In the bizarre world of post-communist Eastern Europe, former communists are not only winning elections in countries like Poland and Hungary, they are often brazenly unrepentant about their resumes. The pain of the economic transformation has worked in their favor. Though the Poles led the assault on the old communist system, many of them are now so preoccupied with their current discontents that they have lost their moral vision; they no longer seem to distinguish between old oppressors and the oppressed. The result: former communists have been emboldened to reach – and, in Zacharski’s case, to overreach – for posts that only recently looked out of bounds.
The first Solidarity government may have sown the seeds for the left’s eventual comeback by allowing forgiveness to turn into forgetting. Almost no attempt was made to pin even moral responsibility on the communists for past political repression or the country’s near-economic collapse. The former communists, in turn, maintained that they had served their country’s best interests all along. Aleksander Kwasniewski, the polished young leader of the left, argues that he might have joined the opposition rather than the Communist Party if he had studied history instead of economics at Gdansk University, since the history department was more of a breeding ground for dissidents. “People’s fates are often determined by accident,” he maintains. Such reasoning infuriates those who did take the risk of joining the opposition. “They were opportunists . . . cowards,” says Zbigniew Janas, a former Solidarity activist and now an opposition member of Parliament.
If the former communists really believed that their previous allegiances were of little consequence, it was only a short step to defending Zacharski’s appointment on the ground of his professionalism as a spy. As former Carter administration national-security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski acidly points out, “That means there was no moral issue involved in the cold war. It was all a game.” In the 1980s, most Poles knew it was no game. Zacharski’s brief elevation raises the troubling question of how many of them no longer understand that now.
