The Magic Lantern E-Book

Timothy Garton Ash

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 256

Beschreibung

The Magic Lantern is one of those rare books that capture history in the making, written by an author who was witness to some of the most remarkable moments that marked the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. Timothy Garton Ash was there in Warsaw, on 4 June, when the communist government was humiliated by Solidarity in the first semi-free elections since the Second World War. He was there in Budapest, twelve days later, when Imre Nagy - thirty-one years after his execution - was finally given his proper funeral. He was there in Berlin, as the Wall opened. And most remarkable of all, he was there in Prague, in the back rooms of The Magic Lantern theatre, with Václav Havel and the members of Civic Forum, as they made their 'Velvet Revolution'.

Leseprobe

THE MAGIC LANTERN

‘In the future, there will probably be streets in Warsaw, Prague and Budapest bearing the name of Timothy Garton Ash.’

Karel Kyncl, Independent

‘A wonderful combination of first-class reporting, brilliant political analysis and reflection.’   New York Times Book Review

‘[Garton Ash’s] own involvement in these events, intellectual and emotional, is of such intensity that he can speak... from the inside as well as from the outside. Yet the sense of historic dimension... is never lost. And the quality of the writing places it clearly in the category of good literature.’

George Kennan

‘Along with the historian’s long view, Garton Ash has an eye and an ear for the telling detail.’   Washington Post Book World

A Note About the Author

Timothy Garton Ash is the author of ten books of ‘history of the present’ which have explored many facets of Europe over the last half-century. He is Professor of European Studies, University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He also writes a column on international affairs in the Guardian, which is widely syndicated, and has been a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, among other journals. His books include The File: A Personal History, In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent and, most recently, Free Speech: Ten Principles For a Connected World. Awards he has received for his writing include the International Charlemagne Prize and the Orwell Prize. The Magic Lantern, originally published in 1990, has been translated into twenty languages.

By the same author

Free Speech: Ten Principles For a Connected World

Facts are Subversive: Political Writing From a Decade Without a Name

Free World: Why a Crisis of the West Reveals the Opportunity of Our Time

History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Despatches from Europe in the 1990s

The File: A Personal History

In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent

The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe

The Polish Revolution: Solidarity

THE MAGIC LANTERN

The Revolution of ’89Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest,Berlin and Prague

Timothy Garton Ash

First published in Great Britain in 1990 by Granta Books in association with the Penguin Group as We the People.

This updated paperback edition first published in 2019 in the United Kingdom by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Timothy Garton Ash, 1990, 1993, 1999, 2019

The moral right of Timothy Garton Ash to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-83895-070-5

E-book ISBN: 978-1-78239-684-0

Printed in Great Britain

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For D., T. & A.

Tvá vláda, lide, se k tobě navrátila!

People, your government has returned to you!

Václav Havel, President of Czechoslovakia, in his 1990 New Year’s Address. Havel was adapting words from the seventeenth-century Czech scholar Comenius originally quoted by Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk in his inaugural address as first President of Czechoslovakia, in 1918.

Contents

Witness and History

Warsaw: The First Election

Budapest: The Last Funeral

Berlin: Wall’s End

Prague: Inside the Magic Lantern

The Year of Truth

Thirty Years On: Time for a New Liberation?

Acknowledgments

Witness and History

One day in April 1989 I found myself in the Dimitrov coal mine at Bytom, in Upper Silesia. The occasion was the first public meeting of Solidarity in this mine since General Jaruzelski declared a ‘state of war’ in Poland in December 1981, and there was a quiet anger in all the dusty faces. One clean-faced podgy man, wearing a suit, sat incongruously in the first row. He was the Party secretary. After a minute’s silence for those – many of them miners – who were killed during the ‘state of war’, the Solidarity chairman introduced Lech Wałęsa’s candidates for election to parliament from the region: a mining engineer, a teacher and the opposition leader and essayist Adam Michnik. The candidates spoke in turn, Michnik observing that this was the first time in most people’s lives that they could vote for an MP of their own choosing. This election, he said, spelled the end of the ‘Stalinist-totalitarian system’. The Party secretary clutched his papers with a sweating hand.

Shortly afterwards the Solidarity chairman announced to the assembled miners that there was, in their midst, a visitor from Britain who had written some sort of a book about Solidarity. Then he thrust the microphone into my hand. Taken completely by surprise, I stammered out a speech in which I made, so far as I can recall, three main points. First, I said that I had come there as an independent observer to write about this remarkable election campaign, which had once again drawn the eyes of the world to Poland. Secondly, I said that, as an independent observer, I wanted to tell them that the name of Adam Michnik was well known in the West, and that it had become a synonym for integrity, courage and resistance. Thirdly, I wanted to tell them – as an independent observer – that if they voted for Adam Michnik, and his admirable fellow candidates, then the West would probably give more money to help Poland.

All three statements were strictly true, but I would not deny that, taken together, they might conceivably have been construed as recommending to the audience a certain course of action, or, to put it another way, as ‘interference in the internal affairs of the Polish People’s Republic’. ‘Instant expulsion!’ said Bronisław Geremek, the veteran Solidarity adviser, when he heard what had happened. But this time I was not expelled, and by the end of the year there was no longer a Polish People’s Republic to interfere in. The people had deleted the People.

In any case, thus it was that I came to give the first – and I sincerely hope the last – election speech of my life, in Polish, in a Silesian coal mine.

* * *

A week earlier I had attended, in Budapest, what was described as a ‘fête’. An opposition fête. Near the stalls, selling samizdat rather than home-made jam, there was a banner that said simply ‘Hyde Park’. In the marquee, a discussion had been organized between the representatives of no less than seven political groups, with the man from the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, the ruling communist party, just one among many. There were Free Democrats, Social Democrats, Smallholders, a so-called People’s Party, the Hungarian Democratic Forum, and the hosts, the Alliance of Young Democrats. The spokesman for the Free Democrats, a sociologist called Bálint Magyar, said: ‘Our programme is to change the system, not to reform it.’ The Free Democrats wished to turn the neo-Stalinist dictatorship into a multi-party democracy and to transform the planned economy into a market economy based on private ownership. The loudest applause of the day came when Viktor Orbán, the fiery, black-bearded leader of the Alliance of Young Democrats, declared that Hungary should leave the Warsaw Pact.

Coming out of the marquee I was suddenly sat down behind a rickety table, next to a stall selling samizdat copies of a translation of my recent essays about Central Europe. These I was ordered to sign. Meanwhile the stall-keeper started talking in the sort of jocularly lifted voice that people will use at fêtes when they say, ‘Roll up for the shove-ha’penny!’ or ‘Any more for the tombola!’

After many a winter, this was spring. But in April, while a comparison with 1848 had already come to mind, it was the springtime of only two nations, Poland and Hungary. The other four states of what was misleadingly called Eastern Europe were still frozen in various kinds of dictatorship, ranging from Brezhnevite immobility in Czechoslovakia and East Germany to the outright tyranny of Romania’s ‘socialism in one family’. For me personally, this meant that I was banned from going back to East Germany, and wrote about Czechoslovakia under the pseudonym of Edward Marston, or once, I blush to admit, Mark Brandenburg. (Edward Marston first started writing for the Spectator from East Germany in the late 1970s. Now that the files of the State Security Service are reportedly to be made available for scrutiny by scholars, I look forward to studying the one on Marston, E.) An American specialist referred to these unreconstructed states as ‘the gang of four’ – a description that could well be applied to their leaders, Honecker, Husák, Zhivkov and, last but not least, Ceauşescu.

Even in Poland and Hungary, what was happening could still hardly be described as revolution. It was, in fact, a mixture of reform and revolution. At the time, I called it ‘refolution’. There was a strong and essential element of change ‘from above’, led by an enlightened minority in the still ruling communist parties. But there was also a vital element of popular pressure ‘from below’. In Hungary, there was rather more of the former, in Poland of the latter, yet in both countries the story was that of an interaction between the two. The interaction was, however, largely mediated by negotiations between ruling and opposition elites.

This story cannot be told in detail here. Yet a few signposts are essential. In both Poland and Hungary, the direct antecedents of the ‘refolutions’ of 1989 may be traced back to May 1988. Characteristically, in Poland the refolution began with strikes, in Hungary, with a Party conference. That Party conference replaced the ailing János Kádár with Károly Grósz who, being just fifty-seven years old, was naturally hailed in the West as young, pragmatic and dynamic. But what Grósz led over the next year was less a dynamic advance than a confused retreat, in which the Party conceded position after position: by the end of 1988 it was allowing opposition groups to form and to organize demonstrations; in January 1989, legal guarantees of free assembly and association (though not yet for political parties) were passed through parliament; in February, the Party declared its support in principle for the transition to ‘a multiparty system’, and in April it formally jettisoned the Leninist principle of ‘democratic centralism’.

To some extent all this was the result of a deliberate strategy of retreating in order to advance – reculer pour mieux sauter. The trouble was, they never got to the sauter. Those who did were the various opposition groups and fledgling parties that I saw represented at the fête. Them and the journalists. For this was a movement conducted as much in the media as on the streets. To be sure, there were demonstrations of growing size, notably on the anniversaries of the earlier Hungarian revolutions, 15 March (1848) and 23 October (1956). But even here, the major impact in the country at large came through media reports, and especially through television broadcasts. In sum, there was a curious disproportion between the relatively weak people’s ‘push’ and the Party’s ‘pull’.

Not so in Poland. Here the story of 1989 cannot be understood without reference to the largest and most sustained popular ‘push’ in the history of communist Eastern Europe, that of Solidarity since 1980. And here the path to the negotiated end of communism began with a further round of strikes, in May 1988, during which the workers chanted, to the dismay of the authorities, to the delight of Solidarity, and somewhat to the surprise of both, ‘Nie ma wolności bez Solidarności!’: There’s no liberty without Solidarity.

I spent a day at the birthplace of Solidarity, the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, after being led in by a charming student, over a perimeter wall, under a huge pipe, around the rusting hull of a Soviet ferry, to avoid the riot police who had blockaded the yard. Inside the strike committee headquarters, I found Lech Wałęsa, in striped trousers and leather house slippers, arguing with one of his main advisers, the Catholic editor Tadeusz Mazowiecki, while half the committee crowded round. Mazowiecki was trying to persuade Wałęsa to throw his authority into the negotiations but Wałęsa was foxily refusing. ‘Panie Tadeuszu,’ he said, ‘you’re the man for negotiations, you’re for wisdom!’ And Pan Tadeusz cast a wry glance over Wałęsa’s shoulder, as if to say, ‘What can you do with a character like this!’

Later I talked to some of the relatively few workers who had risked occupying the yard. One summed up their grievances in the pithy and far from trivial observation: ‘Forty years of socialism and there’s still no toilet paper!’ When I wished them success, another said, shrugging his shoulders, ‘Maybe in thirty years...’ That was the feeling, and just thirty hours later the remaining strikers marched out arm in arm, Father Henryk Jankowski to Wałęsa’s right hand, Mazowiecki to his left, while in front of them someone carried a wooden cross bearing the words ‘God, Honour, Country’ and underneath ‘1970, 1980, 1988...’

It looked like a defeat. As late as July 1988, the then government spokesman Jerzy Urban could say that ‘the Solidarity movement... belongs to the past for good’. But in August there was another wave of strikes, larger than the last, with the strikers still more widely and emphatically demanding the return of Solidarity. On 31 August, the eighth anniversary of the 1980 Gdańsk Agreement that was Solidarity’s birth certificate, the interior minister, General Czesław Kiszczak, had a much-publicized and demonstrative meeting with Lech Wałęsa, whom the authorities had so long attempted to ignore as a mere ‘private citizen’. Wałęsa then used his personal authority to quell the strikes.

There followed four months of tortuous, often secret negotiation between Solidarity leaders and a group within the Party leadership, while Wałęsa again triumphed in a television debate with the head of the official trade unions, one Alfred Miodowicz. Wałęsa’s large group of mainly intellectual advisers also formally constituted itself a ‘Citizens’ Committee’. Crucially, the party of negotiation won General Jaruzelski’s support. Putting all his personal authority on the line, he managed to force through the decision to accept the return of Solidarity, at a stormy Central Committee plenum in January 1989. The path was then clear for the unprecedented ‘Round Table’ talks, which opened on 6 February. The photograph of the huge, bagel-shaped round table, seen from above, with a great bouquet of flowers in the middle, went, as they say, round the world. More to the point, it went round Eastern Europe.

The history of the Round Table, with its sub-tables and sub-sub-tables, its informal summit meetings in the village of Magdalenka near Warsaw, its bizarre conversations between former prisoners and their former jailers, deserves a separate book. Perhaps the largest historical irony of these talks is that it was the authorities who sought early elections, believing that the shorter the campaign the better their own chance to defeat a wholly unprepared opposition. Solidarity, by contrast, went into the talks determined to get one thing alone: the legal restoration of Solidarity. Beyond that, they would press for fundamental changes in the media, the law, education and local government. Early elections, with agreed restraints, were, they thought, just part of the price they would have to pay. Another part was a strong presidency for General Jaruzelski. In the event, they discovered they could get more than they originally bargained for, and ended up not only with a free contest for 35 per cent of the seats in the Sejm, but also with a free vote for the whole of a new upper house of parliament, the Senate. The first proposal for free elections to the upper chamber actually came from a member of the communist side, during one of those informal summits known colloquially as ‘a Magdalenka’.

The Round Table agreement was signed on 5 April. The preamble to this long and complex document declared it to be ‘the beginning of the road to parliamentary democracy’. In one of the drafting committees the Party representatives had proposed to introduce a parenthesis after that phrase with words to the effect that ‘the government-coalition side regard parliamentary democracy as socialist democracy’. The Solidarity negotiators, after considering their position, said they would agree – so long as a further sentence could be added to the effect that this was also ‘the beginning of the building of a sovereign, independent Poland’. The Party negotiators then dropped their original suggestion. So much for socialist democracy.

Three weeks later, I found myself rattling up to Gdańsk on the morning express with a buffet car full of Warsaw’s opposition intelligentsia, most of them now officially selected by the Citizens’ Committee as candidates for parliament. We were going to the Lenin Shipyard for a meeting of Solidarity’s 261 candidates from all over Poland. The meeting was held in the same hall that the inter-factory strike committee had used in August 1980, with the same model ships in glass cases, the same white eagle on the wall, and the same bust of Lenin. As he walked up on to the platform, Lech Wałęsa – the same – gave that Lenin a laughing glance, as if to say, ‘So who whom to you, old chum.’ Later, each candidate had his photograph taken shaking hands with Lech Wałęsa. Two hundred and sixty-one handshakes. The photography was supervised by the film director Andrzej Wajda. My notebook records Bronisław Geremek explaining that these elections were not democratic but ‘the key is the hope that in four years there will be free democratic elections’.

Four years! How tame those daring thoughts look now! Yet if nothing more had happened in the last seven months of 1989, what occurred in Hungary and Poland between January and May would have been recorded at year’s end as spectacular, unprecedented and historic. In the event, these negotiated breakthroughs, these ‘refolutions’, became almost forgotten as history started to accelerate at a giddy pace. First, there was Solidarity’s own extraordinary triumph in the June elections, which led to the appointment of the first non-communist prime minister in Eastern Europe for forty years. Then there was the reburial in Budapest of the hero of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Imre Nagy, and the events that led from that to the first formal dissolution of a ruling East European communist party.

Meanwhile, as an unintended, indeed barely considered, side effect of the Hungarian refolution, the ‘cutting of the Iron Curtain’ between Hungary and Austria allowed a growing number of East Germans to escape across that now ‘green’ frontier. This was a vital catalyst of the revolution that then erupted to coincide neatly with the fortieth anniversary of the German Democratic Republic. Bulgaria followed with a palace revolution, plus a little help from the streets, but was immediately overtaken by Czechoslovakia. In Prague, late one night and not entirely sober, I told Václav Havel’s wife, Olga, that Ceauşescu would be gone before the end of the year. She offered to bet on it – a bottle of champagne. Sober next morning, I thought I had lost a bottle of champagne. But then, just before Christmas...

Nobody hesitated to call what happened in Romania a revolution. After all, it really looked like one: angry crowds on the streets, tanks, government buildings in flames, the dictator put up against a wall and shot. It is, however, a serious question whether what happened in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria or even Czechoslovakia and East Germany, actually qualified for anything but a very loose usage of the term ‘revolution’. This doubt was expressed by several intellectuals in the countries concerned. Should popular movements which, however spontaneous, massive and effective, were almost entirely non-violent, really be described by a word so closely associated with violence? Yet the change of government, no, the change of life, in all these other countries was scarcely less profound than in Romania. By a mixture of popular protest and elite negotiation, prisoners became prime ministers and prime ministers became prisoners.

I cannot emphasize too strongly that this is not a comprehensive history of the events of 1989 in Eastern Europe. I do not pretend to offer a full analysis of Soviet policy, of economic factors, of developments inside the communist parties and governments, let alone of the longer-term causes. (Some account of these can be found in my earlier books, The Polish Revolution and The Uses of Adversity, to which this is a sequel.) Even less do I pretend to make any firm predictions about the future. To write about 1989 at the beginning of 1990 is perhaps slightly less foolhardy than to write about 1789 at the beginning of 1790; but it is foolhardy enough.

I do not describe events in Bulgaria and Romania, because I was not there. I was there at important moments in the other countries, but even here my account is largely from inside the opposition movements and from among so-called ‘ordinary people’ on the streets – and mainly, as the sub-title indicates, the streets of the capital cities. The chapter on Prague is much the longest, because there my vantage point as a witness was unique. The disadvantages of the witness as against the historian are those of partiality in space, time and judgement. The witness can only be in one place at one time, and tends to attach an exaggerated importance to what he personally saw or heard. The historian can gather all the witnesses’ accounts and is generally unswayed by that first-hand experience. What happened afterwards changes our view of what went before. The historian usually knows more about what happened afterwards, simply because he writes later. Finally, there is partiality in judgement.

‘I am a camera,’ said Isherwood. I was not a camera. A camera would not give an election speech in a Silesian coal mine. Certainly, I have made every effort to get at all the facts, to listen to all sides, to be both fair and critical. But the reader will see that my sympathies are generally with those who made these revolutions rather than with those who attempted to prevent them, with the former prisoners of conscience rather than the former jailers of conscience.

Few laws are more universal than Acton’s ‘all power corrupts’, and I dare say these countries’ new rulers will be corrupted too. To have been persecuted yourself is not necessarily the best protection against the temptation to persecute others. (Many of the communist leaders of Eastern Europe were themselves former political prisoners: Honecker, Husák, Kádár, even Ceauşescu.)

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.

But like most of the inhabitants of East Central Europe I am so conscious of the human price paid under the old evils, and the relief of being rid of them, that my inclination is not immediately to start hunting up new evils.

Such are the grave disadvantages of a witness. But there are also advantages. The witness can, if he is lucky, see things that the historian will not find in any document. Sometimes a glance, a shrug, a chance remark, will be more revealing than a hundred speeches. In these events, even more than in most contemporary history, much of great importance was not written down at all, either because it occurred in hasty conversations with no note-takers present, or because the business was conducted on the telephone, or because the words or pictures came by television. (The importance of television can hardly be overstated. Future historians of these events will surely have to spend as much time in television archives as in libraries.) The witness can see how things that appear to have been spontaneous were actually rigged; but also how things that appear to have been carefully arranged were in fact the hapless product of sheer confusion. And perhaps the most difficult thing of all for the historian to recapture is the sense of what, at a given historical moment, people did not know about the future.

In an attempt to preserve this quality – blissful ignorance, if you will – I have arranged this book in the following way. The four main chapters contain accounts of the June elections in Warsaw, the reburial of Imre Nagy in Budapest, also in June, the opening of the Berlin Wall, in November, and two weeks of the revolution in Prague, in November and early December. These are reproduced here substantially as I recorded them at the time, or very shortly afterwards, in my notebooks and in articles for the New York Review of Books and the Spectator. Each of these chapters ends with a very brief summary of subsequent developments to the end of 1989, also drawing, where appropriate, on first-hand material, but looking back from January 1990. All have the defects, but perhaps also the qualities, of having been written fresh and fast. The final chapter is a set of reflections on the revolution, originally thrown down in note form for a lecture in December 1989, and substantially rewritten in January 1990.

The book thus has two time frames: one immediately contemporary, the other looking back from early 1990. The reader will then superimpose his own, third, time frame, from months or even years later. If things have gone badly in East Central Europe by the time you read this, you will probably find what follows absurdly hopeful and terribly light-hearted. Carefully avoiding all quotations from Wordsworth, I would say only that this, too, belongs to the record. It felt like that at the time.

Warsaw: The First Election

With hindsight it begins to seem obvious that Solidarity should have won a landslide victory on Sunday 4 June, in the first round of the closest thing to a free election that Poland had seen for half a century. They must have known they would win! But they didn’t. I sat with an exhausted and depressed Adam Michnik over lunch that Sunday, and he did not know. I drank with a nervously excited Jacek Kuroń late that evening, and he did not know. Nobody knew.

Certainly the campaign had gone well. Despite all the starting handicaps, the lack of organization, money, offices, staff, and, most of all, media, the Solidarity-opposition campaign had become a festival of national improvisation. Despite all the initial advantages, the organization, money, offices, staff and monopoly control of radio and television, the campaign organized by the Polish United Workers’ Party and its subordinate coalition partners had been extraordinarily feeble. Solidarity selected just one candidate for each seat it was entitled to contest under the terms of the Round Table agreement. The selection procedure was not democratic, but it was highly effective. The Party-coalition side wasted weeks in quasi-democratic feuding, and ended up with several candidates for most seats, thus ensuring that their vote would be split.

Everywhere walls were covered with the names and faces of the Solidarity candidates. Each was shown in a photograph with Lech Wałęsa, taken at that meeting in the Lenin Shipyard. Underneath was the simple message, in Wałęsa’s handwriting: ‘We must win.’ To find out the names of the Party-coalition candidates, by contrast, often required a lengthy private investigation. Solidarity’s posters were red and white, with the unmistakable jumbly lettering. In several places, the Party had retreated into a faded conservative blue. A typical Party slogan was ‘with us it’s safer’ – a slogan for contraceptives rather than parliamentary candidates, as one Italian observer remarked.

On the day before the vote, I watched Kuroń pacing up and down the stage of the shabby Tȩcza Cinema in the working-class borough of Żoliborz, rallying the faithful. First we were shown a long and largely inaudible videotape about the history of the Workers’ Defence Committee, KOR, founded in 1976. For much of the audience this was already ancient history. Then Kuroń answered questions. One concerned a central bone of contention in the campaign, control of television. Television, said Kuroń, should be ‘public’ but not ‘governmental’. It should be like the BBC! Then he quoted a revealing remark made by a senior Party official, during the Round Table talks: ‘We’ll give you the Zomo (riot police) before we give you the TV.’ ‘And he’s quite right,’ commented Kuroń, ‘I’d much rather have the TV.’

On the overcast Sunday morning I went to the polls in Żoliborz with my indomitable underground publisher, Andrzej Rosner, his wife Ania and their seven-year-old daughter Zuzia. Ania proudly observed that this was the first time she had gone to vote in her life, since she had boycotted all the earlier, unfree elections. Andrzej confessed that he had voted once before – most embarrassing – but he had been just eighteen so it hardly counted. A steady stream of people flowed across the barren ground between the half-finished high-rise blocks, dodging huge muddy puddles on their way to vote. Outside the polling station, the only ‘information point’ was for Solidarity. Inside, it was all official red-and-white: the flag, the posters, even the ballot boxes.

Andrzej and Ania were handed their complicated ballot papers: separate white ones for each seat in the Sejm; the ‘National List’ of thirty-five prominent Party-coalition candidates, who merely had to get more than 50 per cent of the vote to take uncontested seats; and a long pink paper listing all the numerous candidates for the Senate. Ignoring the curtained booths, Andrzej and Ania sat down at a table and began the glorious work of deletion; for, in yet another blunder, the Party-coalition side had insisted that voting should be by crossing out the undesired candidates. Zzzick, zzzick, went the pens, as my friends crossed out name after official name, taking their time about it, savouring the moment. With an access of feminine mercy, Ania left one name out of the thirty-five on the National List – that of a judge who had not, it was suggested, been entirely a swine. Then we walked home, round the giant muddy puddles, past the half-completed blocks, the tenements of communism, in a glow of quiet but profound satisfaction.