Читаем Poland полностью

When Wałęsa was sworn in, on 22 December 1990, he was handed the pre-war presidential insignia and seal of office by the president of Poland in exile, who had flown in from London to bestow on this first freely elected president the legitimacy handed down consecutively by the last one. But this symbolic reconnection and legitimation did not presage a new harmony. Wałęsa appointed as prime minister Jan Bielecki, a non-partisan liberal whose main concern was the economy and the preparation of the first free parliamentary elections. He kept on Balcerowicz as Finance Minister and Skubiszewski in foreign affairs, which provided continuity in those vital areas. But endless disagreements about technicalities delayed the elections until the autumn of 1991, which allowed time for frequent confrontations between a Sejm still made up mainly of former communists and Wałęsa, goaded on by the head of his chancellery, Jarosław Kaczyński.

In preparation for the elections, new groupings and parties were formed from fractions of disintegrating ones, against an uncertain international background: after a failed coup in Moscow that summer, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Ukraine declared their independence from Russia. Comecon was formally dissolved in June 1991, and the Warsaw Pact soon after that, but there were still large numbers of Russian troops based in Poland. At the same time, the opportunity provided by the first free elections precipitated a free-for-all, with over a hundred parties contesting them.

The result of the elections, held on 27 October 1991, was predictably inconclusive. The party which came out on top, Mazowiecki’s Democratic Union (UD), won no more than 12.3 per cent of the vote, and only seven of the twenty-nine parties represented in the Sejm took more than 5. An ominous sign was that the PZPR, restyled as the SdRP and now as the Alliance of the Democratic Left (SLD), came second, with 12 per cent of the vote.

It took nearly two months for a centre-right coalition to be cobbled together and to form a government, under Jan Olszewski. And although this had a genuine mandate, it found itself paralysed in various areas by the post-communists who still infested the administration and all state services, and who had become emboldened by the lack of any attempt to hold them to account for past crimes, as well as by the electoral success of their party. It also came under vicious attack from the post-communist controlled media and from Michnik’s Gazeta Wyborcza, whose staff and contributors vented their bitterness on their erstwhile colleagues.

A burning issue was whether people who had committed crimes against the Polish nation under the communist regime should be called to account. Popular feeling demanded it, reinforced by the knowledge that many were making careers for themselves, and that even those members of the former security services who had retired or been dismissed were getting higher pensions than ordinary citizens. But many of the former post-Solidarność camp were opposed to raking over the past, on the grounds that it would divide the nation. The issue was soon personalised, and rather than focusing on those who had murdered AK members or perpetrated serious crimes, attention was shifted onto the altogether more interesting subject of who among living public figures might have worked for the secret services as informers. Ministers who had access to secret service files leaked gobbets of unverifiable information, and even Wałęsa was accused of having been an informer. The issue brought down Olszewski’s government in a welter of accusations and recriminations, and after lengthy negotiations, a new centre-right coalition was formed under the premiership of Hanna Suchocka, the first woman to hold the post.

Her government was buffeted by the consequences of a world recession, which produced unemployment of up to 20 per cent in some areas, giving rise to strikes and, at the beginning of 1993, the rise of a peasant organisation called Self-Defence, under the leadership of Andrzej Lepper. While the governmwnt struggled with the economy, discussion in the Sejm and outside was dominated by such questions as the role of the Church in political life and the unresolved issue of calling to account the criminals and informers of the communist era. Wałęsa, who had lost his way politically and squandered much of his authority by making absurd off-the-cuff statements, was growing increasingly dictatorial, and weaved about supporting the government one day and opposing it the next. Public anger mounted, and at the end of May 1993 Suchocka’s government fell.