, I need not have worried. I had no political difficulties at any time, at the border or anywhere else. Indeed, I later regretted that I had not taken in a bagful of Western literature, for which Poles are starved for both political and financial reasons. (Instead, advised that Poles lacked fresh fruit, I took a bagful of apples. This was not an inspired choice. Poland was swimming in apples when I arrived. Oranges, on the other hand, are extremely scarce and astoundingly expensive—a kilo cost 1,800 zlotys, about one-tenth the average monthly wage. Lemons are unobtainable.)

As for mincing words, well, virtually no one does. This is one of the exhilarating things about visiting Poland. One continually meets people preoccupied with serious matters, in fact the same desperately serious matters, and prepared to speak openly, candidly, and thoughtfully about them to a stranger. And since in Poland—unlike in “normal” countries, as Poles call the West—conversations are in a sense always the same, one gains quicker and easier access into what preoccupies people than is usual in countries with the luxury of unfocused small talk. There is no small talk, though there are plenty of jokes, all of them political.

The openness with which people are prepared to speak in Poland is extraordinary, whether compared with other Eastern-bloc countries or, as I understand it, with pre-Solidarity Poland. This is one of the profound and lingering consequences of August 1980. The English journalist Timothy Garton Ash goes to the heart of what several people told me when he writes of the “principle of As If” which has long been part of the self-definition of the Polish intelligentsia and its understanding of its mission:

Try to live as if you live in a free country, it says, though today your study is a prison cell. . . . But . . . in the mid 1970's, the number of intellectuals who actually tried to live by the principle of As If was still tiny. . . . What transformed the “dissident” minority into a “dissident” majority was the Solidarity revolution of 1980 and 1981. The Solidarity revolution was a revolution of consciousness. What it changed, lastingly, was not institutions or property relations or material circumstances, but people's minds and attitudes. . . . Behind the front line of confrontation between Solidarity's national leadership and the Communist authorities, millions of people across the country—in factories, offices, universities, schools—suddenly found that they no longer needed to live the double life, that they could say in public what they thought in private. . . . For a few months it really was as if they lived in a free country.¹

In Poland it does not take much looking to find people at least talking “as if.” People generally are not afraid of the consequences of what they say and they say a great deal. Poland is not Russia. This is evident in the ease and speed with which strangers and chance acquaintances will move to tell you what your friends have already told you: life is terribly hard, the economic system is quite surreal in its inefficiency, and nothing better (or, in a common variant, much worse) can realistically be expected. Not a single person I spoke to dissented from these judgments, not even a journalist for the party daily, Trybuna Ludu, who criticized Solidarity and defended the present government but whose private comments about “the system” differed remarkably little from those of everyone else.

Everyone made such judgments freely, if not always publicly. I spent an hour in a little shop run by a father and son, waiting while a cap I had bought was stretched to fit my oversized head. In no time I received instruction on the privations and bałagan(mess, chaotic disorder) of everyday life, the absurdity of official pronouncements, the impossibility of believing anything—particularly optimistic things—that “they” (oni), the “Reds” (czerwoni), the “Communists,” say. The father had enthusiastically believed “them” when they came to power after the war. He laughed, recalling the promised transformations to which he had looked forward.

In a taxi traveling from Cracow to Auschwitz I received similar, though more detailed, instruction, and example upon example of ways in which the system makes even the most ordinary, routine activities difficult. After about half an hour of such pedagogy, the taxi driver paused, perhaps thinking of earlier times in his life, and said, “Sir, I've said quite a lot. I trust none of this will go beyond the two of us.” Before I had come to Poland I would have expected such a question. After listening for two weeks to talk “as if,” I was startled. I assured him that I would betray no confidences, and the lesson continued.

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Before visiting Poland, and with no thought of the visit, I had written several papers, including one on my current work in legal theory and one revisiting work I had done some years ago on Marxism and bureaucracy. When invited to give seminars, I offered the former but once, largely in jest, mentioned the latter. That was taken up with enthusiasm and I felt in a quandary. Having told myself that I would be sensible, I was not sure that a critical discussion of Marx, Engels, Trotsky on Stalinism, and postwar critics of Communism such as Milovan Djilas, the Poles Jacek Kurón and Karol Modzelewski, the Hungarians George Konrád and Ivan Szelenyi, the Russian Michael Voslensky, and others, was the best way to begin. Yet the paper had been conceived and written as ordinary academic work and I did not want to start by being a coward before I knew that it was even necessary. I had received wildly different advice, some people saying that I should not even take the paper across the border, others (rightly, as it turned out) saying I would not encounter any problems. With some misgivings, which only disappeared when the customs officials evinced no interest in what I read or wrote, I had taken the paper in with me. (Poles, needless to say, have greater difficulties, at the border and everywhere else.)

I decided to leave the choice of what to give until I had some feel for the situation. Ultimately I left the decision to my hosts wherever I visited, and gave each paper twice. On one occasion the head of the department I was visiting preferred to hear my other talk, whether because it seemed more interesting or because it seemed safer, I don't know. But some young members of the department had invited several postgraduate students and there were a number of ex-Solidarity activists in the audience (also, I later learned, three party members). They suggested the seminar take a vote, and it was Marxism again. On both occasions, discussion of a paper highly critical of Marxist treatments of the social and political role of bureaucrats was absolutely free and unconstrained. On both occasions the discussion was fascinating to me, as much anthropologically as intellectually.

Marxism has a somewhat different resonance where it is the ideology of a loathed regime from what it still means in universities in the West. In Poland I met few Marxists—indeed, to my knowledge, none—though I did meet several people who had thought deeply about Marxism. On the two academic occasions, few sought to dispute my argument that the Marxist tradition had little useful and much that was useless to say on the subject of bureaucracy. On the contrary, several speakers warmed to the theme. Essentially the discussion, strikingly and poignantly un-“academic” in the pejorative sense, was about whether I or the thinkers I discussed had anything illuminating to say about Poland (and the other countries with “really existing socialism”). On both occasions people freely expressed views, which they could nowhere publish “aboveground,” concerning the nature of their political and social system and its practices.

One speaker, for example, vehemently denied that one could sensibly use the same term for Western bureaucrats and those in the Communist bloc. The gist of his remarks was that there is a difference between a clerk and a jailer, which it is important not to blur. The seminars themselves were ordinary university discussions, in no sense secret or clandestine, and I felt no pressure to mince words. On the contrary. Yet my paper could not appear aboveground in Poland. If it should appear underground I would be delighted and in more distinguished company than I am likely to be asked to join elsewhere.

Underground is not very subterranean. People constantly exchange illegal periodicals—of which there are allegedly over a thousand—and whole Western and banned Polish libraries can be had in underground Polish editions. Such publications are often used as texts in universities. Timothy Garton Ash conveys “the extraordinary quality of Polish intellectual life today”:

Here is a Communist state in which the best writers are published by underground publishers, the best journalists write for underground papers, the best teachers work out of school; in which banned theater companies just carry on performing, in monasteries, while sacked professors carry on lecturing as “private guests” at their own seminars: in which churches are also schools, concert halls, and art galleries. An entire world of learning and culture exists quite independent of the state that claims to control it. . . .

A recent article in the (London) Times, reporting on the impact of high-tech in the Eastern bloc, gives further examples:

There is a hunger for uncensored films in the bloc. By Western standards some of this is pretty innocuous. . . . [C]hurch videos—now a very common phenomenon—can draw a full house in Poland. But the challenge to the censor is usually more explicit. A film of the funeral of [Father Jerzy] Popieluszko [the priest beaten to death by members of the state security forces], recorded by Solidarity cameramen who flaunted equipment bearing the sticker “independent Poland productions,” is shown regularly in churches.

The underground produce documentaries—interviews with people who claim to have been abducted or beaten in the Torun area, the more politically sensitive of the Pope's sermons—and have started work on a feature film about internment under martial law. They also make scores of copies of banned films. . . .

Some Polish dissidents use word processors to print out samizdat materials. Underground pamphlets, even books, are sometimes put onto floppy discs, smuggled into Poland, then printed at the press of a button. More playfully, there is even an underground video game called Zomo in which a riot policeman chases a Solidarity supporter through a maze of streets. [November 12, 1985]

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The most solidly institutionalized pillar of life “as if” in this extraordinarily religious, now almost solely Catholic, society is the Church. One particularly poignant example is the church of St. Stanislaw Kostka in Zoliborz, a suburb of Warsaw. This is the church where Father Jerzy Popieluszko preached. After his murdered body was found, he was buried in the grounds of the church. He is mourned as a martyr both of the Church and of Solidarity. His church and its grounds have become a shrine in his memory (there is also a memorial to the young student, Gzegorz Przemyk, also murdered by the police, in 1983), and pilgrims come from all over Poland leaving badges and banners—huge Solidarity banners—in his honor.

It is a startling and moving experience to enter these grounds from the unrelieved grayness of Warsaw. In “official” Warsaw there is almost no color and, it must be said, no visible sign of Solidarity. During my stay, in fact, the only public color was provided by the ubiquitous and frequently glossy “election” advertisements: “From a Wise Choice Come Wise Laws”; “We are Choosing the Polish Sejm [Parliament]—Secure, Financially Responsible, Just”; “Do You Thirst for Democracy? Help Develop It”; “Choose! Decide for Yourselves Who Will be Your Representatives”; “Patriotism: A Characteristic All Poles Share”; “The Future of the Country Depends on You.” (Note that all energies are in fact devoted to persuading people simply to vote, not to choose.)

In Popieluszko's church the contrast is complete: his grave thickly covered with constantly tended fresh flowers, the fences of the churchyard strewn with one vivid banner after another proclaiming slogans both religious and political, and naming their source: University of Łódz Solidarity, Warsaw Steelworks, etc. In answer to the election posters, compulsorily placed in every shopfront, several of these banners proclaimed: “Father Jerzy, We are Voting Only for Mary.” (One of them continued, Solidarity, Lublin Electoral District.)

So conversations are free, lively, intense, and deeply serious, though the jokes are good. (Blackest joke I heard: In Łódz, the Polish-Soviet Friendship Society houses a coffee shop. The locals call it Katyn, after the forest in which the corpses of several thousand Polish officers, murdered by Soviet troops in 1940, were found buried.) In the contrast now universally used by Poles, “society” (społeczenstwo) has not been cowed by the “power” (włwadza) and survives as a largely autonomous realm. There are dense and strong social networks beyond the reach of the state, a vast range of extra-state activities, publications and forums for debate and discussion, and, in the Church, a powerful institutional protector of independent activity, almost wholly intact.

And one is moved and humbled, not simply because all this is happening under the nose of a state which, to put it gently, would prefer that it did not, but also because so much of it is done on such an admirable moral and intellectual plane. I met many people for whose views and life-choices I felt deep respect. Unlike what so often passes for political engagement among Western intellectuals, in Polish discussions one finds no coquettish frivolousness about serious, usually tragic, political business, such as revolution—even among supporters of revolution. This is not, of course, to say that everyone is wise and reasonable, but many are and as many or more are brave. It is hard not to be a little intoxicated by it all.

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Yet from the beginning I was struck by how sad so much of what I saw seemed. I was ill-prepared for this. Though I had heard about most of what I will describe, I had not felt it. The sadness of the conditions of life in contemporary Poland is so pervasive as to be palpable when one is there. Yet it is, of course, intangible and difficult to convey to outsiders. It may indeed not be reducible to its most obvious manifestations, but here are some that I observed.

Before my visit, I, like many people, tended to think of Poland in rather vivid colors, especially after August 1980. The Gdańsk strike that saw the birth of Solidarity was, after all, a vivid event, worthy of the startling flags, banners, slogans, badges, and T-shirts with which the movement it sparked is indelibly associated. The emancipated society of which I have spoken deserves to be evoked in vibrant, lively tones, and in journalistic accounts it usually is. The present Pope, who is one of the major inspirations of life “as if,” and Lech Wałęsa, its best-recognized practitioner, are hardly “gray blurs,” as Trotsky used to call Stalin. And they are nothing if not Polish. On the other hand, it is traditional to think of apparatchiks as gray, and men like Kania and Jaruzelski do not let us down. Where the apparatus has crushed or dominated the society, I guess one expects grayness to permeate everything. But I did not expect that of Poland.

I was not really prepared for the overwhelming grayness of the setting of everyday life, or at least that part of it constructed in the past forty years. The image that kept recurring to me was of a curtain, not iron any more, for it is too full of holes, but thick, drab, shabbily patched, unrelievedly gray, and draped over nearly everything one saw, everything that didn't move. Warsaw, of course, had to be almost wholly reconstructed after the war and, with the splendid exceptions of the faithfully rebuilt Old and New Towns, it is done in a uniformly drab, swiftly dilapidated, and “user-unfriendly” way. Indeed, Warsaw is so drab now that I was shocked to walk by a flower store (as it happened, a lovely one) and see such an abundance of brightness.

Other cities were less damaged, it is true, and there much beauty remains. The center of Cracow, untouched by the ravages of the war, is splendid, although it degenerates swiftly, and in the same monotone fashion as Warsaw, as you move into the suburbs. Then, too, my experience was limited, and I did see several exceptions. In Warsaw, for example, to walk into a prewar apartment after unleavened exposure to the typical small, dingy, postwar chicken coops is like moving from night into day. And since Poland has so many enterprising people bending and finding gaps in rules, there are sure to be many more exceptions.

Yet I do not believe that this impression of grayness was an illusion, and it does not simply have to do with specific material things. It pervades all public space: the identical half-empty shops with identical and identically drab signs; the weary shoppers standing in the omnipresent queues; the dilapidated but not old buildings; the uneven, pot-holed roads; the shoddiness of cars and other finished goods; the drabness of clothes. Even if not all that one hears about the shoddiness of domestic products is justified, it is believed to be true, and it is universally blamed on the system. That in itself is a significant social fact. Perhaps if one tore away the curtain nothing much would change, but the contrast between the vividness and resourcefulness of the society and the sickly pallor of the conditions of life makes that hard to believe. And this contrast, like so many of the contrasts in Poland, is all the more poignant for being so stark.

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Life is not merely gray but constantly, pervasively, and wearyingly hard. Even the most routine goods are difficult, and unpredictably difficult, to get. So a shopper's life—and who is not a shopper when so much is scarce?—is a constant hunt for something that, if here today, is sure to be gone tomorrow. So far as I could tell—my sample being merely three large urban centers, not the provinces—it is not at the moment a question of poverty. Essentials can be obtained somehow—in stores if they and you coincide; na lewo (literally, “on the left,” roughly, “under the table,” “on the sly”); on the black market (for more); from private sellers, some of whom are legal; or, if one has Polish gold—U.S. dollars—at the special dollar shops where many imported goods and some higher-class Polish goods are available to those (both Poles and foreigners) who have hard currency. But if poverty was not evident to me, the constant strain of making ends meet was. Money is very short and all too often even if one has the money one cannot find what one wants to spend it on. So much attention has to be paid for such pitiful rewards.

I took three friends to dinner at a restaurant. The dinner cost about 7,000 zlotys, or well over one-third of the average monthly salary and the whole of a pensioner's monthly pension. (For a Westerner this is either a reasonable sum, at the official rate of 150 zlotys to the U.S. dollar, compulsorily extorted from the tourist at $15 per day spent in Poland, or next to nothing, at the real rate of 650 zlotys to the dollar.) One of my guests, a surgeon, is not well paid by Polish standards, and a fortiori by most other standards. He cannot make money on the side, as many doctors apparently do, because his specialty requires hospital facilities. In any event, he is happy to work in the hospital because he still wants to learn from more experienced specialists. But he is angry and frustrated that facilities, equipment, conditions, drugs, are so primitive in Poland.

His wife, a vivacious and attractive woman, regaled us for some time on how fortunate she was to live in Poland. She explained that it is insufferably boring to go shopping in a “normal” country: as soon as you leave home you know where to go for what you want and you know that it will be there. Her life, by contrast, is full of surprises. Each day means a fresh hunting expedition. She goes forth armed, like almost every Polish pedestrian, with a string bag—whatever your purpose, you may pass a shop which has something you want, or a queue which suggests that it might be worth waiting for whatever it is that others are waiting for. And then she stalks. She is never certain what her “game” will be, or whether it will still be there by the time she gets to it, but she is ready to pounce. One day it might be toilet paper—a good catch—another day something else. And when she pounces she buys up all that she can or, if it is rationed, all she is allowed, because it might not reappear for some time. (One habit which Poles who travel told me is hard to unlearn in the West is the habit of buying in bulk, in case the merchandise fails to reappear.) If there is a crush of people for a popular item she limbers her hand so that her attack is faster than another's. Each day she has the opportunity of returning home triumphant, because she has found something she thought unobtainable, or beaten the competition to something desirable. Her life is full of successes. This parable was told lightly and wittily, and I laughed a lot. But of course it was not a funny story.

It is in fact hard not to laugh at the surreal consequences of an economic system so bizarrely out of touch with human needs. Thus, the same woman told me of a new institution for people on particularly long queues, which might last many days or even longer. Queues for furniture are apparently among these. The institution is that of stand-in queuers—usually pensioners or cripples—who for a fee hold a place for their “clients” until the time of purchase arrives. I also heard of an academic searching for pots and pans who was rung up by a friend to tell her of a set of Chinese cookware she had seen on display as she rode past in a tram. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a display organized (if I remember rightly) by the Polish-Chinese Friendship Society, not an item for sale. For all I know, she is still looking.

The day I arrived in Poland from London—hot, tired, and sticky in a crowded train—friends drove me to the apartment where I would be staying for a week. Unfortunately, the apartment—in a huge block in the center of Warsaw—was without hot water. When I asked why, my friend shrugged and replied, “Who knows? Socialism.” I was happy to take a cold shower but my friend would not hear of it. Instead he drove me to an international hotel with a sauna and swimming pool. He knew a caretaker and exchanged favors with him. Thus I spent my first hour in Poland, unexpectedly luxuriating in a sauna for well-heeled foreigners.

The system's inefficiencies and incompetency are such that it breeds a people skilled in informal arrangements—legal, semi-legal, and illegal—to overcome its privations and frustrations. Such arrangements are endemic: what is unavailable can often be found, from a friend, for a bribe, na lewo; what is illegal is often done, and for many ordinary, mundane purposes needs to be done.

One example evident to every tourist is currency exchange. Private currency exchange is a criminal offense. But the dollar is so valuable—both because it is worth many zlotys and because officially many things can only be bought for dollars, no matter how many zlotys you have—that as a natural and inevitable consequence people are keen to buy dollars. And the official rate is so derisory that anyone with dollars who needs zlotys has little incentive to go to a bank. Even if he does, he will be accosted in the street outside by touts offering a handsome rate for his money. He might even receive an offer from the bank teller. So currency constantly changes hands privately; everyone does it, and everyone knows that everyone does. But don't buy from those touts. Among them are provocateurs and you might be arrested.

Apartments are very small. One distinguished academic I met has a grown daughter who is ill and who with her own husband and child lives with her parents in their apartment. There is so little room that the academic lives in his office, going home at about eleven in the evening merely to sleep. Currently a young couple who put their names down for a palace such as this can expect to wait about twenty years. In the meantime, unless they inherit an existing apartment or can afford what I am told are prohibitive prices to buy one, they must cram in with their parents and hope that their own children might get the benefit by the time they are ready to leave home.

A friend bemoaned the lack of mobility among Polish academics: she occasionally dreamed of moving from Cracow to Warsaw or some other city but said it was inconceivable. I asked if that was because jobs were tight, as they are now in Western universities. “No,” she replied, “I would have nowhere to live.” When I emerged from my sauna in Warsaw, I went to the telephone operator of the exclusive, expensive, international hotel housing it in order to look up a number. The operator gave me a 1978 phone book, which, she said, was the most recent she had. “But don't worry; we don't move around.”

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Life is a constant grind. There is nothing dramatic about this, nothing horrifying, just an unending, frustrating, time-consuming, and unspeakably wearying grind. Moreover, for many people I spoke to the strain is not merely, or primarily, related to material privations and frustrations. Of course everyone is sick of queues, but the tiredness is not merely physical—though there is more than enough of that. Even the bravest people I met, perhaps especially they, live under constant psychic strain. Life “as if,” after all, is not without risk or price. True, it appears that the regime has for the moment given up on hearts and minds. It seems resigned to being regarded as the alien “power” set against and oppressing Polish “society.” And as a glance eastward shows, the regime could be more brutal than it has yet been. But it insists on compliance and appears to seek submission, in an increasingly repressive manner.

The local operations of Solidarity have, for the moment at least, been crushed. The shrines to Przemyk and Popiełuszko, extraordinary symbols of independence though they are, do, after all, commemorate murders. Arrests continue. In May 1985 three prominent dissidents were arrested for discussing a proposed 15-minute strike (which never took place) with Lech WałŽsa in his apartment. In June, after a farcical trial, the three—Adam Michnik, Bogdan Lis, and Władysław Frasyniuk—received 2½-to-3½-year jail terms. The recent so-called amnesty for political prisoners will not apply to them or to anyone regarded as “socially dangerous.” New laws which came into force on July 1 (the day protests were expected over increases in meat prices and falling living standards) augment the legal powers of the security forces and summary courts, further restrict rights of independent assembly, and increase penalties for “public-order disturbances.”

Hitherto the universities seemed, for some reason, to have missed some of the more malevolent forms of regime attention. Indeed, the universities were governed by a relatively liberal Higher Education Act of 1982, which was an only partly watered-down version of drafts prepared before the state of war was declared. This is changing. In April 1985, Bronisław Geremek, a medieval historian and adviser to Solidarity, became the first person to be fired from the Polish Academy of Sciences. In May, General Jaruzelski told the Central Committee that (according to a report in the British Listener) “the state could no longer afford to maintain universities that would be training grounds for dissent.” In late July, the Polish Sejm, which had passed the Higher Education Act of 1982, issued “amendments” emasculating the autonomy and self-government which that Act had allowed.

The draft amendments had brought forth massive protests from university governing bodies, academics, and students—protests in themselves unique in Communist states. The final laws are thus somewhat less vicious than they were intended to be, but they are vicious enough. New faculty members must take an oath of allegiance to the state and pledge that they will dedicate themselves to the socialist education of students. The universities' electoral colleges, which used to elect rectors and deans, are to be disbanded, and this function is to be performed by university senates—with all choices for membership subject to veto by the Minister of Education. The Minister can also overrule or suspend decisions of collegiate bodies, dissolve them, decide on curricula, and dismiss rectors, deans, and other members of the faculty. The powers of student self-government bodies have been gutted.

When I was in Warsaw it was rumored that eight faculty members were scheduled to be fired. Elsewhere the head of one institute I visited was told to expect an investigation of his staff to examine their records of loyal acts. One such act, he was told, would be voting in the October elections. On the Friday before those elections (which were held on Sunday), the male members of the one department I visited that day received letters from the army, requiring them to make appointments for interviews on the following Monday. No reason was given. My friends assumed this was yet another “subtle” attempt to concentrate their minds over the election weekend. By early December the expected purge had begun. Over 70 senior academics throughout Poland were dismissed from their posts (though not from their institutions), “verification”—political vetting—was to begin early this year, and a party spokesman announced that “universities had to uphold the principles of socialist education and that lecturers had to be measured against these principles.”

Finally, a number of academics with foreign invitations have for some years been refused passports. Since foreign materials are so hard to get, and the academics' sense of isolation from the Europe to which they profoundly and defiantly insist they belong is so deep, this is a painful blow. Again, as is characteristic of most Polish repression, the barrier between the East which oppresses them and the West which has so much they lack and yearn for is not impermeable; but it is real and palpable. Many Poles do travel, and professional literature sent to professional addresses (though not to private homes) stands a good chance of getting through. But no one will be surprised if it does not, and one must take care what one sends. I am told that problems connected with isolation from latest developments, let alone equipment, are particularly strong in the hard sciences. They are certainly not small in the fields with which I am familiar. Apart from whiskey, the best present one can bring a Polish intellectual is a good book.

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What results from this unholy mixture, unique in the bloc, “a country,” as Adam Michnik puts it, “where the nation strives for freedom and autonomy, and the authorities try to force it back into a totalitarian corset”? Not, it must be said, terror or even, among most people I met, immediate fear. While the authorities' continuous repression appears to retain pragmatic usefulness—it stops strikes—it has lost symbolic power. And the regime's repression is so uneven—some heroes do get passports, some non-heroes do not—that it is doubtful whether even a draconian law will be enforced systematically. No one, for example, seemed to know what use the regime would make of the harsh new law on universities. Not that anyone considered this new law, and the huffing and puffing accompanying it, to be encouraging signs. But optimists said to me, “We'll survive. We've had to live with such laws before. Poland is still far from being Russia,” while pessimists replied, in effect, “Given the continuing crisis the situation can only get worse. This law will be enforced and there may be harsher laws to follow. And Poland may well become Russia.” Instead of fear one has frustration and wary apprehension. Of course good should triumph, but Polish history does not give one much reason to bet on it, and Poland's neighbors are not keen to help it along. Many futures are possible; some of the most plausible are less than attractive. And no one is a short-term optimist.

In the meantime, one waits, struggles, and decent people continue to behave decently. None of this is easy. Some of the most courageous people of principle I met are very, very tired: tired of the petty frustrations and idiocies of daily life in “people's Poland”; tired of that single conversation, so exhilarating to a foreigner; tired of constantly struggling for the fate of Poland; tired of a life where so many decisions and acts—inconsequential in “normal” societies—are moral decisions; tired, in effect, of constantly having to be morally serious; drained from constant material, psychic, and moral strain and the knowledge that it might go on forever and might get worse.

Living through a war must be something like this. In most ways, of course, it is easier to live in Poland now than during war. Hardly anyone is killed, no one lives in terror, and though the struggle is recognized to be a long one, morale is strong. It is more like living under occupation, with rulers who won't go home. These rulers have, in their implacable overlords, a trump card which no one wants them to play; they are also well versed in what Trotsky called “corridor skills.” For the rest, state and society are in stalemate, which both sides expect to last some time, and there is no respite visible.

One morale-testing and sometimes sapping difference between the present situation and one of war is that the Polish regime is not outside the society (though it is alien to it). It holds the jobs, pay, economy, and political and administrative structures. Thus the system rests on greater and smaller complicities. As one officer of the secret police recently observed to an underground paper, “I have the impression that efforts have been made for many years to turn Poland into a country in which it is difficult not to be a scoundrel.” The benefits of collaboration are material and obvious: foreign trips, access to dollars, job preferment, a better apartment sooner, unrationed gasoline (the present ration is 24 to 30 liters per month), non-market privileges, and so on. Not, I imagine (though I don't know), princely fortunes—Jaruzelski is not Edward Gierek, and anyway the whole country is so ramshackle that it is doubtful whether there is a great deal to spread around. But every bit extra counts when it is denied to everyone else. And the regime is adept at encouraging complicities, even among those—now an extraordinary number—who will do nothing gross.

I was told of a meeting between the Deputy Prime Minister, Mieczysław Rakowski, and leading literary and intellectual figures after the declaration of martial law. Knowing his audience well, since he had been among them for many years, he allegedly said, “You probably think that by refusing to cooperate with us the intelligentsia can force us to back down. That's not so. Czechoslovakia was a cultural desert for over ten years. Poland can be the same. It's up to you.” I spent an evening with a young academic who berated himself and his colleagues for holding on to their jobs, whereas younger aspirants would have to decide whether to take the oath of loyalty or not. He quoted an author (whose name I missed): “The Nazi occupation forced us to be heroes; this occupation forces us to be shit.” I suggested that there was a significant area of moral space in between, but he, who obviously occupies that space and is no shit, refused to agree. So there is a good deal of melancholy.

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People have to decide again and again: how much dealing with the regime is permissible? How much is too much? Have I gone too far? Have my friends gone too far? The choices are not enviable and they do not affect oneself alone. I had some of my most rewarding conversations with a young academic who had been active in Solidarity. She sought to explain to me some of the ways in which even one's most basic and private decisions get caught up in moral dilemmas. In “normal” societies, she argued, you would like to bring up your children to share your values, whatever they are. But so long as this system exists, our values are the opposite of its values. Should we teach our children to believe what we do, or to believe what we despise and to behave in ways we would not behave?

Apart from such “first-order” concerns—what should I do?—this constant call on moral decision breeds a variety of second-order preoccupations, some of them wise, subtle, and discriminating, some suspicious, some fundamentalist, some dogmatic and extreme. Not all of this is socially or politically healthy. It is fed by, and feeds, the traditional divisions between “realists” and “romantics” which have bedeviled Polish politics for centuries and have made realism seem (and often be) opportunism and idealism seem (and often be) utopianism. Poland does not need these divisions to add to its list of problems, but in the present conditions they seem inescapable.

Of course a great many people negotiate this chasm realistically and honorably—it is, after all, a skill they have had some practice in acquiring. One friend, for example, works in a small academic department, several of whose members are in the party. He explains their motives without rancor: one is scared, one is a careerist, one likes to travel. Personal relations at work are civil and he does not suspect them of undue patriotic diligence. He thinks it unlikely that they will report on other members of the department, and discussion, as I have said, is candid. But he will have nothing to do with them socially; they will never enter his home.

There is, however, another option, and many Poles, particularly young ones, are taking it. That is to opt out. The most clear-cut way is to leave. Poland has suffered a brain drain of enormous proportions from which it will not quickly recover. Motives are various: danger if one stays, exhaustion, hope of economic betterment, inability to practice one's vocation or practice it properly, the wish to get far away from Russia, and many others. The consequences are the same. Many of the most talented and outspoken Poles have been lost to Poland.

Among those who stay, many of the best educated do not enter, or they leave, state employment, but drive taxis, become tradesmen, go into private business. Again the reasons are various, sometimes political, sometimes moral, sometimes financial. Among academics I met several who specialize in arcane theoretical areas because it is impossible to publish truthfully anything related to politics or current affairs. An important question which Poles generally, and the intelligentsia especially, ask is, what will be the result for Poland of all this highly talented opting-out? And the problem is not just what Poland loses when many of its best people opt out, there is also the question of who takes their place: careerists, dopes, thugs. Thus the notorious Polish “negative selection” continues and now it need not even be deliberate. The jobs remain and someone will be found to fill them.

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Given the all-pervasive hatred and distrust of “them,” the “Reds,” the “Communists,” it is inconceivable that the party will find people of moral and intellectual stature to replace those whom it has driven out. For there is one thing on which “society” is now agreed: its misfortunes derive from the system of power, not from a Gomułka, Gierek, or Kania whose replacement might do things differently. (When asked why my parents had not visited Poland after the war, I explained in terms of my father's anti-Communist activity. Several people who hardly knew me and had never met him asked me to pass on their congratulations.) Last August the New York Times Magazine published a moving account by Michael T. Kaufman, its Warsaw bureau chief, of a visit to Poland by his father, an eighty-two-year-old ex-member of the Polish Communist party. This man had sat in Polish prisons for 9½ years with, among others, Adam Michnik's father, Ozjasz Schechter. Among the many intelligent comparisons which the old man makes between pre- and post-war Poland, one seems to me particularly striking:

He said that when he was a young Communist organizer in the 1920's, people in Poland had many ways to explain and account for their unhappiness and dissatisfaction. “There was a pluralism of blame,” he said. “A worker might blame the factory owner, some anti-Semites blamed wealthy Jews, Jews said the problem lay with anti-Semites, and the peasants resented wholesale merchants. Others pointed to Germans or Ukrainians as the source of the trouble. Meanwhile, we Communists, a small group, ran around saying, no, it's not a question of individual grievances, it is the system that is to blame. Now, after 50 years, I come back and what do I see? The whole nation knows perfectly well that the problem lies with the system and only the leaders are saying, no, the difficulties are the fault of individuals, former leaders, mistaken politicians, or, as during the anti-Semitic purges of 1968, Jews.”

So, unless there is some breakthrough, the nature of which I cannot imagine and some forms of which I fear to imagine, the impasse between state and society will continue. Each side is strong enough to thwart the other's deepest ambitions, but not to realize its own. For the immediate future, it seems to me that Adam Michnik's prognosis, smuggled out of jail as he awaited his recent trial, will prove accurate:

Yes, it is possible to govern in this way. So long as geopolitics is favorable, this system may last for quite some time. But it cannot rid itself of the stigma of an alien, imposed garrison. Repression has lost its effectiveness. Our imprisonment does not frighten anyone, nor will anyone be enslaved by it. This has been the case for the past five years.

Michnik goes on to offer grounds for his heroic and profound optimism:

They [the rulers] are much too confident. They forget that the sociology of surprise is hidden in the nature of the Leading System [Communism]. Here, on a spring morning, one may wake up in a totally changed country. Here, and not once, Party buildings burned while the commissars escaped clad only in their underwear. Edward Gierek, so beloved by Brezhnev and Helmut Schmidt, so respected by Giscard d'Estaing and Carter, within a week traveled from the heights of power into oblivion. Sic transit gloria mundi. . . .

Poland's postwar history, and in particular Solidarity and its extraordinary and continuing aftermath, are striking testimonies to the “sociology of surprise.” And it can be witnessed elsewhere in the bloc. One of the characteristics of political development in the satellite countries of Central and Eastern Europe has been, as a recent study put it, that “the whole vast apparatus of domination which seemed omnipotent and omnipresent the day before, disintegrates the next day.” And it may be that Poland, unlike its neighbors, will avoid what has traditionally followed that collapse in Poland itself, in Hungary, in East Germany, and in Czechoslovakia:

Once popular resistance is broken by external force (or even by no more than a threat of external force) the whole apparatus of domination (with a few changes at the very top) is reconstituted with remarkable ease. In an essentially unchanged form, it again attains that character of practical immovability and solidity which can even result in the memory of its collapse fading from the consciousness of its subjects—at least until the time when its next crisis approaches.²

Poland is already an astounding exception in that the apparatus has only been able to reconstitute itself, not the cowed or hopeless population which has been the other pillar of “really existing socialism.” I have no doubt that this Polish exceptionality will continue. Sadly, I also have no doubt that its bearers will continue to pay dearly for a system they neither want nor deserve. I hope Michnik's optimism will ultimately be vindicated, though I am not confident that it will be. I also hope that worse will not befall Poland, though I am not confident that it will not.

¹ “Poland: The Uses of Adversity,” New York Review of Books, June 27, 1985.

² Ferenc Fehér, Agnes Heller, and György Markus, The Dictatorship Over Needs (1983).