On the “Neville Chamberlain’s logic” and the “logic of resistance”

Polish journalist and (former) dissident Adam Michnik visited Ukraine in mid-March. Speaking at the National Museum of Taras Shevchenko on March 11, he touched on a wide range of topics. According to the Polish dissident, the West, long enjoying peace and stability, is afraid of war: “Europe has two logics at its disposal: Neville Chamberlain’s one and the logic of resistance. However, they need to understand that Vladimir Putin’s political philosophy calls for a ‘Finlandization’ of the entire Europe. Just look at the fifth column’s successes in Hungary and Greece.”

Michnik also spoke about the main threats currently facing the West. “I would say at once that Putin is the foremost of them, he and his aggressive imperial policy as well as his regime of ‘sovereign democracy,’ meaning the sovereign right to imprison all those who he wishes to, unhindered by Strasbourg and Brussels officials,” the dissident explained. Michnik cited Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban as an example of the spread of this ideology in Europe: “He is a Putinist using anti-communist slogans, and his pro-Putin policy means that he likes Putin’s governance model. This model is a union of authoritarianism and corruption, two traps for the sovereign Europe. All this leads to ethnic nationalism, which often comes close to racism.” In addition, according to Michnik, the current developments in Russia are generally akin to fascism: “I mean populism as expressed by egalitarianism and campaigns against the intelligentsia.”

As we know, Michnik was a central figure of the Solidarity trade union movement, founder and editor-in-chief of Poland’s most influential publication Gazeta Wyborcza. It was peculiar features of changes in the communist Poland and its liberation from Soviet influence that the Polish dissident devoted a lot of his lecture time to. “We had an idea that united us in opposition. We were arguing among ourselves, because we were different, but we did find a compromise. This was possible because we had two absolute authorities: the Solidarity’s leader Lech Walesa and Pope John Paul II,” Michnik told his audience.

After the formation of the first Solidarity Cabinet in 1989, Poland underwent an economic reform known as the “shock therapy,” which aimed at a transition from a planned to a market economy. “The Solidarity relied on big factories, large businesses, miners... It was when they went on strike that we saw the impotence of our party secretaries and generals,” Michnik continued. “What we did then was the nation’s worst trauma, Leszek Balcerowicz’s reform package, known as the ‘shock therapy.’ We have a healthy economy today, but it was a great political challenge then, because it concerned the social sphere. It was a blow to these businesses and their employees. Their struggle has brought freedom to Poland and opened the door to the reforms, but these people were their first victims.”

Michnik separately addressed the issue of lustration, which took place in Poland and is an important issue for Ukraine: “It is important that Poland, in spite of all the conflicts and debates, paid virtually no attention to the logic of revenge. I   think it is unacceptable to organize a social or intellectual movement around hatred, around looking for enemies...” Michnik is well-known as an opponent of lustration who spoke out against the persecution that befell the former first secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party Wojciech Jaruzelski. “I thought that the only reasonable way to conduct a lustration was through a democratic election, and KGB archival records were not pages from some holy scripture that I could trust, but only a means to destabilize the country,” the dissident shared his thoughts. “It reached ridiculous levels when the lustrators found some documents and stated that our leader Lech Walesa was a secret police informer. They aimed to humiliate him, to kill him with words. Therefore, a lustration in Ukraine will be a gift to its enemies. I would not advise you to go that way.” According to Michnik, if an official was corrupt or had people illegally arrested, we have a prosecutor and a judge who should investigate them, so Ukraine should not organize “hatred movements” now.