Do you remember the moment when communism fell in Eastern Europe? Most people will recall the dramatic events in Berlin in November 1989. Perhaps they will remember the overthrow of Ceaucescu in Romania or when Yeltsin defeated the coup in Moscow two years later. Yet communism ended here, in Poland, when twenty years ago the first semi-free elections were held in the former eastern bloc, leading to the creation of the region’s first ‘non-communist’ government. It was here that the twentieth century ended and the twenty-first began.

On 4th June 2009 Poland commemorated the twentieth anniversary of the end of communism. The elite was desperate for this to be a time of unity, when the nation remembered its great achievements and how much life has changed. The media was filled with grey images from the past: of empty shelves and militia brutality. They wished to remind people, despite the troubles of the present, of how bad things had been before.

In Warsaw exhibitions were placed in the street, happenings organised and pop concerts put on to draw the crowds. However, the real events were occurring elsewhere. In Gdansk, outside the shipyards (which have been under the threat of closure), the trade unions gathered to remember the fall of communism. The Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, was absent, although President Lech Kaczynski was at the historical site of the Solidarity struggle to gain political capital and stand alongside the shipyard workers.

South in Kraków, safely encossed in Wawel Castle, Tusk was welcoming foreign guests who would speak warm words about Poland and Solidarity. Less than 70 kilometres from Kraków, in the industrial city of Katowice, thousands of trade unionists were marching to demonstrate against the inactivity of the government in face of the economic crisis. All shows of national unity, behind the façade of Solidarity, had quickly dissipated.

The past two decades in Poland’s history are told through two conflicting tales. The first is one of victory, freedom, opportunity and progress. Communism is remembered as a time when the creative, dynamic members of society were held back by the state and its drive to create a monolithic social existence. Communism meant not just repression and dictatorship but sadness, lost opportunities and absurdities – when the government’s claims of industrial greatness conflicted with its inability to regularly provide basic consumer goods.

And so anyone who resists the forces of free-market capitalism is a conservative relic from the past. Those that defend their workplaces, industries, pensions or welfare services are restricting society’s newly gained freedoms and opportunities. All these collectives are dying embers from the past, while the future belongs to the new ‘free individual’.

This first version of history remained dominant throughout the 1990s and continued into the new millennium. All the main political parties, whether from the right or left, post-communist or ex-Solidarity, were subsumed into this overarching hegemony. And so it remained, right up until the centre-left government steered Poland into the European Union in 2004. But the transition had taken its toll. Poland had been the first post-communist country to recover from the post-transition economic collapse, inflicted upon all the countries in the region, and the first to return to its pre-1989 level of GDP.

However, unemployment soared (rising above 20% by the end of 1990s), huge social divisions appeared and public services crumbled. Those living in the countryside or declining industrial towns found themselves stuck in a cycle of poverty and despair, in total contrast to the growth that continued in the urban oases of globalisation. The slogan of the opposition – ‘There is no Freedom without Solidarity’ (Nie ma Wolnosci bez Solidarnosci) – had truly been forgotten.

It was in these conditions that the second story of Poland’s road from communism gained prominence. The political consensus had been based upon an alliance between elements of the previous elite (now reincarnated as social democrats) with a section of the Solidarity liberal intelligentsia. The latter had largely been defeated and marginalised in the early 1990s, due to the role they had played in introducing the shock-therapy economic reforms, with the ‘post-communists’ becoming the most coherent and stable force in Polish politics.

However, the social effects of the reforms connected to taking Poland into the EU, along with numerous corruption scandals, reduced this party to a minor political player. The disillusionment and anger felt by the ‘losers of transition’ were directed against the elite. Rather than the post-communist transition being one of freedom and opportunity, it became a story of corruption, nepotism and conspiracy. The elites of the opposition were seen to have conspired with those from the former system to create a new network of interests (uklad) and secure positions in the upper echelons of government and business. Anti-communist sentiment mingled with social conservatism and xenophobia to create a conspiratorial description of post-communist deceit.

The centre of political power had shifted back from Warsaw to Gdansk. Not to the mass workers movement, that had attracted the attention of the world in the early 1980s, but to parties grouped around two conflicting factions who had been minor players in the Solidarity movement. Both were building their support through opposing the arrogant liberal elite in Warsaw and espoused replacing the young Third Republic with a new Fourth Republic. On the one hand, Citizens’ Platform (PO) combined a radical free-market ideology with social conservatism; on the other, the Law and Justice Party (PiS) proposed a radical anti-communist policy, which supported rooting out those from positions of power who had ‘collaborated’ with the communist state.

In 2005 PiS won the Presidential election and emerged as the largest party in the parliamentary elections. It subsequently formed a government with the populist agrarian and nationalist parties and promised to decisively break from the previous course of reform taken since 1989. The boot was now on the other foot. The government directed its attacks not just against the ex-communist elite but also against the ‘betrayals’ of former Solidarity leaders.

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