06/04/09 – William Brand – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, some old Run-DMC for you there.
B-Sports for that.
Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton.
Thanks for tuning in to the show today.
And moving on to our next guest, it's Bill Brand from the Krakow Post.
He owns a communications company called Krakow Letters.
And he's an American who's been living in Poland for the last 26 years by my count.
Is that right?
Welcome to the show.
That's right, Scott.
That's right.
Thanks.
Good to hear you.
Well, it's great to have you on the show here.
And it's a very interesting article that you wrote in the Krakow Post here.
If I can find my tab.
Here we go.
20 years on.
And this is at krakowpost.com.
And this is about the beginning of the end of the USSR, which was 20 years ago today.
Is that right, Bill?
That's right.
Today is the anniversary of the elections that were held in 1989 in Poland.
And this is certainly one of the crucial points, I think, in history.
Because this really was where the whole Soviet structure really unraveled in terms of their Eastern European allies.
Well, you know, we hear people talk about – sometimes they say, yeah, Polish, the solidarity thing, whatever.
I was a kid.
I remember the wall coming down.
And I remember even before the wall came down, the beginning of the unraveling of the Soviet Union in 1989.
But not that clearly.
Why don't you help us understand, what was it that the Poles accomplished that sounded such a death knell for the communist system there?
Well, if you just want to take the events of 1989, I would say that the way things started was that after a long, long period of unrest, of tensions between the workers and the government, in 1989 in the spring, they finally agreed to have what they call a roundtable talk.
The roundtable talks.
And when I say they agreed, that is the opposition agreed.
Because the communists had been angling for this kind of negotiations for a long time.
The situation in the country was so economically dire that they were desperate to get the opposition, which was very well organized and which had very strong support, they wanted to get the opposition into some kind of a responsibility-sharing agreement.
But, of course, not a power-sharing agreement.
And the opposition held out, held out.
But finally, in the winter, actually, in January, they started in 1989, they began these roundtable talks.
And they worked out a wide range of agreements on things like ending censorship, on allowing associations to be registered officially.
They opened the way for the re-legalization of the Solidarity Trade Union, which had been outlawed in 1981.
And the capstone of all this was elections, which were to be held in June.
So, wait a minute.
The Workers' Union was the leader of the opposition to the communist system.
That's right.
It was a very broad-based opposition.
They had lots of intellectual support.
Basically, this is a country where the communists never had any real support.
They had the party which controlled all the different tools of power.
Basically, everybody wanted that system out.
And as we know, in 1981 it was, and in 1980, it was the workers who really organized themselves effectively enough to go on strike and win a lot of concessions.
Those were taken back, but it was very much a workers-led movement, led, of course, by Lech Wałęsa, the icon.
The real difference was the communists were basically always seen as a puppet Vichy government of Moscow.
And the Workers' Union and the rest of the supporters, they were the Poles.
It was the Poles versus the sellouts.
It very much was.
And that was the language that was used.
It was the language of patriotism.
And, of course, this day is now remembered as it was back then.
This is referred to as the day when they regained independence.
And now, so this is, explain more about the dynamic.
You said that they held out, they refused to compromise with the communists.
The communists were the ones who were trying so hard to get them to come to the table and work out a deal.
And they held out and held out and held out, and they ended up getting, what, guarantees of a free press?
The ability to create a real dissenting press in the country?
And what other things now?
Well, as far as the press goes, there had been a thriving opposition press.
I can remember in the late 80s, in 88, possibly even in 87, at university campuses, you could buy any kind of book because the universities had autonomy then.
The police didn't go in there.
There was flourishing underground press.
This was allowed to come out into the open.
The censorship law was abolished in May, I believe, which was the last barrier.
The government couldn't censor anything after that.
The Solidarity Union was guaranteed the right to become legal again.
And some associations were not permitted to be legalized.
But basically the whole underground life, which had been flourishing, was allowed to take on a legal dimension.
And so what exactly was it?
The election of 20 years ago today, June 4th, this was a situation where, well, what exactly happened?
Go ahead.
Well, on the surface, nothing terribly dramatic.
In other words, there had always been these elections to the parliament on a regular basis all through the communist era, even though only a token number of non-communist candidates were ever allowed to run for office.
This, in effect, looked like it would be another election in the usual style.
However, at those roundtable talks, they worked out an agreement whereby, in the first place, they restored the Senate, which had been abolished at the very beginning of the communist era.
They restored the Senate and agreed that there would be 100 seats and free elections for all 100 seats.
Now, in the lower house, which is about the size of the U.S. House of Representatives, they reserved 65% of the seats for the communists or their allies, and 35% were put up for free election.
And the incredible thing is that, reading now all the histories that have been written since then, the communists actually believed that they would hold onto power this way.
They actually believed that solidarity would win some seats, but not all.
This is a characteristic of communist government.
They continually shot themselves in the foot.
And here they really, well, they did it for the last time, because they thought that what this election would do would be to give them legitimacy.
They thought it would bring opposition members into the parliament.
They thought it would bring some opposition members into the Senate.
But they basically conceived a communist-dominated coalition would rule afterwards.
And, of course, it just didn't happen, because the people elected every possible opposition candidate that they could.
There was a very well-organized opposition campaign.
Lech Wałęsa posed for a picture with each candidate, and it was centrally coordinated by what they called the Citizens Committee from Warsaw.
But still the communists were shocked when the results came in, because they didn't elect anybody.
And even among that 65% that they had reserved for themselves, there's a law that a minimum percentage of people have to vote, and those seats simply, they were reserved for the communists, but nobody was elected, because people just didn't vote at all for those seats.
So it was a total victory for solidarity.
The communists woke up the next morning in shock, and that's when it unraveled.
Then there was a period where there were efforts to form a government.
Everyone expected that the communists would still have the prime ministership, but they couldn't work out how this coalition would be set up.
And finally, in August, they ended up choosing a non-communist prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, and that was the first non-communist government in Eastern Europe since the late 40s, and that basically was the end in Poland.
Yeah, but what about the Soviet secret police?
I mean, how come people weren't getting shot in the head, tanks weren't rolling, and the USSR cracked down like had happened so many times before?
I mean, in other countries at least.
The secret police were surely still there, and there are those that claim that they're still on the scene, but the simple answer to that is that Gorbachev, in a couple of speeches to the European Parliament in the summer of 89, but even before that to the UN, I think in 88, Gorbachev had repudiated what they called the Brezhnev Doctrine, and the Brezhnev Doctrine was exactly the commitment that all the socialist countries had the duty to uphold socialism in all the other fraternal socialist countries, as they called it.
And that was what justified the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 68, when they had a reform movement there, what we now call the Prague Spring, that was crushed by not just Soviet troops, but also Polish, Hungarian, East German, they were all engaged in that to their shame, which lasts to this day.
But Gorbachev repudiated that, and in fact, indeed, his repudiation turns out to have been real.
It did not happen.
And so then, what came next?
I guess all over Eastern Europe, people said, wow, you can overthrow the Communists and not get invaded, huh?
And that's more or less what it was.
And there's the old, you know, we have the cliché from the Vietnam days, which turned out perhaps not to be true, the dominoes.
Now, part of the celebrations today in Gdansk, I think, was that Lech Wałęsa tipped over the first domino in one of those big domino constructions, and they all came down.
And that's basically what happened.
That's basically what happened.
Hungary followed suit.
And then, of course, we did get the fall of the Berlin Wall in November.
Later in November, the Czechs followed suit.
There was the bloody overthrow of Ceaușescu in December.
But basically, it was the Polish elections that were the first sign that, yes, this really can be done.
Tell me about the violent overthrow there.
How do you say his name again?
I can never pronounce it.
Ceaușescu in Romania.
Ceaușescu in Romania.
I don't know exactly.
That was a bloody coup d'état.
How many people died in it?
Well, he and his wife certainly died, and I can remember the shocking pictures, because, of course, they tried to flee from Bucharest, and were hunted down, I suppose, by some elements of the secret police.
I don't really know too much about the Romanian story, except I remember the absolute shock of those pictures, which came out just around Christmas time.
They hunted them down in some government lodge in the mountains.
Well, them getting away with that, it seems, that's really a further precedent, right?
You know, having the very peaceful coming to power of the Solidarity Movement in Poland is one thing, but then having a violent revolution and the Soviets still not doing anything, the Russians, I guess, still not doing anything to enforce their authority.
At that point, all bets are off for the entire communist system at that point, right?
You know, there are even some reports, I can't put my finger right now where I read this in the last couple of days, but actually, I think it was James Baker, who was US Secretary of State then, if I'm not mistaken, some reports that he actually urged the Soviets to intervene in Romania to prevent bloodshed, and the Soviets said, no, we don't do that anymore.
Right, and in fact, I'm trying to remember, it may have been Ray McGovern, not just now, but in a previous interview, who characterized Baker numerous times.
He and Scowcroft and Bush Sr. in a panic about the collapse of the Soviet Union.
And, you know, how are we going to split the world, two-thirds us, one-third them, if their empire falls apart?
And they were doing everything they could to try to help the Soviets keep their system together.
Well, stability was important, because among other things, of course, the two great armies, or the two great coalitions, were still facing each other on the edge, armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons on both sides in Europe.
For instance, even though Poland had this non-communist government, I don't think it was until 1991 or even 1992 that the Soviet troops withdrew.
The Warsaw Pact wasn't dissolved until 1991.
So the danger was there, for sure.
And I have to tell you also that in Poland, as I said, things were very calm on June 4th, and in fact it was in some ways, for me at least, it was sort of an anti-climax, because I thought there would be some public celebration, but there really wasn't much.
But on the other hand, there was this sense of uncertainty, because we now know in retrospect how it turned out, but at that time, every one of those steps really was a step into the unknown.
And there was tremendous argument and discussion every step of the way.
Should we do this?
Should we do that?
I can remember being at a public meeting, which Valencia had at the university here in the spring of 1989, well before the elections, and I was surprised to see how many critical remarks there were made to him, saying, you're making a mistake, you shouldn't get mixed up in these negotiations with the communists, they'll take advantage of you, they'll let you go so far and then they'll crack down again, because that was the history, after all, of the whole Soviet bloc.
There would be swings towards reform and then would come the crackdown.
That was the pattern that was finally broken in 1989, but at that point it was not at all clear that it would be broken.
Right.
Well, I wonder, why is it that you'd already been living there for six years, and I guess in 1983 nobody thought the Soviet, well, very few thought the Soviet Union was going to cease to exist at the end of the decade.
Why would you move from America to communist-controlled Poland?
Well, I'll tell you, I became fascinated with the place.
I first visited it in 1976, when that was very much the Brezhnev era.
The first time I came, just for a couple of weeks while I was there, there were workers' demonstrations and strikes in Radom, and that was when, really, the overt opposition movement was born.
I came back the following year, in 1977, because I wanted to see a student cultural festival, which was held every spring in Kraków, and it was called off that year because the secret police murdered a, well, everyone assumes that they murdered, let's put it differently, a student activist was killed in mysterious circumstances, and the students boycotted the festival, but that was another big step in terms of things changing.
Wait a minute, are you a CIA agent like my first two guests on the show today?
No, not at all.
Okay, I'm sorry.
Far from it.
Now, my travels were completely private, but I'll tell you, it was a fascinating place.
The next time I came back was when the Pope, John Paul II from Kraków, had been elected.
I came back for his first visit.
That was incredible.
Every time I came there, something happened which was just inconceivable, and the mood of the place, for instance, during that visit by the Pope or during the first Solidarity era was just incredible.
It was an intoxicating time, most of all because, like I said, this is what everybody wanted.
Even though the first few times it didn't come to fruition until 1989, but every step of the way there was this tremendous feeling of a grassroots movement of people simply standing up and saying, this is what we want.
I don't want to say this is the change we want because that might have some other associations, but anyway, it was just a magnificent place.
Well, I mean, this whole thing from June 4th, 1989 through New Year's 1991 or Christmas 1991, this was the Velvet Revolution with very few exceptions.
All of Eastern Europe was freed without, or at least gained their independence, without a bloody war against one of the most bloody and powerful empires the world has ever seen.
That's right, that's right.
It happened.
For years and years the Poles in their patriotism and anti-communist hopes, they were referred to as believing in magical thinking and all that, but in fact it turns out that in a way they were right, because it really was in some ways the unthinkable happening.
Well, now, how unthinkable is it that James Baker's promise that America would not extend NATO any further than Germany to the East has been broken, and now I forgot how many former Soviet republics and former Warsaw Pact states, obviously including Poland, are part of NATO now, and we're even, I'm sorry to have to say this, but in Jane Mayer's book, The Dark Side, she quotes one of the CIA torturers, I believe, or someone who was in charge of the torture, saying, oh, Poland is the 51st state, the American people have no idea, as we have our death camps there.
One of the places in Poland, I understand, was a former Nazi base, turned into a communist Soviet base, and then became a transfer point, at least, if not a torture center, for the American empire.
What's that like, to be a Pole under American domination instead of Soviet domination?
Well, I'm not a Pole.
Well, okay, that was a poorly phrased, but anyway.
No, no, but to answer the question, I remember reading a 51st state remark, and Poland has always been madly in love with America, although Franklin Delano Roosevelt, of course, was regarded as the man who sold Poland to the Soviets during the negotiations with Stalin and Churchill, and he was certainly not held in regard.
But one thing, Scott, is that there's a very, very large transfer of population back and forth between Poland and the United States, and in many ways, it's a dream of a lot of Poles, especially of the farmers, to go to America, make some good money for a few years, come back and be set up for the rest of their life.
That used to be the dream.
Now, I think Polish wages are still far below American wages, but the disparity isn't so great between the two countries.
But in any case, many Poles, because of family connections and so on, also because, remember again, Woodrow Wilson had a hand in bringing Polish independence after the First World War, and also Poles have felt, with I think some justification, not only threatened through a large part of their history by those two large neighbors, Germany and Russia, but also let down by other European countries.
After all, when Hitler attacked in 1939, Poland had treaties with Germany, sorry, with the United Kingdom and France, defensive treaties, and of course they did declare war, but they didn't really do much practical, in practical terms, maybe they couldn't have done much.
But anyway, Poland felt that they had been left in the lurch there.
So I guess what you're saying is the average opinion out there in Poland is that it's believable that America actually would field an army in their country to protect their independence, and they would rather have us as their empire than the Germans or the Russians.
I'm sure that if you asked any Pole whether he would like to be part of an American, a German, or a Russian empire, he would choose the American empire, because they've had, believe me, lots of experiences with the other two.
Well, you know, I don't know hardly anything about Poland.
I sure would like to learn more.
I hope we can continue this conversation at another time, Bill.
Well, I'm certainly happy that we had this conversation and ready at any time to carry it on.
Great.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
Okay, thank you.
All right, everybody.
That's Bill Brand.
You can find his excellent article.
It's really good.
Seriously, check it out.
It's at Krakow Post.
Both of those C sounds are Ks.
KrakowPost.com.
20 Years On, by William Brand.