GW Discourse

“I am not a symbol of the fall of Communism, Ceauşescu was a symbol of the fall of Communism. I am a symbol of democracy.”

Even through a translator, Adam Michnik is an eloquent speaker. But during his speech at the Elliott School, this particular biographical point may have been his most contested. There are those who see Michnik as a man unable to give up his glory days.

During Jaruzelski’s rule, Michnik was a hero of the democratic opposition. The intellectual wunderkind of Solidarity, he founded the Worker’s Defense Committee – and by the time he was the age of the students who came to hear him speak last Friday, he had been jailed more times than he could count.

But as the revolutionaries became the founders, things got complicated.

Michnik assumed editorship of Poland’s largest daily, and used it to advocate against lustration. (“The news was lies. Prices in stores were lies. But we’re supposed to believe the KGB records are gospel?”) But he took it a step further. Citing denazification and the post-Franco regime change, he advocated destroying the records entirely.

He argued against the return of property commandeered by Communists. He even praised Jaruzelski. (“Poles ought to say a special mass, that they had a Jaruzelski and not a Ceauşescu.”) Soon he was giving joint interviews and attending the birthday parties of former Communist bigwigs.

Many in Poland began to believe Michnik was more concerned with defending collaborators and informers than democracy. He decried Lech Wałęsa’s presidency as a  first step toward tyranny. Solidarity yanked its famous trademark of his newspaper’s standard.

By the 1990s his former ally, the poet Zbignew Herbert declared him a has-been in a scathing interview:

“Now he stays in his paper citadel [Gazeta Wyborcza] surrounded by true believers of both sexes. I recently talked to a forty-year old ‘youngster’ who confided in me that he adored Michnik and would do anything for him … Thus the pattern of the charismatic leader and dedicated worshippers repeats itself.”

As it happened, I found it hard to resist conversion. For one thing, Michnikism appeals to students of American history. There was never such a revolution, Michnik reminded us several times, where the revolutionaries were not disappointed. He noted that many of the American founding fathers considered their great experiment a failure.

“Revolutions like bold colors, red, orange, green – but democracy is gray.” Michnik speaks with excitement and abandon. His rhetoric is logical and airtight, even if it doesn’t always correlate with his actions.

If Wałęsa is Poland’s General Washington, it’s easy to picture Michnik as a Slavic Thomas Paine. The man who openly criticized Washington after the war. The most loyal oppositionist.

Perhaps Michnik’s most redeeming evidence is the success of Poland’s democratization. Because of him – or despite him – Poland has had an astonishingly smooth regime change. As we talk about exporting democracy and nation building in the Middle East, it might pay to listen to Michnik. Nothing happens twice, but in reality we must not always improvise.

Edit: A link to the footage of Mr. Michnik’s speech:

http://www.gwu.edu/~elliott/news/multimedia/index.cfm#michnik