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Polish activist Jacek Kuroń (1934-2004) helped to transform the political landscape of Poland. He was expelled from the communist party, arrested and incarcerated. He was also instrumental in setting up Workers' Defence Committee (KOR) and became a Minister of Labour and Social Policy. [Listeners: Jacek Petrycki, Marcel Łoziński; date recorded: 1987]
TRANSCRIPT: If you want me to tell you the whole story and how it came about...
[Q] These authorities have changed, they really have changed.
What happened was, if you took a good look at those few years you'd see they were years of trying to reform the totalitarian system in a way that wouldn't make it democratic. When this failed, martial law was the next attempt. Martial law was not an attempt at withdrawing totalitarianism, let's be honest here. It was an attempt at economic reforms against society and against the Party apparatus on the back of which a dictatorship would be established, after which a model of a more liberal totalitarian order was supposed to have been set up. This was a total failure. That's when they understood that without society's co-operation this won't work, and there were at least two clear attempts to isolate the opposition and to draw society into co-operation, in other words, to involve the silent majority. This, of course, ended in failure, too. So they came to the conclusion that there was nothing left to do but to reach an agreement with the opposition although it took them a long time to come to this decision. They'll keep renewing their efforts... we could make a joke here by saying it's like nature calling the wolf back to the forest, they kept being drawn by the attraction of 'taming' the opposition. But they already know that this is no good to them, that they won't achieve anything by this yet nevertheless, they keep on trying to do this.
[Q] So this means these authorities have become wiser, is wiser?
I have never considered the authorities to be stupid. I only ever considered them to be totalitarian, and that they want to remain totalitarian. They are, however, pragmatic, and I have always written that this is the case. This, then, is what I based the possibility of a movement on, that when the moment came when this movement would be very powerful, this same pragmatism will make various people in authority take it into account, not just as something that has to be destroyed since the moment will come when it will prove impossible to destroy. There are simply a lot of pragmatists there, authority is altogether the work of pragmatists and it attracts pragmatists. This is just as well because the authorities ought to be pragmatic. Except, of course, it needs to be democratic, as well. So these pragmatists understood that the force of the opposition in Poland cannot be destroyed and, what's more, that there is no other way to reform the system, which needed reforming, other than by following the path leading to democracy, along which they had to come to an understanding with the opposition. What I'm saying is very simple, although it's hard to understand not because the words are difficult or the concepts but because they're hard to accept by people who are used to thinking in 'them and us' categories. 'We' shoot at them, while 'they' shoot at us.
[Q] Do you not think that there are other factors influencing this? How about perestroika?
Excuse me, but all this time I've been talking about the camp, the whole camp, meaning the same phenomenon in the whole camp. Perestroika is that phenomenon, that's what I've been talking about. Except that the issue of how it happened that this evolution, these attempts at reformation from the totalitarian system to this agreement with the opposition, I was using Poland as an example because so far, it has undoubtedly worked best in Poland. [...]
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