The Politics of Catastrophe

Catastrophe, Politics, and Probability

Politics is obviously the sphere of unpredictability. This feature is proverbial as there are so many examples of political decisions that had seemed to be sheer impossibilities before they happened. This characteristic of politics makes this concept very close to the idea of disaster. No wonder that natural catastrophe can avert the course of affairs and change the political scene. Elsewhere, I have described two examples of such a situation. The severe winter of 1978–1979 turned out to be a serious blow to the legitimacy of the communist state and the flood in 1997 changed the predicted outcomes of parliamentary elections in Poland, causing the defeat of the post-communist party. ¹ The question of course arises whether or not the same outcomes would have emerged if the weather had been different. That we cannot know for sure, but at least we can be sure that natural catastrophe works as a magnifying glass to show with sometimes caricatured precision the details of political life previously hidden from the gaze of beholders. The same applies to catastrophes that have their causes in human activities. A natural catastrophe can be politically significant because some steps to protect citizens from its consequences have been neglected, but usually it is difficult to blame political authorities for, let us say, a heavy snowfall. ²

There is, however, a second kind of catastrophe in which natural causes coincide with the serious negligence of the government—if for instance it does not secure a dam properly and its bursting causes serious fallout. In this case, we have to deal with a double political knot. Politicization concerns not only the consequences but also the causes of catastrophe. Nature is then so to speak a means of transmission from one political situation to another. The knot of different causes and occasions makes catastrophe a vehicle of political change by working as a projection test that allows us to see the Gestalt in a chaotic composition of dots and stripes. However, the experience of catastrophe is not only a retrospective exercise in overcoming trauma but becomes also an open wound in the social organism that has to be sutured. At the most general level, it is necessary to endow a catastrophe with meaning or, so to speak, to domesticate it. This “temptation of meaning” to use Slavoj Žižek’s term imposes a double condition on the social. On the one hand, the search for meaning forces people to review again the very foundation of the social and, on the other hand, it allows replacement of one hegemonic ideology by another. ³ However, ideology is not only a clearly crystallized system of believes values, etc. It is also a way in which we express our views in everyday activity. For this aspect of ideology, I will use the term behavioral ideology coined by the Russian linguist V. N. Vološinov. He proposes to use “the term behavioral ideology for the whole aggregate of life experiences and the outward expressions directly connected with it. Behavioral ideology is that atmosphere of unsystematized and unfixed inner and outer speech which endows our every instance of behavior and action and our every ‘conscious’ state with meaning.” ⁴ Behavioral ideology is then a kind of everyday ideology that only can become a crystallized ideology if it clashes with more coherent system of beliefs and values. In his characterization of behavioral ideology, Vološinov enumerates two stages. The lowest stage consists of “experiences born of momentary and accidental state of affairs” and to it “belongs all those vague and undeveloped experiences, thoughts, and idle, accidental words that flash across our mind.” ⁵ “The upper strata of behavioral ideology, the ones directly linked with ideological system, are more vital, more serious and bear a creative character. Compared to an established ideology, they are a great deal more mobile and sensitive: they convey changes in the socioeconomic basis more quickly and more vividly.” ⁶ Catastrophe is a kind of natural experiment in which behavioral ideology confronts the established system of social meanings and changes to the developed ideology. The case I would like to deal with is the crash of Polish presidential plane at Smolensk in April 2010. What I will do in this paper is not making a historical report on the catastrophe but rather reflect on its ideological background and consequences. ⁷

For the description of Polish politics after 2005, I use the term “post-postcommunism” which I coined in order to differentiate between post-communism and the period when the transformation was over. Poland has stable democratic political institutions and a stable free market economy but the ghosts of communism still haunt the country. Therefore we have a paradox; on the one hand, it is a popular and widely recognized claim that the past is over, but on the other, the communist past and the relation to it is still a point of reference for the current politics. ⁸

The Event

On the morning of 10 April 2010, a Polish plane carrying a delegation of high-ranking officials crashed at the Smolensk airport. All ninety-six people on board were killed; there were no survivors. These two sentences contain all the information that has not been contested. ⁹ Everything else has been put in question, not only the cause or causes of the crash but also the exact time, the chain of incidents that led to the catastrophe, the crucial decisions of the pilots and the authorities. All of this was to seem to be problematic.

What is worth noting is that in the crash, representatives of all the main political parties in Poland were killed, along with the members of the staff and crew, but the death of the presidential couple was what made this event especially dramatic as the accident happened in the year of Presidential elections, which as was widely acknowledged, would have to lead to the defeat of President Lech Kaczynski.

The Background

The crash occurred in the midst of the bitter presidential campaign, which was considered to be crucial for the political future of Poland. In the elections of 2005, in a dramatic turn of the political scene the party Law and Justice came to power. This party, along with the second biggest party, Civil Platform, formed a block which contested the shape of the democratic transformation in Poland after 1989. They claimed that during the transformation, the post-communist elites together with some liberal dissidents had dominated the politics of the country, which had led to serious distortions of democracy at the political as well as the economic level. Both parties claimed in the campaign that it was necessary to change the entire political system, a change that was conveyed by the slogan “the Fourth Republic.” ¹⁰ This rhetoric was directed mainly against the post-communist party, the Democratic Left Alliance, which at that time was losing power because of a series of corruption scandals, but it touched also upon the opposition elites of the transformation, symbolized by the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza and its editor, Adam Michnik. However, during the elections of 2005 the programs of these two parties started gradually to diverge. Law and Justice evolved more and more in the direction of nationalism, claiming that the national and religious values are the most important for politics, while Civic Platform used extensively the rhetoric of liberal modernization. As a consequence, contrary to their own promises the parties were not able to form a coalition and instead the government was formed by the exotic coalition of Law and Justice, a populist party called Self-Defense of the Polish Republic, and the nationalistic party League of Polish Families. The leaders of Law and Justice, the twin brothers Kaczynski, took the positions of Prime Minister (Jarosław) and the President (Lech). ¹¹ The two years of this government were marked by constant struggles inside the ruling coalition and conflict-ridden efforts to change the ideological landscape of Poland. Instead of what they called the failed transformation, the brothers wished to introduce the true values of nation and religion as the main axes of Polish politics. In doing this, they were partially successful as the dominant discourse of political life shifted from economic questions to moral and symbolic issues. ¹²

As always with the politics of identity, there is a suspicion that something else is actually at stake here. How it is possible to reactivate the old national idiosyncrasies in the new reality? Are they just a kind of a cover for the real interests of different groups in society? Or is politics more a cultural phenomenon where the clever arrangement of attractive arguments enables politicians to take power? In political theory, we could discuss this question as an issue of the relative independence of the political. ¹³ Is the political a separate, autonomous field of action, as postulated by such different people as Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, Claude Lefort, and Chantal Mouffe, or is it a continuation of other spheres of social life as is suggested in “classical” political theories of the left and the right? Politics is then either an expression of deeper instances of the economy, as Marxists would say, or of the national and religious culture, as the nationalists could argue. If the political is an autonomous sphere of conflict, then any content that can fill an empty signifier in order to mobilize political passion is suitable for the political struggle. If so, the catastrophe at Smolensk revealed the potential of traumatic passions that can be readily used for the division of political field, which Pierre Bourdieu argues is a necessary condition for politics. ¹⁴ The Law and Justice Party was able to establish such a division but eventually it led to its failure. It was perceived by many voters, especially the young, as a defender of traditional values blocking the way to modernization and Europeanization of Poland.

Therefore, when in 2007 an internal clash within the Law and Justice–led coalition resulted in new elections, it caused an unexpected change of power. The Civic Platform formed the government and Lech Kaczynski remained in power a president from what was now the main opposition party (in Poland, the President serves a five-year term). However, using his power to veto governmental initiatives, he was able to make governing difficult for Civic Platform. Thus, removing Lech Kaczynski from power became a significant element of Civic Platform’s tactical plan. However, the presidential elections were to be not merely one more boring exercise in standard democratic politics. Since 2005, Polish politics dramatized rapidly as what was at stake was, at least in declarations, the future of nation. The leaders of Law and Justice insisted that the politics of Civic Platform would lead Poland to lose her sovereignty to the European Union and via the EU to Russia. In this way, they played on the profound Polish resentment evoked by the long historical periods of enslavement of the nation.

As a result, Polish politics became a politics of identity and the political conflict took the form of an unresolved Schmittian conflict that would have to lead to political elimination of one side of the controversy, as the various parties’ visions of Poland seemed entirely incompatible. As it was, in the conflict over symbolism, the visit to Smolensk played a crucial role in the political struggle. When Lech Kaczynski got on board the presidential plane on the morning of 10 April 2010, he must have felt that his participation in the Katyn massacre celebration could be of crucial importance not only for the current elections but also for the future of the Polish nation.

Katyn and the Symbolic

Katyn is a unique place in Polish mythology. The site of the mass execution of more than twenty thousand Polish officers is a focus of intersecting lines in the martyrology of the nation. The Poles were killed in April 1940 on the orders of the Soviet authorities. This crime was of course a strict secret concealed from Poles by the Soviets and the postwar Polish communist government. The crime was overlooked by the Western powers, who were not interested in the peripheries of Polish–Soviet relations. Nevertheless, truth about Katyn was widely recognized in Poland. The list of the officers who were killed was published clandestinely and broadly distributed. For this reason, Katyn became more than a place of memory. The suppressed trauma acquired the dignity of a myth that reflected the double tragic figure of Polish fate as the country under the oppression of Russia and betrayed by powers that called themselves friends of Poland. ¹⁵ As a part of Polish national mythology it has had a great influence on current Polish politics, foreign and internal. Katyn, along with Warsaw Uprising in 1944 and Solidarity in 1980–1981, is supposed to be one of the crucial events forming modern Polish identity. The Warsaw Uprising in 1944 is a symbol of the cooperation of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany against Poland. It was directed against the German occupants but it was supposed to prove Polish sovereignty in the face of the approaching Red Army. The Rising was brutally crushed by the Germans, leaving more than two hundred thousand dead in the presence of the Soviet Army, which remained on the far bank of the Vistula River, obedient to Stalin’s order not to intervene. ¹⁶ While he was Mayor of Warsaw, Lech Kaczynski helped establish the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising, which turned out to be a great success and opened for him the way to the presidency of the country. Janusz Kurtyka, one of the persons killed in the crash, President of the Institute of National Memory and a person closely associated with President Kaczynski, claimed that building the myths of these events was decisive for Poland’s special position in the world because owing to them, “we not only exist and emphasize our identity and continuity but also we situate ourselves in the political and moral dimension on the world scale.” ¹⁷

The visit to Katyn was to be a visible summary of Lech Kaczynski’s involvement in maintaining Polish national identity and would be the commencement of the presidential campaign under the same banner. The participation in the event had for Lech Kaczynski a double significance as it was not only the emphasis on the integrity of the nation but also the special role of Poland in international relations, of which Kaczynski was a devoted proponent. This special role consists in being a voice of warning against the imperial ambitions of Russia. His presence in Katyn had from this perspective an important symbolic content.

The Katyn massacre was taboo in the official discourse under the communist regime and after the transformation the relation to it became a sort of litmus test for Russia’s attitude to Poland. In 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev officially admitted that the Soviet secret police had been responsible for the crime and Boris Yeltsin in 1991 and 1992 released documents that clearly showed that the decision had been made at the highest level of Soviet leadership, including Stalin. However, this ploy was not accepted on the Polish side as representing a closure of the past. Still some questions have not been resolved, for example, the question of compensation for the families of the killed officers, as well as the symbolic issue of labelling the massacre as “genocide.” The Russians were reluctant to agree to these demands and they did not even comply with the Polish demand that they reveal all archived materials about the crime. The Katyn question was involved as a significant symbol in the total foreign policy of Lech Kaczynski, who always showed resentment toward Russia. He engaged in the spectacular support of Georgian president Mikheil Saakhashvili during and after Georgia’s war with Russia, which he perceived as a continuation of the Russian imperial policy and an attempt to regain power over lost territories—among them, of course, Poland.

The ruling party Civic Platform could not accept the conduct of the president toward Russia. It tried to prove that it could execute a more realistic and sober policy with Russia and owing to this it also could become more active in the policies of the European Union. Therefore, the Civic Platform had to develop its own politics around the anniversary of the Katyn massacre. Its main thrust was to show that this anniversary could serve as a vehicle of reconciliation rather than of the building of national identity. So the main event was the official meeting of the two Prime Ministers, Donald Tusk and Valdimir Putin, at Katyn on 7 April 2010; and President Lech Kaczynski’s visit on 10 April 2010 again was to be his own confirmation of the stability of his party’s policies of affirming the identity of the Polish nation.

Politics and the Art of Mourning

The catastrophe came as a shock for the country. The first commentaries, of course full of sorrow, emphasized that in fact the whole spectrum of Polish life had suffered in the catastrophe and nobody could claim to be specially hurt. The sense of the crash was perceived in the reactivation of the unity of nation. In this way, the ever-present ideology of full national reconciliation was again evoked. ¹⁸ This idea has always been present in Polish politics as a kind of ideal situation. The unity of the nation seemed so natural that it did not require justification. This was shown during the fight against the Communist regime with its clear division between “us” and “them,” and of course “they” were perceived as agents of a foreign power in a literal as well as metaphorical sense. The communists and their supporters could be easily identified as Russian intruders into the Polish nation and as seeking to convey into the Polish mentality ideas quite alien to it. After the collapse of communism, this idea was used by different political parties and of course each of them claimed that only it had found the proper way to unify the nation. However, nobody questioned the idea itself and every traumatic event instigated hopes that this unity would become real. These hopes introduced a kind of Messianic strand into Polish politics. Every time something dramatic happened, it became a reason for the expectation of the final reactivation of the unity of nation and this mood was almost immediately followed by feelings of disappointment and bitterness. The highest tide of such a mood in the years before the Smolensk catastrophe occurred after the death of Pope John Paul II. The time of the funeral and national mourning changed temporarily the whole life in Poland, and politicians from almost all important parties competed with public intellectuals in declaring how strong from that moment the unity of nation would be. ¹⁹ It did not happen and again complaints were heard that the nation had not lived up to the expectations and challenges it had set for itself.

This impoverished generalized Messianic moment became an axis of Polish politics after the fall of communism. One important reason for disappointment was the feeling that after communism there was still a persistent division between “us” and “them” although “they” were conceived in a quite undefined way. Who are “they” and why are they “they”? Why after the miracle of regaining independence did the second miracle of national unity never happen? This question was repeated by different politicians in different political contexts. In fact, it has become the crucial issue in a series of election campaigns. The Civic Platform was considered to be the party that wanted to modernize Poland even at the cost of loosening up Polish national identity, whereas Law and Justice claimed to preserve Polish identity and sought to bring the country into the modern world but without losing traditional values. The first effect of the Smolensk catastrophe was the feeling of unity and grief. It seemed to be so perfectly inscribed in Polish fate that it became a confirmation of the necessity of the Messianic harmony of the nation. The people who were killed on the plane represented all dimensions of the Polish political spectrum and their death on the “accursed land,” as this region (including both Smolensk and nearby Katyn) was marked in Polish memory, signified the essential unity that transcended contingent divisions and political ruptures. For this reason, it was of special significance that not only politicians were killed in the catastrophe. Among the dead there were also artists and academics, as well as representatives of Katyn families. This organization brings together people whose family members were killed at Katyn and its members have fought for the commemoration of the victims and for recognition of Soviet responsibility for the crime. Their deaths became in the consciousness of many people a link between the past and the present. But of course the main question that arose was, what was the political significance of this symbolic sphere? How can symbolism be translated into current politics? The highest expectation was that the wave of mourning should destroy party politics and build a new political dimension. But this was of course illusory and almost immediately was contradicted by the first test of the validity of the new order: preparing an official funeral.

Politics of the Funeral

After the crash, one immediate task was to identify the corpses and to prepare their funerals, and another was to secure the continuation of the presidential power. As always in such a case fortuitous decisions and accidental gestures soon became endowed with meanings that in turn could change the course of history. One such gesture was Vladimir Putin’s embrace of Donald Tusk on the evening after the catastrophe at the airport in Smolensk. This symbolic gesture was for a moment a sign of Polish–Russian reconciliation. Putin promised every kind of assistance necessary for the explanation of the cause of the catastrophe and for returning the remains of the dead to Poland. On the same evening, Jaroslaw Kaczynski was on the same spot to identify the remains of his twin brother but he refused to meet with Tusk and Putin. In Poland, almost at the same time, the Speaker of the Parliament (who was also to contest in the upcoming presidential elections), Bronislaw Komorowski, assumed presidential powers, according to the constitution. Each of these gestures was to be subjected to long discussion and commentaries, and they were evoked in various political contexts.

While politicians went to Smolensk, a crowd gathered in Warsaw at the Presidential Palace. People stayed the whole night in front of the building lighting candles and laying down flowers on the street. This gathering endowed the catastrophe with a specific meaning as the deceased President and his activities become the focus of the catastrophe. As almost from the first moment the catastrophe was recognized as a “second Katyn,” the presidential death was inscribed in the history of Polish martyrdom. The President and in consequence his party acquired in the eyes of their proponents a special status as incarnations of Polish Messianic tradition. The remains of the President were returned to Poland on April 11 because the autopsy had been performed in Smolensk, which was exceptional, as other bodies were taken to Moscow. On the route from the airport to the Presidential Palace, a crowd of seven to eight hundred thousand people paid homage to the President. On April 13, the remains of First Lady Maria Kaczynska were brought from Moscow and again a crowd gathered along the route. The coffins were displayed at the Presidential Palace and the crowd of people stood every day in front of the Palace to pay homage to the President and his wife. People waited as long as eight hours to get inside and of course they discussed political questions, especially the role of Lech Kaczynski in politics and his relationship with the current government. These comments were full of criticism, even aggression toward the government and accusations that people from the governing party had blood on their hands. Two right-wing journalists made a film, The Solidary 2010 (Solidarni 2010) showing people in the crowd who presented very extreme opinions about the government and Civic Platform. The thesis of this film was that the crowd gathered around the Palace represented “the new Poland” without particular interests, unified to pursue common goals. These goals remained undefined but in the air the idea was hovering that in fact the distinction dating from communist times between “us” (i.e. Polish patriots) and “them” (the servants of foreign powers or foreign ideologies) was being reconstituted as the new distinction between, again, “Polish patriots” and a so far vaguely described “they.”

In such an atmosphere did the negotiations start as to the place of the burial of the presidential couple. Different possibilities were discussed but the decision which was made came as a great surprise. It was announced that the President and his wife would be buried in the crypt of the Wawel Castle Cathedral in Cracow, which is Poland’s royal necropolis. Apart from Polish kings, some poets and generals have been buried there, but the decision has been made after years of discussion and as an act of final recognition of their greatness. In fact, it is still unknown who made this decision to inter Lech and Maria Kaczynski in the Wawel as officially no one wanted to take responsibility for it. Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz of Cracow definitely must have accepted the burial as he is in charge of the Cathedral at Wawel Castle. Cardinal Dziwisz, who was for many years the close associate of Pope John Paul II, is widely regarded as rather favorably inclined toward Civic Platform and as keeping his distance from Law and Justice, but this particular decision was likely a consequence of politics within the Catholic Church which tries to influence almost all political parties, even if the majority of the clergy prefer Law and Justice. Irrespective of the reason for the decision, the burial at the Wawel Castle made the catastrophe at least for the moment one of the most important events in the recent history of the nation. It was clear that the event is of the greatest significance but it remained vague what the real meaning of this event was; it still was “an empty signifier” to use Laclau’s and Mouffe’s terminology. However, the decision on the place of burial obviously shifted the meaning of the catastrophe to the activity and views of the President.

The burial ceremony was a widely publicized event which lasted two days. On 17 April, at 12:00 noon in one of the principal squares in Warsaw the main requiem ceremony was held but the actual funerals took place in various places. The coffins of the presidential couple were on display in the church in Warsaw and the next day they were transported by plane to Cracow, where they were buried on the Wawel Castle in the presence of a large crowd of people coming from all over Poland. It was also supposed that many important international political leaders would come but just the day before the burial, the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted, shutting down much air travel, and a majority of the delegations cancelled their attendance. This gave rise to speculations concerning who is and who is not a real friend of Poland, which was reinforced by the statement of Czech President Vaclav Klaus who expressed his bewilderment that so many politicians did not show up at the ceremony. In the following days, the funerals of all the victims of the catastrophe were held in different places throughout Poland. However, the burials of bodies by no means terminated the consequences of this event. On the contrary, after the official mourning was over the catastrophe became the focus of Polish political life.

Presidential Election and the War Over the Cross

The first thing that had to be done was to elect a new president of the state. The date of the accelerated election was set for 20 June 2010. As one of the candidates, Lech Kaczynski, was dead it was necessary to nominate somebody else from his party. The obvious choice was his twin brother and collaborator Jaroslaw Kaczynski but it was unclear if he would decide to run in such circumstances. He was prompted to do so by many politicians and publicists. They saw in him the only possibility for the continuation of the policies of his brother. Moreover, the political and social atmosphere was becoming more and more ambiguous. As always, in Poland the voice of a poet was found to be necessary. Poland has a long tradition of poet-prophets who are regarded as having been bearers of Polish identity during the times of the partition of the country (1794–1918). Jaroslaw Marek Rymkiewicz, a right-wing poet, literary expert, and publicist, unveiled a poem which was directed at Jaroslaw Kaczynski and which stated openly a thesis about “two Polands”:

And again there are two Polands—her two faces

Jakub Jasinski gets up from the book of Mickiewicz

Poland did not ask him whether he was willing to die

And he knew—that he had no choice

Two Polands—the one about which the prophets knew

And that which the Tsar of the North takes into his arms

Two Polands—one wants to please the world

And the other—which it is taken on the gun-carriage . . .

What divided us—it will not glue

One cannot give away Poland into the hands of thieves

Who want to steal her from us and sell her to the world. ²⁰

In this poem, Rymkiewicz in an interesting way links some elements of everyday life or “behavioral ideology” with the high culture of Romanticism. Jakub Jasinski was a Polish general and poet who was killed in 1794 fighting against the Russian invasion. He was one of the Polish Jacobins, a group of radical Polish politicians who tried to impose radical reforms on the country in the late eighteenth century. The great Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, writing after the partitions when Poland was wholly under the rule of Prussia, Russia, and Austria, made Jasinski the icon of an uncompromising Polish patriotism. This radical patriotic attitude was the most important thing for Rymkiewicz. In one of his recent books, “Hanging,” ²¹ he describes the episode of 1794 when the patriotic mob hanged a few representatives of the Polish elite whom it had accused of collaboration with Russia. In the context of 2007 in Poland, with fervent discussions on the transformation, this was widely read as an accusation of the new elites that, during the Round Table discussions in the spring of 1989 had decided to make a compromise with the communists instead of eradicating them. This “original sin” of the transformation was thought to have had effects on the whole post-communist period. Rymkiewicz is held to be claiming that only radical policies can introduce a radical rupture into history. It happened in 1794 but this rupture was aborted because of foreign intervention, but in 1989 there was not even an attempt to introduce such a radical break. Therefore, according to right-wing politicians, Poland is still immersed in the deep dream and this situation is used by cunning politicians of the “elite” to dupe the nation. Moreover, this Poland is robbed of her own true destiny but instead is given to “the Tsar of the North” which is an established Polish periphrasis for Russia. This symmetrical division is repeated in the next opposition, in which one Poland is eager to please the outer word (which could be read as surrender to the liberal West) and again the funeral procession of the President is presented as a symbol of the true Poland, independent and self-sufficient. Eventually, the poem cumulates in the image of an irreconcilable opposition between the thieves who would like to sell Poland to the World and the true patriots. The poet links some elements of ordinary beliefs with high literary metaphoric description of Polish fate and mission. In this way, the widely circulating view that Polish privatization was a “great theft” that was in fact the selling off of common goods to foreign capitalists (and in politics the same process means subordination to the EU or even to Russia) got a full ideological form in which the real stake of the political game is to rescue Polish independence and integrity. But if the stake is high, we can hardly speak of any kind of reconciliation or even compromise. Naturally, it is risky to treat a poem as a political program or declaration but the poem soon became a kind of manifesto, so some people have seen in it the expression of their own feelings and beliefs.

Within a few days of the publication of Rymkiewicz’s poem, Jaroslaw Kaczynski announced that he had decided to run for the presidency. His campaign was unexpectedly moderate and soft. He sought reconciliation with former enemies, which was commented on as being a change of heart after the trauma of the catastrophe. The most important of Kaczynski’s gestures were his plea to the Russians on 11 May 2010 when he expressed appreciation for the role of ordinary Russian people during World War II, and his high appraisal of Polish communist leader Edward Gierek (1970–1980) whom he described as a “true patriot.” Kaczynski also appointed as head of his election committee Joanna Kluzik-Rostkowska, a former Minister of Labor, who was considered a main figure in the Party with moderate views, and which was widely regarded as a concession to the liberal wing of his party. Despite these efforts, Kaczynski, although he got more votes than his party had done in the last parliamentary election, was eventually defeated in the second round by the Civic Platform candidate Bronislaw Komorowski, who therefore became President.

The end of the presidential election marked the beginning of another radicalization of Polish politics. The catastrophe at Smolensk, which had been rather in the background during the campaign and which was considered to be a mitigating factor in Polish politics, became the central element in the political discussion. The relation to the catastrophe would turn out to be a kind of litmus test of true patriotism at least in the eyes of the proponents of the Law and Justice Party. The thesis of the existence of “two Polands” soon found its empirical confirmation in the center of Warsaw where, in front of the Presidential Palace, just after the crash Polish boy and girl scouts had fixed a large wooden cross. It quickly became a point of reference for people who wanted to pay homage to the deceased President and around the cross there was grew a sea of flowers and candles. Along with the radicalization of the political discourse, the crowd around the cross became angrier and angrier with the ruling party and the elected President. Eventually in early August 2010, the President made the decision to transfer the cross to a nearby Church. This decision was made with the agreement of the Archbishop of Warsaw and was supported by the same scouts who had raised the cross in the first place. However, the crowd unexpectedly blocked the execution of this decision. People around the cross accused the priests sent by the local bishop of conspiring against the nation and against the Catholic Church. It was an interesting expression of opinion as of course the people in the crowd presented themselves as perfect Catholics, but it was obvious that the hierarchy was not a source of authority anymore. After that the cross was fenced off and only a small group of “cross defenders” were allowed to stay nearby but outside the fence a large crowd of people remained day and night praying and singing religious and patriotic songs and uttering political opinions against President Komorowski and his party. The crowd, however, found an unexpected opponent: a young man with a rather complicated biography started an action on Facebook to organize a demonstration entitled “Transfer the Cross.” On the evening of 10 August 2010, two crowds met in the center of Warsaw. The police separated them but there were a lot of verbal confrontations because it was as if each of the two crowds was from a different reality. One crowd consisted of young people who organized a kind of carnival playing popular songs and performing short scenes that in eyes of the second crowd were on the verge of blasphemy, for instance, making a cross out of beer cans. The second crowd consisted largely of older people praying, listening to priests and speakers, and singing religious songs. What these two crowds had in common was individualism. The young people were rejecting the authority of religious and national values. The crowd defending the cross was of course anxious to support traditional values, but at the same time these people denied the authority of the Church hierarchy and the state authority.

This event marks a symbolic break in Polish politics: on the one hand, the nationalistic and conservative camp gathered around Jaroslaw Kaczynski; on the other hand the camp of “modernizers” gathered around the Prime Minister, Donald Tusk. After the election, both parties hardened their standpoints. Kaczynski announced in an interview that he had “lost his true self” during the campaign and that now the most important task was to find the “real cause” of the Smolensk catastrophe and that “true Poland” should be mainly interested in this mission as it was closely linked to the historical destiny of Poland. Tusk put to the fore a program of Polish modernization as the most important achievement and he viewed the catastrophe as a chain of unfortunate actions that needed to be accounted for in technical terms. In spite of these differences, both parties are conservative. Certainly Civic Platform is more open in the moral sphere and is less nationalistic and for sure these differences matter, but what is liberal in Polish terms would still be labeled conservative in the West. This general shift in the Polish political scene compared to Western standards is one of most important factor in defining politics.

What is characteristic of the Polish political scene is the absence of a serious leftist alternative. The Democratic Left Alliance, once a dominant party in Polish politics, after the election of 2005 lost its electorate and it has since polled at about 12 to 14 percent of support. The causes of this decline are complex but at least two were clearly important. One direct cause was the clear involvement of the DLA in a corruption scandal that was a subject of Parliamentary investigation. However, there are also more fundamental reasons of the eclipse. The DLA, which started as a post-communist party, evolved gradually into a party of liberal views on the economy and moderate liberal views on culture and society. Such views and history made the DLA an obvious choice for voters who were afraid of the cost of transformation as they figured that the DLA still had a kind of communist care for social security, but also those who were afraid of the possibility of right-wing domination of politics. Those bonuses ended when the Polish political scene was reorganized with the emergence in 2001 of two new parties, Civic Platform and Law and Justice. They took on both electorates of DLA; the social electorate went to Law and Justice with its mixture of nationalistic and social slogans; the progressive electorate went to Civic Platform with its ideas of modernization.

The Investigation and Smolensk Religion

As is always the case with airplane crashes, the catastrophe at Smolensk had to be scrutinized by the relevant authorities. Of course, the significance of this disaster made the decisions more difficult, but they had to be made quickly. The Polish Government decided to give the investigation to Russia’s Interstate Aviation Committee (IAC). The Government announced this decision as being in accord with the Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation, a claim that soon was contested by the opposition on the basis that the flight was military, not civil, so different rules should apply and the investigation should be conducted by Polish authorities. The IAC was not the sole body to carry out an investigation, because at the same time the Polish Government called together a special commission under the leadership of the Minister of Internal Affairs and Polish prosecutors also were put to work to determine whether charges could be brought against individuals in connection with the causes of the catastrophe. Despite those various investigating committees, the popular imagination was set in motion and the wildest conspiracy theories soon began to circulate. Their circulation closely paralleled with the deterioration of the political climate in Poland. The catastrophe became a main focus of political divisions, more than any policy or program differences. The reason was that the catastrophe could be easily used in behavioral ideology as it was possible to build on it a dramatic narrative evoking fixed tropes from Polish history which in turn could be translated into a political program. So there were several strata in the story which became interwoven but were relatively independent.

The first stratum is what could be called a popular ideology, the lower stratum according to Vološinov, which is a nebulous configuration of beliefs and emotions dressed sometimes in quasi-argumentative mode. Here I locate the wildest opinions, as for instance that the Russians provoked the catastrophe by deploying artificial fog or using powerful magnets. To the same category belongs the dim film circulating on the Internet showing Russian soldiers with the sound of shots in the background. The idea of Russian conspiracy sometimes is even strengthened by the addition of Polish complicity, with Prime Minister Tusk as the alleged perpetrator. Those views are rather rarely presented officially but their elements show up even in the statement of politicians. The second stratum is what Vološinov calls the upper stratum, in our case the system of beliefs which, coming from the catastrophe, assumes that there was serious negligence on the side of the Polish Government in the preparation of the Presidential visit, and that it was this negligence which caused the catastrophe. The negligence together with the more or less conscious failure of Russian Air Traffic Controllers properly to direct the airplane is held to be the main cause of the catastrophe. The proponents of this thesis usually stop short of accusing the Government or the Russian authorities of assassination but they call into question the effectiveness of the state in protecting the President. Consequently, they accuse the Government and the people who support it of not being patriotic and of preferring their particular interests to the common good of the nation. At this level, behavioral ideology comes close to the real ideological system of the nation and its values, including religious values, as the highest good. Such an ideology enables its believers to exclude those who do not share their views from the idea of the nation. Therefore, the term that was coined in the Polish media for these views is “Smolensk religion,” as those who hold them ignore the need for empirical verification; however, in fact it is a behavioral ideology in Vološinov’s sense.

The publication of the official reports of different committees investigating the catastrophe has not made a significant change in popular perspectives on the catastrophe. On the contrary, it has made the situation worse as these reports contained somewhat different narratives. We had first the official report of the Russian IAC, which blamed mainly the pilots of the airplane with some allusions to the idea that there was pressure from the President to land in Smolensk at all costs. The Polish Government prepared its own report, in which the responsibility for the crash was distributed between the Polish pilots and Russian air traffic controllers. Law and Justice came up with its own report that held Russian controllers responsible but with the clear implication that the flight was a consciously prepared trap. Although the publication of each report was a big media event, nobody really changed his or her mind. The believers in the “Smolensk religion” remained in the same position; those who blamed the President for having forced the crew to land in spite of grave weather conditions did not change their mind either.

Conclusion: Politics of Catastrophe and Its Consequences

In a sense, the catastrophe has been absorbed by the official ideology of two main parties. The partisans of the vision of Poland as a special country with a unique historical mission found in the catastrophe the confirmation of their claims. Poland once again was betrayed by a foreign power and abandoned by its allies. This vision has been repeated in Polish history in the past two hundred years and it is still a source of political choices. Another problem is what such a vision could mean in contemporary circumstances. The politics of catastrophe seems to be a late revenge of Marx, the ghost of whom appeared to have faded away from Eastern Europe’s post-communist reality, but we could cite again the famous passages from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language. . . . In like manner a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother language and can freely express himself in it only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use of the new.” ²² So what has happened in Smolensk can be interpreted as a continuation of a Polish drama that began two hundred years ago with the loss of independence. This language seems to be for some people an appropriate means for the description of Polish situation twenty years after the collapse of communism.

Therefore, Polish politics can be viewed as the clash between two languages: the language of tradition, especially the Romantic tradition, and the language of modernization, mainly neoliberal modernization. It would be relatively easy to make simple distinctions between the losers in the recent processes of transformation adopting a nationalistic and religious language, and the winners preferring the language of modernization. Such a distinction would be to some extent accurate but there are also deeper layers that make the use of messianic language so popular even among the intellectuals who are not enthusiastic about the policies of Law and Justice. There are various reasons for this popularity and at the end of my article I would like to outline some of them.

The emergence of the language of nation seems to be connected with general disappointment with the post-communist transformation. This transformation had a liberal or even neoliberal character and although it ended with moderate success in economic terms, at the same time it introduced deep social divisions into society that were difficult to accept for many ordinary people. Expectations at the beginnings of transformation in 1989 were very different; it started under the slogans of Solidarity and there was widespread belief that it would be possible to modernize country and still preserve the unity of the nation. This did not happen, so gradually the language of liberal modernization became associated with ideas of the betrayal of the ideals of Solidarity which in turn were more and more identified with national and religious values. This “conservative shift” took place almost in all social spheres of society and it culminated in the election victory of Law and Justice in 2005. Although this party lost power after two years, the consequences of this shift continued to be felt. This hegemony of conservative views forced almost all political orientations to refer to it in one way or another. For intellectuals, using this language is the only way to protect their special mission, which to a great extent is embedded in the consciousness of the intelligentsia in Eastern Europe. This stratum of society was supposed to enlighten the nation. In Poland, which lost its independence, this role was especially important as the political and economic circumstances did not allow the construction of a modern state created by an emerging bourgeoisie. Instead the intelligentsia became at least in theory the leading force for the survival of the nation. This idea was still active in the communist period, and dissidents felt themselves to be heirs of this tradition. They were persecuted by the communist regime but in a sense those persecutions were a sign of their importance. The market economy substantially undermined the role of the intelligentsia; it was pushed to the margin of society, so a politics of identity enables them to play again an important role in society or at least to have an illusion of such a role. By playing the role of prophets who rescue the nation, some intellectuals can again feel that they are indispensable for the nation.

Paradoxically, this mood of the return to the past was reinforced by European and global trends in politics. The obvious retreat to the nation-state that we have observed since the beginning of the twenty-first century became an important factor in Polish politics. Poland, which was once one of the most enthusiastic nations about the European Union, gradually became more and more skeptical in the face of growing nationalism in the established European democracies. From this point of view, Polish identity politics was harmonious with the changes of the political climate in Europe and probably also in the United States with the growing significance of the neoconservative movement. In fact, some Polish intellectuals consciously refer to the values-oriented politics of the American right wing.

The reason why all the motives enumerated above accumulated in the wake of the Smolensk catastrophe is even more profound and it suggests resentment toward the West. The collapse of communism has triggered a cathexis directed to the future, to the imagined object of desire, a post-communist Poland that never was clearly defined and described. The failure to fulfill this desire had to cause the mechanism of the narcissistic return to the self. This return found its culmination in the catastrophe in which all circumstances seemed to confirm the inevitable gap between our world and theirs. The catastrophe and the figure of the dead president became a point de capiton of Polish fate.