By Georgie anne Geyer
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
The first time I visited Poland was during the turbulent fall of 1981 and I immediately found it one of the most utterly fascinating places I had ever been. Even as gallant Solidarity was falling apart, and into it next eight years of persecution and sorrow, Poland never ceased being profoundly and uniquely alive! as a foreign correspondent, I had worked in countries all over the world and, only in Poland, I awoke every morning actually trembling with excitement because I knew every interview would be filled with philosophy, with dreams and with noble musings about Poland, about the future, about mankind.
It was a strange time---everybody understood that. In the dining room of the Forum Hotel every night, while Poles stood outside in the snow in food lines, inside the guests were ordering smoked salmon, creamed mushrooms, a delicious steak and a good bottle of red wine for the equivalent of $2.00 It made me cringe, even while I consumed it.
after martial law, I went back several times during the dark period, but somehow I never accepted, as indeed the Polish people never accepted, that this was to be all, that this was to be the end. and, of course, it was not!
By the time I went back once again, this time in 2001, the Soviet Union had collapsed, the walls had come down, which had stretched from the Baltic States to Czechoslovakia and Poland, for one of the few times in her turbulent national life, was not only united, she was free! Not only that, perhaps more importantly, she had an extraordinary lineup of leaders that any nation in history would be blessed to receive.
I sat with Leszek Balcerowicz, who told me how he and others in his economic team that would transform Poland had, all through the troubled ‘80s, studied the "countries that worked"---Germany, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Chile---so they would be ready once the moment came. They were.
For me, the direction was clear," he told me that day. "We had to set free the energies of the people and to liberalize enterprise. We had to establish a sound currency, pension reform and an independent central bank, and undertake a complete reform of public finances." This they did, moving quickly that first winter of 1990 because, as he told me, they realized they needed to put the new system into place within three months or lose the moment. With that, the famous "Eastern Front" moved from the borders of Germany to the Eastern borders of Poland---Poland had won.
On that visit, too, I spent fruitful hours with Polish Foreign Minister and historian Bronislaw Geremek, who was by then actually visiting Russia often, by invitation, and speaking on television to tell the Russians how to modernize. "The difference in the transition process today in Eastern Europe and in Russia," he told me, "is that Russia is the example of a blocked or failed transition; in Eastern Europe it was difficult, but there is a real transition. In Russia it is a failed process; in our countries, it is a realized one."
as the world moves on, I sometimes think that it is only the Poles themselves, still stuck, as they are, in the many vexing daily problems of becoming a full Western nation, who do not realize what they have wrought. It is not too much to say that it was they who began the dismemberment of the cruel and rapacious Communist juggernaut.
When I returned once more in the spring of 2004, none was able to capture this more than Lech Walesa. He told a small group of us over a dinner at the palace, "actually, Communism was bound to lose because it was an ineffective system. The Russians wanted to transform the system but hold onto power. But we forced them to give in. It was a huge engine in which we managed to install one little wheel. all the wheels were going leftward, and we were going rightward."
One little wheel that persisted valiantly in going its own way, one chorus of little voices that became ever louder and more insistent, one country that started to say "No" for a lot of others. What a noble and appropriate heritage!
Georgie anne Geyer is a Syndicated Columnist, Universal Press Syndicate, and author, Washington D.C.
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