By SLAVS & TATARS

Keeping up is difficult, particularly when time performs its double-act, one hand throwing dust in our eyes as the other hoses us down with water. In the last issue, we looked at the events of the Iranian Revolution in Tehran as the first of three installments in our series, 79/89/09, Slavs and Tatars’ attempt to look at two key dates in recent history in order to better understand our current environment. Already, 2009 has made painfully clear the failure of Anglo-Saxon, or liberal, capitalism; very few, however, expected it to happen with such haste. Likewise, the contested presidential elections in Iran have already revealed diverse but no less irreconcilable threats across the country that run to and from the very name of the nation: the Islamic Republic of Iran. Yet the increasingly rapid pace of history is nothing new to us – if anything, we’ve been complicit in the romance. Willingly swept up off our feet, landing prostrate at the altar of acceleration, in speed we see radicalism, change, revolution, and subversion.

For the second installment of 79/89/09, we turn to the year 1989 and the fall of the Iron Curtain across Eastern Europe. Over the past two decades, the Berlin Wall has become the iconic shorthand for the events of that year, muzzling and muscling out a story more earnest than edgy, more painstaking than punk. Interestingly enough, several of the tactics employed by reformists, protestors, and opposition members in Iran in recent months have been lifted from the playbook of 1989. The case study has not, however, been Berlin and the heady days of the Wall’s fall, as one might expect, but rather the tactics and strategy of a country, like Iran, exhausted of myths and legends: Poland.

If the German capital’s political singularity has been swallowed wholesale by the cultural industry and spit out as lifestyle, then Poland’s 1989 reminds us of the urgency of the shadows, those places beyond the spotlight where work gets done irrespective of the reverence of future generations. Though lacking the dramatic aesthetic of a divided Germany or the violence of Romania, it was Poland of the 1980s, employing a deft mix of compromise and self-limitation, which was largely responsible for jumpstarting – and most importantly maintaining – the civil disobedience that eventually brought Communism down across Eastern Europe. The often-overlooked story is one of diligence, moderation, and slowness – a bonafide trifecta of Polishness.

BEFORE LEARNING TO RUN, WE MUST LEARN TO CRAWL.

Having begun as a non-governmental trade union, Solidarność (“Solidarity”) soon turned into one of the largest and most sustained movements in Eastern Europe. Its demands bore a mark of temperance: better working conditions, in creased pay, and the legalization of free (non-party) trade unions. Outlawed during the martial law years (1981– 1983) and heavily suppressed until its legalization in 1989, Solidarność eroded the powers of the Communist regime with a gradual efficiency, and a Sacha Baron Cohen willingness to allow a flawed regime to make its own mistakes, to prove its own illegitimacy. Led by Lech Wałęsa, the leader of the Gdansk strikes from which the organization grew, the union managed to demonstrate through student protests, general strikes, and underground radio and newspapers, that, as Christopher Hitchens recently put it, “the absurdity of the ruling system could be counted on; what was necessary in the meanwhile was the refusal of the lie and the willingness to display civic courage.” Wałęsa later became the first president of post-Communist Poland; Solidarność, then, is a case study in patience more brave than bravado.

YOUR PRESIDENT, OUR PRIME MINISTER

The movement’s broad coalition was the key to its success: it brought the church, workers, and  intelligentsia together under one roof. During the martial law years, Pope John Paul II’s visits to his homeland provided tacit support: authorities would look the other way when protestors held signs for the outlawed Solidarność. Keeping the fervor of political movements under control, though, is no small task, and on both sides of the divide, the most re liable force, today as much as then, remained the distant cry of extremism. When the government and Solidarity-led opposition agreed to a series of round table talks in early 1989, some opposition groups refused to participate, accusing Solidarity of legitimizing the government by agreeing to negotiate. On the right, heads of Warsaw Pact countries, such as Romania’s Ceauşescu, were on the verge of hysteria, convinced (ac curately, as history has shown) that any liberalization whatsoever would prove the death knell of the ruling party’s hegemony. Mean while the Catholic Church played a key role, not only as mediator but also as guarantor of the good faith of the proceedings. Pivotal to the reconciliation was one of the principal thinkers of the anti-Communist opposition: Adam Michnik, a Polish Jew who today remains the Editor-in-Chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, the country’s largest daily, founded under the auspices of the movement. A student of his country’s bloody history, Michnik became a leading proponent of the thick line, Poland’s equivalent of the Truth and Reconciliations Commission in post-apartheid South Africa. The proverbial “line drawn in the sand” provided protection from prosecution to leading figures such as General Jaruzelski, Communist Poland’s political and military leader, and Interior Minister Czeslaw Kiszczak: no recriminations, no pursuit of vague justice, only concrete prosecutable cases were to be brought forward.

Michnik’s belief in an anti-utopian revolution, one that is for and not just reflexively against, grew from his personal journey. During one of his numerous stays in prison in 1983, he wrote to Kiszczak: “Your soul is as generous as the Ukrainian steppe… You are a vindictive, dishonorable swine … Those who have suffered and been humiliated will present you with a reckoning.” Six years later, he would sit down at the roundtable talks, across from his former captors, and attempt the political liberalization of the country. When anti-Communist candidates won nearly every possible seat in the first semi-free elections of June 1989, brokered during the talks, it cemented a landmark power sharing agreement. The Berlin Wall was still standing and the USSR, though in the midst of perestroika, was armed to the teeth, with no qualms about bloody suppressions such as those in Prague and Budapest in 1968. Michnik’s famous editorial cum-manifesto, Wasz prezydent, nasz premier (“Your president, our prime minister,” June 5, 1989), in which he offered the presidency to the Communists on condition of keeping the prime ministry for the opposition, softened the blow for Moscow in what was a highly combustible environment. The day of the elections – June 4, 1989 – was also a momentous (if less joyous) day in the life spans of two other political experiments: it flanks both the death of Khomeini, and the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Where the latter signifies a bloody coda to another civic student movement, the former not only brought to term the first phase of the Iranian Revolution, but continues to stir Iran in 2009 – what in 1979 had begun as a popular, pluralist democratic movement had, a decade later, already spiraled into an autocratic rule of a supreme leader, still at the heart of protests today. Yet sandwiched between these bloody extremes, the harsh black and white contrasts of the era, Poland’s combination of realpolitik and equanimity made a convincing case for shades of grey.