The Morning After

Michnik, once a political prisoner under Poland’s Communist regime, is today the editor in chief of a very successful major newspaper. He is well aware of what Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman recently explained in Foreign Affairs: namely, that 25 years after communism’s fall, the transition to capitalism and democracy has proven a success. International trade, household consumption, and standard of living have all increased; per-capita car ownership is higher in Lithuania, Poland, and Slovenia than in the United Kingdom. More East Europeans travel than ever before, pollution has been cut by more than half, and infant mortality has dropped.  

The cheerful verdict reached by quantitative indices is in tension, though, with the impressions of Michnik and his fellow dissident Václav Havel. These two recent books by Michnik—one a collection of essays reflecting on the morality of revolutions, the other a book of conversations with Havel—reveal a thinker who is not content. Neither Michnik nor Havel is a self-satisfied Western-style liberal who has embraced Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history.” Nor is either a Marxist romantic or revolutionary fanatic. They are, rather, philosophical radicals who have insisted on the need for metaphysics in an age of consumerism.  

The precocious son of Communists, Michnik was first arrested in 1965, before his 20th birthday, for adding his name to an open letter calling for a true workers’ revolution against the privileged Communist party bureaucracy. In the following decades, Michnik returned to prison several times, including in 1968, for his role in student protests against censorship, and in the 1980s, for his role in Solidarity. In 1989, he was a key figure in the Polish Round Table Talks, which resulted in the first free elections in postwar Poland.  

Havel’s path to becoming a hero of 1989 was quite different. Born in 1936, Havel was never a Marxist, but, rather, a playwright inspired by Beckett, Ionescu, and Kafka. When, in 1976, the members of a rock band called The Plastic People of the Universe were arrested, Havel mobilized the Czech intellectual elite on behalf of the young, long-haired musicians. That was the origin of Charter 77, the most important act of dissent in Communist Czechoslovakia, an act whose ethos was captured by Havel’s call to “live in truth.” Thirteen years later, after having spent several years in prison, the absurdist playwright became the first president of post-Communist Czechoslovakia. 

Since 1989, former dissidents like Havel and Michnik have grappled with the question: Why has there been no happily ever after? The fall of communism ushered in a period of robber-baron capitalism. Some people became very rich; others—the elderly on pensions, teachers and farmers, doctors and nurses, and others with pitiful state salaries—struggled to get by at all. The files in the secret police archives were exploited as a tool of vengeance against political enemies. Nationalism became a powerful political force. The sense of a collective moral project that had been present in Charter 77 and Solidarity evaporated: While 1989 had felt like a moment of “moral rebirth,” writes Michnik, 

The story of “living in truth” involves urban intellectuals hiking up a mountain. In August 1978, four Charter 77 signatories (including Havel, who was not ordinarily much of a hiker) met with their Polish counterparts (including Michnik) on Sněžka Mountain on the Czechoslovak-Polish border. Havel pulled a bottle of vodka from his backpack. A lifelong friendship was not all that resulted from that first encounter between the two men. 

On Sněžka, they spoke about the political resonance of seemingly insignificant moral acts. Michnik asked Havel to write down his thoughts. Three months later, an underground courier appeared at Michnik’s Warsaw apartment with a manuscript entitled “The Power of the Powerless.” Havel’s essay introduced an ordinary green-grocer who, every morning, displays in the shop window a sign stating: “Workers of the world unite!” Neither he nor his customers believe in the Communist slogan. Even the members of the regime no longer believe in it. All know it to be a lie. 

Yet what else can the greengrocer do? If he were to refuse to display the sign, he could be questioned, detained, arrested—which suggests that displaying a slogan in which no one believes is of great importance. If, one day, all the greengrocers were to take down their signs, that would be the beginning of a revolution. And so the seemingly powerless greengrocer is not so powerless after all. He bears responsibility; by failing to “live in truth,” people like the green-grocer “confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.” 

This is a diagnosis of post-1968 communism as a descent into inauthenticity, and it comes not from the comfortable classics of Western liberal (or conservative) thought but, rather, from Martin Heidegger. Havel was not alone among East European dissidents in having been misunderstood as a Western liberal. He was not a populist representing a good people against an evil regime; on the contrary, he thought that the people bore responsibility for the regime. He did not idealize the West. Havel described the Communist system as only one instance of “this general inability of modern humanity to be the master of its own situation.” He saw “no real evidence that Western democracy .  .  . can offer solutions that are any more profound.”

For Václav Havel, the ethical imperative was to reclaim one’s authentic self. Adam Michnik called on Poles in the late Communist decades to live “as if” one were a free person—that is, to accept that their behavior was their own responsibility, regardless of constraints. For Michnik, the traditional political opposition—right versus left—no longer had meaning. The miracle of Solidarity was its transcendence of political, ethnic, social, and generational divisions. Even Charter 77, while it remained a small ghetto of intellectuals, brought together young and old, Marxists and Roman Catholics, former Stalinists and former victims of Stalinism. Havel described dissidence as an “existential attitude.” He and Michnik were not alone in believing that Charter 77 and Solidarity were special, that they had things to teach the West.

One lesson for the West was about responsibility in conditions of moral ambiguity. In Havel’s autobiographical one-act play Audience (1975), Havel’s alter ego Ferdinand Vaněk is a dissident playwright working at a brewery. The secret police have demanded that the brewmaster file weekly reports on Vaněk. The brewmaster becomes nervous: He finds it difficult to compose the reports. Could Vaněk, perhaps, write them? “You could do that much for me, couldn’t you?” he asks Vaněk. “It would be child’s play for you! You’re a writer, damn it, right?”

Vaněk appreciates the brew-master’s kind treatment of him; nonetheless, he refuses to write the reports about himself. For Vaněk, this is “a matter of principle.” The brewmaster breaks down:

In Audience, everyone is implicated: the regime, the brewmaster, Vaněk himself. The brewmaster is a variation of the greengrocer; he is both victim and oppressor. 

For Michnik, among the disappointments of post-communism has been the rise of right-wing nationalist populism, accompanied by an official memory politics known as “historical policy.” The essence of historical policy is a denial of moral ambiguity and a failure to take responsibility. It is an attempt to enforce a national historical narrative that presents “the thesis that all Polish disasters were the result of Polish benevolence, trust, and gentleness, and of the malice and cruelty of foreigners.” 

For Michnik, historical policy is absurd: Communism had not simply been a Soviet occupation; everyone had taken part. In order to do something good, one had to participate in a system that was evil. Between heroes and villains there were many shades of gray. This was among the reasons why “lustration”—the purging from government and public life of those who had collaborated with the secret police—was not a straightforward matter. Many were put on secret police lists of potential informers without their knowledge. Others found themselves on those lists because they had once met with an agent at a restaurant or had succumbed to threats to their children. 

Moreover, those placed most at risk by lustration were those who had been in the opposition—after all, it was their circles the secret police had tried to infiltrate. Those safest under lustration were the greengrocers. The post-Communist antipathy towards the dissidents, Havel believed, had its roots in the dissidents’ serving as people’s bad consciences. He and Michnik were among those who, under communism, had sat in prison the longest. They were also among those most willing to forgive. For Michnik, historical policy and lustration reflected a Jacobin-like impulse to impose a politics of the sinless. And the problem with revolutionary purity was that it led to the guillotine.  

The trouble with revolution, Michnik finds, is also its aftermath: the superficiality of the everyday. Once upon a time, East Europeans had stayed up all night copying censored poems by hand. Now, no one had time to read serious literature. The omnipresence of Communist propaganda had been replaced by the omnipresence of quasi-pornographic tabloids. The revolution had brought the end of censorship. Then, the market had taken over—and had proven to be tawdry. “Suddenly all great value systems are collapsing,” Michnik observed. 

“[A]long with the development of this consumerist global civilization grows a mass of people who do not create any values,” Havel said during one of his last conversations with Michnik. For Michnik, this “axiological vacuum” was “a typical phenomenon of periods of restoration as described by Stendhal in The Red and the Black: this is a time of cynicism, intrigues, careerism.” Michnik grew preoccupied with Julien Sorel, Stendhal’s weak plebian hero who seeks authenticity in illicit love affairs: “Let everyone take care of himself in the desert of egoism called life,” Julien says. 

In 1989, Michnik’s friend, the philosopher Marcin Król, was among those who had considered liberty to be the great priority. But individualism began to dominate all other values. “We were stupid,” Król said in an interview last year. No longer does anyone pose metaphysical questions like “Where does evil come from?” The dramas of characters like Julien Sorel resulted from their awareness of the weight of their actions. The lack of an answer to the question of whether they behaved well or badly was the source of great suffering. “Today,” Król said, “the lack of an answer does not hurt.” And that is the problem: It should hurt. 

After 1989, Havel still felt the need for an “existential revolution.” Michnik agreed. “This is a civilization that needs metaphysics,” he told Havel in 2003. During the winter of 2013-14, metaphysics returned to Eastern Europe on Kiev’s Maidan. Like Solidarity, the Maidan protests were a miracle: Divisions were suddenly overcome, ideas mattered, moral stakes were high. The concept of human dignity became urgent, immediate, and palpable. People proved willing to sacrifice themselves. The existentialist moments of making a choice, taking responsibility, being shaken into authenticity were illuminated. 

Václav Havel died in December 2011. He did not live to see the Ukrain-ian revolution on the Maidan. Adam Michnik did. And he appreciated that the solidarity of the Maidan was a fragile moment that most people never experience in their lifetimes. On February 22, 2014, having for three days watched Kiev burn and some hundred people killed, Michnik addressed the Ukrainians. He quoted the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert: “We stand at the border / we reach out our arms. .  .  . We send our Ukrainian brothers words of solidarity.” 

Marci Shore, associate professor of history at Yale, is the author, most recently, of The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe.