Abstract
This article is part of the special cluster titled Generation ’68 in Poland (with a Czechoslovak Comparative Perspective).
Whereas much of the European right greeted the fiftieth anniversary of 1968 with a critique of its legacy, Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party was largely silent, both because 1968 did not usher in a counterculture and because the protests were directed against the communist party. And yet the Law and Justice party detests the legacy of 1968, for three reasons: 1968 was shaped by the left, ’68 activists and their values played a key role in the ensuing opposition, and because the right actually sympathizes with the communists of 1968, then dominated by nationalists. The right thus traditionally attacks the legacy of 1968 by attacking 1989 instead, when ’68’ ers played a central role and new left progressivism could finally emerge. That began changing early in 2018 when Poland’s parliament passed its Holocaust-speech law banning calumny against the “Polish Nation.” The resulting criticism brought 1968 back with a vengeance, with the right openly inhabiting the role of the national-communists, and beginning to attack Poland’s 1968 directly. Shedding new light on the diverse meanings of 1968 and the relationship of the right to national communism, the piece ends by looking at developments through Bernhard and Kubik’s theory of the politics of memory.
One of the things that stands out about Poland’s 1968, fifty years later, is that there is no “other side” which condemns it as the start of a tendency or movement that must now be reversed. This is all the more surprising in that a radical right government is now in power in Poland, committed to dismantling democratic institutions and pushing through a traditionalist cultural counterrevolution against secularism, feminism, and a supposedly rampant anti-patriotic liberalism. And wasn’t 1968 everywhere all about new freedoms, radical democracy, and the rise of a counterculture?
Not in Poland. There is a culture war in Poland 2018, but the “progressive” side only got to be able to promote its vision after 1989. It is like 1968 is a phantom enemy for the right today. Those connected with the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) cannot condemn the student protests of the time, since these were directed against (and repressed by) the communist authorities. But neither can they praise them, because left-wingers did dominate the events. Today the right directs its ire at 1989, blaming that caesura for introducing the “commie liberalism” (which others call liberal capitalist democracy) it is so intent on eliminating. This is an indirect bash at 1968, since leading ’68’ ers played a key role in the transformation of 1989. They negotiated the end to communist rule, took control of the new government, and then promoted liberal democracy and facilitated the rise of progressive culture, both of which today’s right finds anathema. So the right largely commemorates 1968 with silence, not scorn. No Polish Houellebecq tries to eviscerate its legacy. Vilification is saved for 1989 instead.
Poland was not the only country in the then–Soviet Bloc to see radical protests in 1968. Indeed, its upheaval was slight compared to that in neighboring Czechoslovakia, site of the so-called Prague Spring. There, however, the events were initiated by the communist government, looking to solve some particular problems. Czechoslovakia’s had just been the first state socialist economy to see a decline in GDP. When intellectuals protesting against censorship were joined by economists seeking freedom to experiment with new models to rejuvenate the economy, the Communist Party, in January 1968, chose a new leader, Alexander Dubček, and opened up the public sphere for the discussion of necessary reforms. Loosening censorship and encouraging democratic debate, the state prompted a veritable explosion of public participation, which flourished for months until the emergence of more radical demands spooked the Soviet Union, which in August invaded the country and ended the experiment, and then got the reformist leaders to endorse the military intervention, thus ensuring that no one looks kindly on 1968 in Czechoslovakia today.
Thus, of all the 1968 movements, east or west, Poland’s was the only one directed specifically against the left—against the communist party (Polish United Workers Party [PZPR]) which had ruled since 1945. In Czechoslovakia, as noted, activists had powerful allies at the top. Even in Yugoslavia—the other country governed by a communist party to see major social protests in 1968—student protests broke out in the context of reforms already going on. Tito had dismissed the hardline police chief Aleksandar Ranković in 1966, inaugurating a mini-glasnost that empowered liberal reformers, who were already operating in a framework where anti-Stalinism and self-management were the rule. 1 Only in Poland did the students have no allies in the top echelons of the ruling party.
Yet this movement against the left was organized by those in a new left. Poland’s 1968 was led by young left student activists who a few years earlier had been seeking “real communism” instead of what they considered the distorted rule of a bureaucratic elite (and who are today mostly liberals). By 1968 most of them had lost interest in Marxism per se, but remained loyal to a left ethos: for radical democracy and self-management, against integral nationalism and theocratic power. When mass protests started in March 1968, participation extended far wider than that strict left group. Conservative-minded student groups also joined in, while most protesters saw themselves as just trying to protect university autonomy, or registering their objection to the authorities. But because this new left was the catalyst of that fight, and the chief target of the ensuing repression, the movement had an inescapably left hue. 2 Indeed, hard-right anti-communists condemned the movement at the time as part of an internal struggle among communists, precisely because its origins were on the left. Because of the fierce repression of the movement, however, and the fact that so many later oppositionists got their start there and became an influence on others, that view never gained much traction (though this might soon change, as we shall see in the conclusion). Still, the undeniable left spirit means the right cannot claim 1968 as its own. Thus, today it largely ignores 1968, and only the liberal-left embraces it.
How does the left remember 1968? There are, of course, hardly any communists anymore, in the sense of staunch defenders of the PZPR. (And even the PZPR apologized for its 1968 behavior in 1988, one year before giving up power.) 3 That leaves two other lefts today. The first are the followers of the original student organizers, including many of the original members, who became liberal democrats in the 1970s, and neoliberals—enthusiastic supporters of capitalism with few regulations—in the 1980s, but who still count as left because of their defense of democracy, inclusiveness, rule of law, and their rejection of nationalism. The other is a new, anti-capitalist left whose members came to adulthood only in the postcommunist era, and who dismiss the left-liberals as apologists for capitalism not so very different from the right.
The liberal left has been and remains the standard-bearer of the memory of 1968. It is the group whose leaders, fifty years ago, led the student protests, and who have played such a large role in politics ever since: as opposition leaders in the 1970s, Solidarity and underground activists in the 1980s, and strong defenders of the post-1989 political order. 4 Yet just as the right tends to pass over 1968 in favor of 1989, so the liberal left focuses on the later date, too. For them, the real accomplishment of 1968 was that it served as a key stepping stone in the march towards 1989. It was in 1968 that they turned away from Marxism, gave up hopes for party reform, recognized the importance of patriotism, developed underground skills, and established contacts with milieus far different from their own both geographically and ideologically.
If the right cannot fully acknowledge 1968 because of the dominant role played by the left, today’s anti-capitalist left sees 1968 as the moment when the new left turned right. The charge is that the ’68’ ers soon abandoned not just Marxism but any concern about inequality, and as a result of the anti-Semitism that was a key element of the repression of the movement, began to fear their own society. In this way, says the journalist Rafał Woś, an unofficial spokesman for today’s anti-capitalist left, the ’68’ ers “opened the door for the return of the right.” 5
Anti-Semitism? Here we get to the other element of 1968 that complicates its reception fifty years later. For while this was a movement against communist party rule, and thus against the left, that left in power was at that very moment controlled by a right, “patriotic” fraction. “National communism” had reached its peak. Led by Interior Minister Mieczysław Moczar, the Party not only abandoned its denigration of nationalist traditions but revived the anti-Semitism associated with Poland’s far right. For the Moczarites, the PZPR had too long been under the influence of Jewish Stalinists and “cosmopolitan” intellectuals, and needed a patriotic infusion so the Party could better represent the nation whose interests it was supposed to serve.
This is another reason why 1968 was such a critical juncture not only for the left but for the right as well. The student protesters could more easily give up on all hopes for the Party when the latter sounded and acted like fascists. The right’s ambiguity towards 1968, meanwhile, is heightened by its admiration, despite everything, of the patriotic turn made by the communists. “Weren’t you ever attracted to Moczarism, with its more patriotic, more national, socialism?” a right-wing journalist asked PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński. “No,” said Kaczyński, but by quickly adding that it was only “thanks to Moczar” that the Home Army finally got the respect it was due and “patriotic songs began to be sung in schools again,” he made clear the respect today’s right has for this iconic figure of national communism. 6
Before we turn to the events themselves, one more point is in order. What was unique about Poland is how short its 1968 was. It began in January, and ended essentially in March. After that, there was only repression—a repression so intense that a student from the provinces who entered Warsaw University in the fall of 1968 recalls that it was almost impossible, already then, to learn what had really happened: “I asked all around, but everyone was afraid to speak.” 7 Elsewhere in the world, 1968 lingered. Even as the protests ebbed, discussion of the events continued unabated. In most countries, the real political and cultural upheavals resulted from 1968, unfolding in the years ahead. In Poland, 1968 began, ended, and nothing more could be said about it in public for the next twelve years.
So the activists got repressed, while the public memory of it got suppressed. Ironically, this ensured that it would continue as an opposition political movement, but not a countercultural one. A counterculture requires constant publicity. It needs to be promoted through a media which has the political freedom to portray it and an economic interest in disseminating it. But the PZPR blocked the former, and the lack of private media or corporations able to profit off a counterculture blocked the latter. There was no equivalent of what Daniel Bell called the “cultural contradictions of capitalism,” or the economic gains to be made by promoting irreverence and opposition. 8 This, of course, is what made 1968 uncooptable. Those who sustained its legacy, and fought for its memory, had to do so on their own, through independent networks and underground samizdat publications.
All this means that it is only the liberal-left that still promotes the memory of 1968. The conservative right ignores it, the anti-capitalist left regrets it, while most of Poland still knows little about it.
The Events
The odd thing about Poland’s 1968 is that while it was started by new leftists, their immediate cause was not particularly left at all. For the events began when students demanded that a classic patriotic play—Forefathers’ Eve, by the nineteenth-century national poet Adam Mickiewicz—be allowed to continue its run at the National Theater. It had been cut by the authorities after students began flocking there to boisterously applaud the scenes denouncing the tsarist autocracy, an obvious swipe at the Soviet Union. Leftist students thus got involved to protest censorship of a patriotic play. Understanding how this happened requires going back to the heyday of Revisionism, after the death of Stalin, when the communist authorities, under the new leadership of Władysław Gomułka, allowed critical discussions of Marxism and a new appreciation of national traditions. Within a couple of years of coming to power during the anti-Stalinist movement of 1956, Gomułka had cracked down on the public discussion, but that ban did not extend to all of academia, and particularly not to Warsaw University. In 1964 even the official student organization, the Socialist Youth Union (ZMS), started sponsoring critical discussions of official Marxism. Its aim was to allow, and contain, the new anti-Stalinist interpretations of Marxism, and to attract energetic young intellectuals to the Party. With activists taking advantage of this new opportunity structure, Warsaw University soon became a hotbed of critical Marxism. Party conservatives began to regroup. When two leading radicals, Jacek Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski, wrote and distributed a “worker-powerist,” basically Trotskyist, Open Letter to the Party, they were not only expelled from the Party but thrown in jail too. In 1966, the philosophy professor and leading revisionist Leszek Kołakowski was also kicked out of the Party after a highly publicized lecture where he denounced the authoritarian backsliding in the ten years since 1956.
Younger disciples continued the conversations through a combination of officially tolerated university discussion clubs and informal “self-education circles,” where they moved away from the Open Letter’s Marxism towards a view of radical democracy from below, similar to what was emerging as a dominant framework in new left circles abroad too, put forth in documents like SDS’s Port Huron Statement. By 1967, a diverse network of discussion clubs had become active, most on the left but some with a national-patriotic and Catholic orientation. But one group, led by Adam Michnik, stood out for its militance and commitment to disruption. Barred now from ZMS meetings, they nevertheless “raided” the meetings to put forth their radical left views, earning them the dismissive label “Commandos” from conservative Party activists.
There could hardly be a better symbolism for the strange new cleavages emerging: a communist party, increasingly nationalist, dismissing its left critics as quasi–Latin American guerillas. The students accepted the term as a badge of honor. And these same Commandos started showing up at the National Theater, leading the anti-Russian applause. They too were changing. Seweryn Blumsztajn notes that most leading Commandos, including him, had come from communist families and were of Jewish descent. “We were raised as anti-nationalist, . . . that kind of thinking was foreign to us,” and by getting involved in the fight over the play “we were moving into a world that wasn’t fully ours.” 9 Yet because of the growing solidarity of the diverse array of student groups, and in reaction to the Party’s authoritarian-nationalist turn, they too had begun to think about the nation, and realized they wanted a democratic one, first or even instead of a socialist one.
“Independence without censorship,” they chanted at Forefathers’ Eve’s final performance, on 30 January 1968. And afterwards they led a march through the streets—thus breaking the unwritten rule that criticisms would be tolerated in the university but not in public. This was the first public oppositionist demonstration in Poland since 1957.
Things moved fast after that. Adam Michnik and Henryk Szlajfer gave an interview to Le Monde, and within days news of the demonstration appeared in newspapers worldwide. Michnik and Szlajfer were summarily expelled, in violation of official university disciplinary procedures. Activists produced leaflets calling for a mass rally in their defense on the Warsaw University campus, thus escalating the stakes. On 8 March, two students read a resolution demanding the expelled students’ reinstatement. The crowd applauded, sang the Polish national anthem, and began to disperse. Before they could, factory buses suddenly drove onto the campus, emitting several dozen “worker activists” from the local car manufacturing plant, hitting back at the “anti-socialist” students. (“Don’t push me,” cried one student. “It’s the working class that’s pushing you,” came the response.) 10 When the workers retreated, the militia came in, swinging at everyone, bloodying dozens.
Three days later the authorities, and thus the press, denounced the students as anti-socialist hooligans. The activists at the time did not imagine themselves to be against the system or against socialism—indeed, their protest rallies often ended with the singing of The Internationale—and many recall being shocked by such a portrayal. Students then organized sit-in strikes at universities throughout the country, with demands such as punishing the perpetrators and having the press “tell the truth” about what happened. The militia waited outside. The strikes lasted anywhere from half a day to a few days, but eventually the students had to emerge. Most were allowed to go home. Sometimes the sit-ins led to street demonstrations, and in some cities street demonstrations occurred instead of sit-ins. Street protests, naturally, included many who were not students. Indeed, of the 2,700 people detained during these protests, the largest single group, totaling 937, are identified on police reports as workers. 11 But just as the sit-ins ended quickly, the demonstrations ended—or rather, were ended—even quicker. By the end of March, the public protests were over.
Then came the arrests. Quietly, and unpredictably, over the next few months. At 6
For many, even more shocking than the swift repression was its unusual (for a Marxist party) ideological basis: Not only were the academic “hooligans” anti-socialist, but they were anti-socialist because they were Jews. Anti-Semitic fever swept the country. While euphemistically labeled “anti-Zionism,” having Jewish roots sufficed to make one a suspected “Zionist.” Poles who had nothing to do with the protests but did have Jewish roots had their lives ravaged. 13 All in all, some fifteen to twenty thousand Jews were pushed out of Poland within the next year, accused of being disloyal, hounded out of their jobs, told that their prospects had all but disappeared.
The impetus came from above, but it was the support from below that also stands out as a legacy of 1968. Mieczysław Rakowski, editor of the liberal communist weekly Polityka, wrote in his diary about the “incredibly anti-Semitic letters” his journal began receiving; even most Party officials he spoke to at the time uttered some anti-Semitic statement or opinion. 14 Students protesters themselves often reacted to the anti-Semitic propaganda not by claiming “we are all Jews!” but by urging Jewish activists, in the name of the cause, to step aside from leadership positions.
In the face of such harsh repression, it is hardly surprising that protests over other events—the invasion of Czechoslovakia several months later, for example—were few and short. Oppositionists deeply resented that the Polish army participated in the dismantling of the Prague Spring, though much of the population accepted that the “dangerous” Czech events, as described in the press, needed to be curtailed before they led to mass chaos.
The Changing Meanings of 1968
How has 1968 functioned since it was over? Unlike in the West, it could not be processed in a public, ongoing manner, since no public discussion of it was allowed, even among scholars. The official media denounced it as simple anti-socialist excess, and within a couple of years ceased talking about it altogether. The Baltic Coast strike wave and bloody repression of 1970-1971 made 1968 seem less relevant, and soon the Party’s national-communist fraction lost out to a modernizing one. By the mid-1970s, however, the growing democratic, post-revisionist opposition movement, many of whose activists and intellectuals experienced 1968 as a transformative moment, began framing 1968 as the first part of a movement yet to unfold. In this view, 1968 was the time when students struck against the communist authorities and workers stayed away, while in 1970 workers went out on strike and students held back. In other words, the new opposition saw 1968 as a cautionary tale, part of a broad movement that still had to be built.
There was relatively little discussion of the events of March per se, except by those who had left Poland. For that group, 1968 was an unmitigated catastrophe, in which they became victims of a wholly unexpected ethnic purging . Their lives overturned, all contact with Poland now cut off, they told their tragic stories to a stunned world, which thus heard of 1968 chiefly as a story of anti-Semitism. Those who stayed in Poland did not talk that way. Even the “Jewish” protesters who stayed did not focus on anti-Semitism, except as a sign of general regime intolerance. Few of them, after all, considered themselves Jews. They were “Poles of Jewish descent,” “full Poles” absolutely. 15 (A number of them would eventually convert to Catholicism.) They were committed to Polish politics, to transforming Polish politics, and that required a program for the future, not focusing on a problematic and divisive past.
And so these liberal-left activists became a key force in opposition politics for the next generation, the ones (according to both them and their opponents) who came to power in 1989. They succeeded by mobilizing the resources to get their views across, and putting forth a framework—the struggle for democracy and national autonomy—inclusive enough to bring to their side even people on the patriotic, religious right.
Based in Warsaw and part of the intelligentsia (always seen in Poland as the dominant social group), they had close contacts with the international press, and thanks to their leading role in KOR (the Workers Defense Committee, formed in 1976 to assist workers arrested for participating in strikes), had a reputation among working-class activists too. These contacts, movement skills, intellectual capabilities, and tactical political experience made them key players during the Solidarity period of 1980–1981, and key advisers to Lech Wałęsa. Conservative oppositionists never understood why such a strict Catholic as Wałęsa had “old Marxist radicals” as close allies, and did their best to dislodge them, without success. When martial law was declared in late 1981, the old Commando circle played a key role in the underground, and then in the Round Table negotiations of 1989 that brought an end to communist rule. With elections scheduled, the government was forced to allow official publication of an opposition daily, and ’68’ ers became its editors and owners. Gazeta Wyborcza (“Electoral Gazette”), edited then and still now by Adam Michnik, has been Poland’s major opinion-forming daily ever since. Today PiS vehemently attacks both this newspaper and its milieu, and blames them for creating in 1989 the system it is currently trying to dismantle. PiS, however, always blames them for 1989, not 1968.
By 1989, the ’68’ ers had changed their views of many things—most notably their view of capitalism, which over the course of the 1980s they came to embrace, just like so many other former ’68’ ers elsewhere in the world. But they remained on the left in terms of their cultural predilections, secular and international norms, support for women’s and minority rights, and calls for an honest reckoning with the “dark sides” of Polish history, instead of the traditionalism, nationalism, “anti-genderism,” historical triumphalism, and strong-Church policies beloved by conservatives.
1989 as 1968
How can we make sense of my claim that 1968, in its broader global sense signifying a watershed in politics and culture, took place in Poland only in 1989?
The first to put forth such an argument were the world-systems theorists connected with Immanuel Wallerstein, in a provocative piece with a provocative title: “1989: The Continuation of 1968.” Their argument is about class structure and concerns a new type of workforce needing new structures to bring opportunities for their new skills. 1968 here is thus the rebellion of the “new professional intelligentsia,” increasingly involved in production processes, “against the institutions that had brought them into existence only to stifle their further development.” 16 France and Italy ultimately had the structures able to accommodate these new productive forces, while in Czechoslovakia and Poland the regime tried to repress them. Those attempts, however, only made the movement of these new classes even more desperate and ever more powerful. “Eventually, the movement could no longer be contained and governmental power had to be handed over to Solidarność: 1989 had begun.” 17
Aside from this class dimension, there are also cultural and political ways in which 1968 can be said to come to fruition only in 1989. Think of how 1968 is typically remembered in the west: as the start of a cultural revolution, and the moment when politics stopped being the sole purview of official politicians and started including non-state actors who raised their voice and insisted that they had a right to participate, too. An acceptance of non-conformism, a revolution in personal relations highlighted by the rise of feminism, a revolt against traditions, and a political transformation, marked by the entry of formerly excluded claimants and a burgeoning of new social movements: these elements of the “global ’68” became possible in eastern Europe only in 1989.
We have come to know this second sphere as “civil society,” in large part because East European oppositionists after 1968 demanded it be allowed to exist. For this is what state socialist systems could not allow. In running contrary to the Leninist principle of a party monopoly of power and the workings of a centrally planned economy, an independent civil society threatens the entire system, which is why conservative communists so feared the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia and Solidarity in Poland. This civil society could and did arise only in 1989. It was only then that the professional intelligentsia the world-systems theorists refer to could finally pursue single-mindedly the advance of its own interests. It was only then that the NGOs, civic associations, independent media, and independent trade unions could finally flourish. In the west, all of this started happening after 1968, alarming traditional bourgeois elites who soon started warning of a “crisis of democracy.” 18 In the east all this had to wait till 1989.
As for the cultural revolution, let me offer two personal examples. The one time in my life I wore a pony-tail, I did it as a test. It was 1984 in Warsaw, a time of deep political gloom, and even though Poles were everywhere pining for freedom, it seemed to me that did not yet extend to the cultural sphere. So I grew the pony-tail. Sure enough, the hostile stares followed at once. The guy in the café who could not contain himself, wandered up and inquired “if the lady could spare one of the chairs—oops, maybe not a lady!” Within ten years after 1989, pony-tails and ear-rings were worn comfortably by men in every big city in Poland.
Or take feminism: that too had no room to emerge publicly before 1989. 19 1968 had not even made a dent. Instead, there was only one fight—against communism. All hands had to be on board to “defend our men fighting the fight.” Poland’s ’68’ ers were as sexist as male radicals in the west at the time. The difference is that in the latter, women’s subordination within “the movement” played a central role in building the feminism than began to thrive exactly around 1968, while in Poland sexism could not be challenged until 1989. 20 Or rather it would not be challenged, because women too saw nothing wrong with it. So in 1986 it was not so surprising when I and another American male doctoral student were eagerly defending feminism to our two Polish female counterparts, who would have absolutely none of it. “Men are not our enemy,” “we don’t feel oppressed.” But then came 1989. Both became feminist activists soon after.
Why? Under state socialism, no one had guaranteed citizenship rights, so no group could feel particularly oppressed by another. Everyone confronted only the Party/state as the other. “Under state socialism,” writes Peggy Watson, “society was excluded as a whole,” and thus the “‘male subject,’ so scorned in the West, did not have a chance to develop.” Only when “citizens are excluded relative to each other” can feminist consciousness gain momentum. 21 Thus it took eastern Europe till 1989 for the cultural revolution widely associated with 1968 finally to be possible. So while the cultural revolution’s Western critics keep bashing 1968, in Poland PiS and the Church blame only 1989.
The irony, of course, is that Poland’s 1989 was nothing like the global 1968. That year saw no mass or unruly demonstrations, no denigration of cherished traditions, no flower children, no radical culture or politics at all. The Round Table negotiations were an elite affair, and for years afterwards much of Poland remained a rather staid and even gloomy place. Cultural innovations occurred on the margins, as they always have. 22 In public, in fact, the post-1989 regime made sure to limit any countercultural or unduly progressive tendencies by introducing religious education, taught by Catholic priests themselves, into the public schools.
So how in the world could 1989 be like 1968? Because it did open Poland up to the influence of post-1968 western understandings of democracy. Suddenly, there was discussion about how politics ought not be the purview of only one type of people. Perhaps it should include women, gays, minorities, and embrace at least a modicum of multiculturalism. 23 Perhaps environmental impact should be considered in planning and investment discussions. Perhaps domestic violence was not just a family matter. Perhaps exercise by city people was not such a silly idea. All these became possible to discuss and pursue only after 1989. Activists could be found to mobilize around these issues, often with funds from western corporate and liberal foundations. George Soros set up the Open Society Foundation and Central European University at this time to support just these kinds of initiatives. Cultural innovations were not at the center of postcommunist transformation, but they symbolized progress, and as such carried an aura of destiny, perhaps inevitability—precisely the same emotions (and fears) so many in the west felt when confronting 1968. Nor were the fears without warrant. After all, the two Polish grad students who had so resisted it in 1986 did in fact become feminists.
All the venom about 1989, so reminiscent of Western conservative reactions to 1968, came to the fore in the great 2016 tirade of PiS Foreign Minister Witold Waszyczkowski, who told the German newspaper Bild that his increasingly authoritarian government was just trying to “heal our country of certain diseases” caught by the “left-wing” contagion of 1989. PiS, he said, was just trying to resist the new gospel according to which the world . . . must move in only one direction, towards a mixture of cultures and a world of cyclists and vegetarians, which stands for renewable energy only and combating all forms of religion. . . . Poles instead want tradition, historical consciousness, love of country, faith in God, and normal family life between a woman and a man.
24
This quote got such wide publicity in the western press because it offers a classic, pithy, malevolent, yet humorous list of all the sins that have been leveled against 1968. For PiS, however, like for many east European conservatives, all this was the doing of 1989. For them, that was not the year communism was toppled, but the year that “communist values” like the belief in progress, the superiority of science over religion, and secular individualism finally got institutionalized. 25 Before 1989, the Polish right could dismiss all this as communist. After 1989, they found that anti-communists (the newly dominant liberals) believed in such values too. And precisely because these values were championed by anti-communists, in alliance with the increasingly secular West that Poland was about to rejoin, they had a better chance to be legitimized, considered normal. For the right, then, the cultural revolution that in the west happened in 1968 finally arrived in Poland in 1989. Thus, they fight the global ’68 by trying to undermine the liberal democracy built in 1989.
1968 in 2018
Where does this leave us, then, for the fiftieth anniversary? Because they lend themselves so naturally to reflection, anniversaries can be a time to create new memory perspectives, shape new associations with the past. And this is what happened just as the golden anniversary got underway, when a new law passed by Poland’s parliament in January 2018 ushered in a series of events that had the specter of March hovering over the news as never before since 1968 itself. The law made it a crime, punishable by up to three years in prison, to “publicly, and contrary to the facts, attribute to the Polish nation or state responsibility or co-responsibility for Nazi crimes committed by the German Third Reich.” The law applied to anyone in the world, regardless of citizenship or where the “crime” was committed, and permitted the use of civil law to seek damages if justice could not otherwise be served. Only “if the criminal act . . . is committed in the course of artistic or academic activity” would perpetrators have immunity.
Begun as part of a campaign to stop the (not especially widespread) use of the phrase “Polish death camps,” the bill was passed into law the day before Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2018. It fit neatly into PiS’s proclaimed fight against “national shame,” its commitment for Poland to “rise up from our knees” and speak truth directly to those who besmirch its reputation. Pushing back against enemies is of course crucial to all who seek to make their countries great again. Moreover, a sense of aggrieved nationalism and the exaggeration of alleged humiliations have played well in east European politics in the past decade, particularly since the economic crisis of 2008. PiS promulgated the law chiefly for internal consumption, with no intention to usher in a rash of lawsuits against aging holocaust survivors recalling wartime harassment at Polish hands. (Some say it was passed solely in order to charge Jan Gross, the historian who left Poland precisely as a result of the 1968 purges and has in recent years, with considerable publicity, published books and interviews documenting the bloody impact of Polish wartime anti-Semitism.) In any case, once it became law, it elicited a vociferous backlash, particularly from Israel (though also from Ukraine, whose different memory from the official Polish one was also made subject to criminal charges). And the pushback against that backlash is what suddenly brought 1968 back, glaringly obvious for all to see.
Clearly some genie got out of a bottle, as the state-controlled media and right-wing Internet shouted back with vituperation. Maybe we just call them “Jewish death camps,” joked one commentator on national television, since “who was servicing the gas chambers, after all?” to which his interlocutor replied, “And who was dying?” 26 A national talk show relaying incoming tweets displayed several with clear anti-Semitic content. And then the popular pro-PiS website wpolityce.pl ratcheted things up with opinion pieces that sounded just like the worst of 1968. “In the face of such vile abuse, why be silent about Berman, Minc, and other [Jewish] Stalinist murderers? Instead of talking only of the ‘Just Poles’ who saved Jews, let’s speak about the Jewish police in the ghettos, the Jewish kapos in the camps. Let’s go all out! We have already been beaten. We have no more cheeks to turn!” says education professor Aleksander Nalaskowski from Torun. 27
Of course the Jews blame us, writes Wojciech Reszczyński, as “Israel has been denying German responsibility for the Holocaust ever since Germany started paying them billions of marks in reparations. Shifting the responsibility to Poles has been going on for over 50 years. Jews have their own special way of treating history, saying one thing now and another tomorrow, just as long as it serves their interests.” 28
PiS and the Polish state did not officially join in, but neither did they distance themselves from their zealous supporters. And so 2018 opened up with a reminder of this other side of 1968. Even before all this, in reaction to PiS’s overall xenophobic and racist politics—chiefly against Muslims and refugees, frequently against Germans—liberals were planning to commemorate 1968 very differently than ever before: this time highlighting the anti-Semitism and intolerance of the period. A series of events on anti-Semitism—lectures, panels, academic conference, and a special exhibit—were held in March 2018 at Warsaw University and at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. 29 In the face of current crackdowns on cultural institutions not following the new official patriotic course—the PiS government had already fired directors of state-run theaters and stripped subsidies from theaters producing plays not to its liking—censorship was also a key theme of the fiftieth anniversary commemorations. In other words, for the first time it was not just the “fight for freedom” that 1968 was meant to symbolize, but the defense of minority rights and a world of tolerance and mutual acceptance. For the first time, then, 1968 was being used as a cautionary note by the liberal-left against the right, which itself was coming to resemble the “communist” side of 1968. (Stung by international condemnation, parliament repealed the punishment provision of the law quietly in June 2018.)
Troubles Ahead
Of course, PiS tried to co-opt the fiftieth anniversary events for its own purposes. The institutions holding the events do get state subsidies, and, particularly in the context of the new Holocaust-speech law, the government used the public discussion of 1968 to denounce the left as the real anti-Semites. And with the National Theater in Warsaw staging Forefathers’ Eve again, PiS insisted that it is the true voice against censorship.
But memory, of course, is always contested. Societies always imagine the past in the context of debates taking place in the present. This was as clear in 2018 as it was in 2009 when Poland and other countries from the old eastern bloc commemorated the twentieth anniversary of 1989. In an effort to make sense of the diverse responses to that anniversary, Michael Bernhard and Jan Kubik proposed a theoretical framework of “memory regimes.” Because it is probably the best account of the problem of contested memories, and because it is still not widely known, let us conclude this discussion of the fiftieth anniversary of 1968 with a theoretical look through that lens.
Bernhard and Kubik’s primary claim is that different types of “memory regimes” emerge from the relationships of different types of “mnemonic actors.” 30 Each of these actors—which they call the warrior, the pluralist, and the abnegator—pushes a different approach to the commemoration of a significant past. The warrior insists that its view of the past is the only truth, and that any other is wrong, false, and must be abandoned. The pluralist allows everyone their own view of the past. The abnegator, meanwhile, seeks to avoid commemoration altogether, and not take any stand. When the public discussion includes either all warriors or both warriors and pluralists, the result, say Bernhard and Kubik, is a “fractured” memory regime: the past will be heavily politicized, its meaning vociferously contested, and a consensus impossible to achieve. If only pluralists and abnegators populate the scene, without warriors, a “pillarized” regime results: here there is a coexistence of views, and the past is not heavily politicized. If everyone agrees about the past, or if everyone fears politicizing it, then everyone is essentially an abnegator, and the memory regime is “unified”: no side can gain by insisting on its own particular view. 31
What then is the memory regime concerning 1968? In both Czechia and Slovakia today, it is unified. No one in either country has an interest in either claiming or denouncing the Prague Spring. Liberals and social democrats might privately regard it as an inspiring moment, when reformists tried to democratize state socialism and common people mobilized themselves too. But since the Prague Spring was led by communists, who ultimately signed declarations accepting the Soviet invasion, they cannot claim it as anything exemplary, though neither do they wish to denounce the whole thing. They celebrate those who protested Soviet (and Polish) tanks, and otherwise do not say much about 1968. Conservatives and right-wing populists tend to scorn the whole affair for being led by communists, but since the reformers were ultimately overthrown by Warsaw Pact military force, they cannot give full vent to that scorn. They too can only celebrate the resisters. The few remaining communists, meanwhile, disown the Prague Spring altogether, so even they do not have an interest in commemorating 1968. The result is a “unified” memory regime in which 1968 is noted as a historical moment without great significance.
As for the former Yugoslavia, there what Bernhard and Kubik call a “pillarized memory regime” prevails, populated by a mixture of pluralists and abnegators. Because of the cataclysmic wars that ripped Yugoslavia apart in the 1990s, 1968 counts little today. With no direct continuity to any pressing contemporary political issue, the events from fifty years ago produce no memory warriors today. Student protesters of the time largely started out as new leftists, like the Polish Commandos, though many soon lined up behind reforms that gave more power to local republic-level politicians. Leftist students today cannot energetically celebrate them, because of the nationalist endpoint. Some nationalists might try to do so, but the new left pedigree of the ’68’ ers and the radically different political context ensure that little effort will be dedicated to doing so. And so, pluralists and abnegators. Events of 1968 were noted during their fiftieth anniversary in the former Yugoslav states, but without much fanfare at all.
Poland remains much more complicated. Those who might originally have been “memory warriors,” the successors of the Commandos who became a key part of the post-1989 elite, were unwilling to be so, because they recognized that their old “new leftism,” which motivated them to action but which they shed even as 1968 was going on, would not be too popular in the country as a whole. They had little to gain by vociferously championing their own role, or even the role of anti-Semitism, and more to gain by presenting themselves as activists in a democratic struggle in which all Poles eventually played a part. They had their view of 1968, but did not insist on it. They have been pluralists.
National and religious conservatives, now prominent in PiS, were prominent in 1968 only on the communists’ side, and that creates enormous problems for them today. From the 1980s until PiS first came to power in 2005, they saw themselves only as part of the general opposition. They did not laud the Commandos, but neither did they try to defame them, since the Commandos did initiate the demonstrations against the communists, and went to jail for it too. Secretly they liked some of what the “national-communists” in 1968 did—as noted, even Jarosław Kaczyński admires their revival of patriotism, the restoration of honor for anti-Soviet Home Army fighters during World War II—but would not endorse them because they were communists. Thus, the conservatives have mostly been abnegators: they saw no advantage to engaging in memory politics over 1968.
Since returning to power in 2015, however, with a racist populist politics that has given open anti-Semites new life, things are changing once again. In short, the far-right narrative, in which 1968 was only a power struggle between competing groups of communists, is poised to make a comeback. The 2018 Holocaust-speech law helped speed the process up. For when the law was criticized by liberal anti-censorship activists, defenders of the law, who claim only to protect the good name of the Nation, denounced the critics as unpatriotic leftists. And then, when those critics replied that they are only fighting the same fight as in 1968, this allows 1968 to be denounced as a communist episode too.
When there were only pluralists and abnegators, 1968 was never especially politicized. Too weak to become “warriors,” the far right had little chance of “fracturing” the memory and making 1968 contested turf. But when the right starts including open anti-Semites (as it does today), and the left starts focusing on anti-Semitism and intolerance as an important negative legacy of 1968 (as it began to do after PiS itself started pushing intolerance), then the memory of 1968 can turn quite controversial. Because then even conservatives can become “warriors,” denouncing all those who insist on a denunciation of anti-Semitism as unpatriotic. This would drive the left to become warriors themselves, insisting that others view 1968 as a heroic fight against intolerance. And in this situation, liberals would become abnegators: afraid of being seen as unpatriotic, but unwilling to line up with the right, they might start saying that 1968 is simply irrelevant. (Like they did with the Holocaust-speech law.) And so, where 1968 has traditionally been unpoliticized, it has become much more politicized for the fiftieth anniversary and beyond. In this way it may finally free itself from the relationship to 1989, but only, alas, in a way that delegitimizes democracy, and counters what the nonrevolutionary ’68’ ers had in mind.
