It is 30 years since the bitterly cold night in December when the communist secret police in Poland fanned out to arrest thousands of leaders of the Soviet bloc’s first democratic trade union. In Warsaw and Krakow and Gdansk there was the smash on the door between midnight and dawn as men and women were hauled from their beds and bundled into police vans to be interned. In 1981 it seemed as if the Kremlin had once again established its rule over eastern Europe just as it had done in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Today it is the turn of the people of Russia to ask for the same rights that the Poles appeared to have lost three decades ago. Or rather the core democratic right, that of electing in free and fair elections a government of their own choosing. I had spent much of 1980 and 1981 in Poland working as a link between western trade unions and the new Polish union. As every phone line went down I spent hours during the night on telex machines trying to find out what was happening in Poland.
Today the men and women of Russia can text, Twitter, Facebook and find a hundred different ways of linking up. Yet in many respects Putin’s Russia is less free than the Poland of late communist rule. There are too many gravestones to the heroes of Russian democracy like the journalist Anna Politkovskaya or the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky who was beaten in prison while seriously ill and died in consequence.
In a curious way, Polish late communism was less cruel than Putin’s ‘sovereign democracy.’ The corrupt capitalism that has flourished under Putin has brought with it a degree of violence, including settling accounts by killings, that was not known in the last period of communism.
Polish Solidarity announced the death knell of the Soviet Empire. It took seven and a half years from the suppression in 1981 to the first free elections in Poland in the summer of 1989. The fall of Berlin Wall has become the symbol of communism’s fall but in truth the Poles did the heavy lifting. Indeed, when Solidarity was suppressed the first reaction of the then German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt and Willy Brandt, president of the Socialist International, was to find excuses for the restoration of Soviet normality.
Britain took the lead in speaking up for Poland with both Margaret Thatcher and Labour’s Michael Foot speaking out with clarity. Much of the support for the Poles has been channelled through London where a young Polish diaspora had established a network of political support. I was sent with a few thousand dollars – worth a fortune in purchasing power under communism – for the underground printing operation. I was arrested, briefly imprisoned and I must be the only MP to have appeared in front of a workers’ court in May 1982. But I could feel the police and judges did not have their heart in it. Polish communism was already all-but-dead by the time Solidarity was outlawed.
How strong is Putinism? The people of Russia are tired of his oligarchs and ex-KGB friends stealing the nation’s wealth. The thievery of bureaucrats demoralises every Russian. The question for 2012 is whether Russia can imitate Poland and find her way to freedom? The people on the street want what the Poles have won. Good luck to them.
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Denis MacShane is MP for Rotherham and a former Europe minister. He wrote the first book in English on Polish Solidarity in 1981.
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