Postcommunist McCarthyism in Poland.
BY MATTHEW KAMINSKI
Monday, January 15, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
Among the documents in the Polish security service's folder on covert informant "Grey," a two-page "Note" dated Oct. 5, 1977--and prepared by a Col. J. Mazurek--gives a good idea of what collaborating with the Communists entailed.
A Catholic priest and philosophy professor "with moderate opposition views," Grey only "partially carried out his tasks" during a recent trip to Sweden, reports his handler. He discussed academic exchanges with an émigré Medievalist the Polish spooks wanted to know more about, but failed to get "closer to the immigrant community," since a social club in Stockholm popular with them was closed when Grey stopped by. The following year, Col. Mazurek writes to his superiors, Grey will take a fellowship at the University of Munich and is "ready to work for us in Germany 'along the way.' . . . He emphasized his commitment to us but declared that he didn't want to be treated as a dependable agent." In return, Grey asked for a passport, but explicitly not money. None of the other documents in the 69-page folder suggest that Grey's spying for his country, as it was then, was anything but banal, ineffective and as far as anyone can tell harmless.
Thirty years on, at St. John's Cathedral in Warsaw last week, the new Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus was to celebrate Mass to mark his promotion when he abruptly resigned. Until last month, only a couple of ex-secret policemen knew that Archbishop Wielgus was Grey. His "folder" was leaked to a Polish newspaper soon after the Vatican gave him one of the most important jobs anywhere in the Roman Catholic Church. He denied the charge, then apologized for "weakness," but had to step down.
Suddenly the Catholic Church, the hero of the fight against Communism and spiritual home of the late John Paul II, finds itself under attack from the furies of historical reckoning. Another prelate resigned a day after Wielgus amid collaboration accusations, and others are sure to follow. The country's 45 bishops, minus Wielgus, in Friday crisis talks agreed to investigate themselves for past ties to the secret police.
The bishops were naïve to believe that the Church wouldn't be touched by the gathering Inquisition. The country is busy playing "Catch That Traitor," which, every week it seems, finds a prominent (or not) reputation destroyed. If politicians, artists and businessmen have been tarred by leaks from dusty archives, why not priests? To the ruling Communists the Church posed, with Solidarity, the gravest threat to its survival. The enemy had to be infiltrated, and was.
In agreeing to work with the secret police, Stanislaw Wielgus's vice wasn't drugs or sex but professional ambition, the right to be able to work abroad. A man so tainted couldn't carry on in such a visible job, next in line to lead Europe's most vibrant Catholic community. Public opinion turned against him; the Church hierarchy in danger of splitting. Now as the hunt gathers pace for others--how many priests are "agents"? 15%, more?--one almost forgets that in its epochal battle with Communism, the Church won in a rout.
Among former totalitarian states, Poland is a case apart. Except for a brutal dose of Stalinism in the early 1950s, the country had been, until its negotiated demise 18 years ago, a corrupt, cynical, largely benign Communist regime, the freest in the Soviet bloc. Martial law in 1981-83 claimed about a dozen lives. Its past, in other words, is full of grays; after the fall of the Berlin Wall no effort was deemed necessary by many of the victors to get South Africa-style "truth and reconciliation."
Only history refused to stay buried. In hard-fought electoral battles it turned out to be politically useful if presented in stark colors. Though some of the dissidents who suffered most (Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuron, to mention two) fought against it, the calls to "out" former collaborators were hard to ignore. The Kaczynski twins, who hold the presidency and prime minister jobs, won power in 2005 on promises of vengeance--not truth, much less reconciliation.
The unintended consequences are rich in irony. Some of the loudest voices in favor of "lustration," from the Latin word for purification through sacrifice, apparently didn't realize it would bring low not former regime hacks but people from their own ranks; the Communists, after all, didn't need informants about themselves. The influential hard-line Catholic Radio Maryja championed lustration, then fast changed its mind when its patron, Wielgus, got into trouble.
Making it all so much messier is that, unlike in East Germany, Polish archives are closed to the general public, incomplete and disorganized, and possibly misleading. Secret policemen, one might well keep in mind, could and did lie and embellish successes in recruiting agents to further their careers. Yet their scribblings have taken on near religious authority for people who otherwise detest them. It's also a good guess that the most important files were destroyed in the closing days of the old regime, leaving thousands of people who made smaller compromises left to pay a higher public price than they might have expected or deserved to.
There is a special "vetting" court to screen public officials for most top jobs in government (which at times uses neo-Stalinist methods in the cause of de-Stalinization); but most are prosecuted through press leaks from the historical institute that manages the archives. In an angry homily delivered that memorable Sunday at St. John's, Polish Primate Jozef Glemp said: "Today Archbishop Wielgus was judged. Based on what? On scraps of paper, thrice photocopied documents. We don't want these kinds of courts!"
The 76-year-old primate is much criticized for his defense of Bishop Wielgus. A day later, a younger priest published an op-ed article that said who needs the old guard, when a fresh cadre of Polish priests stands ready to take over. And so, finally and somewhat surprisingly, when wielded nearly a generation after the collapse of Communism in Poland, lustration is turning out to be a useful weapon for the young: only those born after 1970 can ever truly be beyond suspicion on this count. Among politicians, the intensity of self-righteous disdain for people who had to make their lives in the past era is inversely proportional to their age.
To doubt the wisdom of cleansing by public lynching is not to endorse moral relativism. Poland could have, but didn't, exclude senior Communists from power for a few years after the 1989 turnover. Now it's certainly late for that. Too little was done to prosecute real crimes or preserve and sort out the archives. The past of anyone who runs for office in a democracy is fair game. Yet Poland, once a model in the region, has long crossed the line from healthy historical examination to post-communist McCarthyism.
Mr. Kaminski is editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe.
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