Between Scylla and Charybdis: The Institute of National Memory and the Roots of Polish Populism

*Note: This article was written in 2009, before the Smolensk Air Disaster and subsequent elections. Proceed Accordingly.

In most countries, national memory is rarely more than a specter, lurking in monuments and postcards. In Poland, it dwells in an embodied institution, one of staggering size and influence.

In the Western academy, the study of cultural or collective memory has developed in recent years into an independent subfield, with its own canon (Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Nora), journals (History and Memory), and centers (McGill, Indiana) all dedicated in various ways to investigating the ways in which “people construct a sense of the past.”[1] Much of this literature tends to treat memory as a benign and creative act, generating useful myths to serve communities and countries. In these analyses, memories rarely have a clear origin in fact, but they do have a predictable lifecycle: first construction, then appropriation, and finally, contestation.

Poland’s memory of its Communist past has arrived solidly at the final phase of contestation. If history can be constructed, it can also be defended against all challengers. In Poland, that defense is led by the Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej)[2] or IPN, whose website portal on a recent visit held a flashing ad announcing that, “Our history creates our identity.” It is as if the Institute’s historians took Halbwachs’ lesson too much in earnest. Every community and state needs a useable past, and they have been asked to construct one for the new Poland. Since its establishment in 1998, the IPN has become at once the chief custodian of the Polish memory of the recent past, and the largest center of organized historical research into the eras of Nazi Occupation and Communist rule. A very significant proportion of recent Polish historiography on the past seventy years has come out under the IPN’s auspices; much of the rest might be read as a critical response. This essay is not an attempt to make an assay of this literature (which is very large, and constantly growing: some 300 volumes and a decade of journal runs from the IPN, and a perhaps larger literature in response). Rather, it is an attempt to make a sketch of IPN’s guiding program, examining its mission, activities, and, crucially, its complicated political involvements — for the IPN has become the center of a bitter political battle which has roiled Poland over the past two years.

The IPN and its reading of history both laid the groundwork for the ruling Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, or PiS) party’s win, and for its recent fall from favor. No one (except the IPN itself) has yet devoted a book to a comprehensive overview of the IPN’s working in Poland, nor has it been the subject of any systematic investigation by English language scholars. The question of the “reckoning with the past,” whether viewed legally, as one of transitional justice, or culturally, as one of history and memory,[3] is itself not yet past — it has returned to center-stage in Poland, and is making an unexpected comeback across Eastern Europe.

The Institute of National Memory

The Institute of National Remembrance is remarkable both for the range of its activities and for its omnipresence in public life. Poland’s leading paper, Gazeta Wyborcza, has devoted over three thousand stories to it in the last few years. IPN’s own website provides a daily digest of the nine or ten most notable news stories which feature it. It is difficult to convey the extent to which IPN has attracted attention and dominated conversation. This summer while in Warsaw I turned on the television one night to see a talk-show anchor beseeching one of the Institute’s historians, “Really sir, is this the way one should read primary sources?”

The question goes to the heart of the Institute’s purpose. At its center is an archive: the IPN is in charge of all the files created by the State Security Services between July 22, 1944 and December 31, 1989. This includes some 85 linear kilometers’ worth of documentation. The dates are significant, especially the second, which falls several months into Poland’s first post-Communist government — an early sign that nothing involving the archive would be entirely straightforward. The IPN was created by special legislation on December 18, 1998, with the intention that it would bring order to this wilderness of files, and along the way bring justice to the crimes they documented. This has not turned out to be a simple process.

Though the archives of the Secret Police (in Poland, the UB, or Urząd Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego) are central to the IPN, archival work is not. The institute is as much a gatekeeper as it is storehouse. It is also an educator, publisher, and prosecutor. According to its statutes, the IPN has four main branches: the Commission for Prosecution of Crimes, Archival Bureau, Public Education, and, finally, the Lustration Bureau. However, the institute’s full name, The Institute of National Remembrance — Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation, perhaps gives a better sense of its priorities. The Institute is a hybrid entity, at once a research institute in charge of creating and guarding a definitive version of the Polish past, and a sort of Solicitor General, tasked with righting historical wrongs — war crimes, crimes against humanity, and especially the “crimes of Communism.” This last one is where lustration comes in; thanks to the 2006 Lustration Law,[4] the IPN is in charge of furnishing evidence and providing judgments for all lustration cases in the land. It has also been at the center of the extra-judicial (or really, extra-procedural) ‘wild’ lustration. This confluence of functions has created the extraordinary, and as far as I can tell, unique, spectacle of historians acting as both Arthur Schlesinger and Eliot Ness.

IPN’s size is startling. Last year it had a budget of 209 million złotys (between 100 and 70 million dollars, depending on the date of exchange) and some 1200 employees. Its Warsaw headquarters are a 12-story high rise in the center of the city guarded by metal detectors and armed guards at the entrances. It occupies six more buildings in Warsaw, and across the country it has research centers in eleven cities, and offices in seven more. It publishes two biannual journals, the tellingly titled Memory and Justice, and Apparatus of Repression in People’s Poland, 1944–89, as well as a ‘popular-scientific’ monthly. It has also published nearly 300 books and edited volumes, including a series of photo-albums called the “Faces of the Secret Police” (Twarze Bezpieki, now up to 27 volumes) and a chronicle of an “International Memory Tour” on motorcycle to Katyń, site of the Soviet massacre of Polish officers at the start of WWII.[5]

The Institute of National Remembrance is not alone in the Post-Communist world. In 2003 Slovakia created the closest imitator, the somewhat-oddly translated Nation’s Memory Institute (Ústav pamäti národa, UPN). The UPN’s mission statement invokes Santayana: “Not knowing one’s past means to be destined to repeat its errors.” So does the Czech Institute for Study of Totalitarian Regimes (USTR), begun this year. The equivalent archival organizations in Hungary and Germany are the more modestly named Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security and the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service (BStU), while in Romania the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes in Romania (IICCR) was set up in 2006 with the explicit aim of condemning the Communist past — in the words of its president, “Many people are asking whether an outright condemnation of communism is still necessary … I say it is, and I rely on the fact that such a profoundly moral decision, meant to restore the Romanian society from its foundation, is necessary at any time.”[6] Several of these countries have also undergone more recently introduced lustration. Nonetheless, Poland is so far the only country in which historians are in charge of lustration, and where the roles of historian and judge have been brought so close together.

The IPN is not only interesting as a feature of a particular Eastern-European manifestation of the politics of memory; it also has implications for the epistemology of history more generally. Carlo Ginzburg has written sensitively about the differing approaches towards evidence practiced by judges and historians; at one point he mentions Marc Bloch’s distinction between “understanding and judging,” and concludes that in contemporary historiography, understanding has won.[7] He goes on to wonder whether this triumph has not gone too far, whether historians haven’t lost a proper regard for the category of proof. In Poland, it would seem the reverse situation prevails. Judging is paramount, and looking for ‘proof’ in the judicial sense has become the signal task for historians.

There is something ironic in this condemnatory certainty, however, especially when applied to the files created by professionals at subterfuge. After all, István Rév begins Retroactive Justice, his superb (though often elliptical) cultural history of burial, reburial, festivals and pantheons in Communist and post-Communist Hungary, with the injunction Nullius in verba!, Trust not in Words![8] Rév goes on to give a Dantean warning about Communist archives: “The documents in the archives of repression are, however, largely fabrications: misinformation, blatant lies, overdramatization, or their opposite: trivialization of dramatic events.”

Lustration — Memory and Sacrifice

In antiquity, the word lustration, derived from the Latin verb luo, to purify, referred to a variety of religious ceremonies, usually involving blood sacrifice, aimed at the ritual cleansing of people, houses, and cities. They were a regular feature of Greek and Roman life: lustrations were performed at birth, marriage and death, as a precondition for entering holy places, for the purification of houses, lands, cities, or people, and as expiation of blood-guilt.[9] A lustration was always performed before the founding of a new colony. Rome itself underwent a lustration every five years and after any great calamity, such as civil war.[10] At that time the acting censor and city priests walked a pig, sheep and ox three times around the city and then slaughtered them on the Field of Mars.

In recent years lustration has made an unexpected return, with a new meaning, and a new significance, in post-Communist Eastern Europe. Lustration now means a policy of screening public figures (often very broadly defined) to see if they collaborated with the former regime, and especially its secret services.[11] Those who are identified as collaborators are typically barred from public service, in addition to being named and shamed. Lustration is thus in essence a process of vetting and excluding, creating a just polity by excluding secret enemies and thereby “cleansing a shameful past.”[12]

This double function retains a trace of the ancient definition of purification by sacrifice. Although this etymology is almost universally believed, both in Eastern Europe and by foreign commentators, it appears to be a false one.[13] Lustration had an entirely different meaning in the early modern Slavic world: in Poland it meant the visitation and review of a plantation by its noble owner, who would then settle accounts and right wrongs. In the Czech lands, it came into use by archivists, for whom it meant simply “the compilation of an inventory or register.”[14] To lustrate someone meant simply to check whether his name appeared in a database; it entered the Czech language during the bureaucratic battle for control of Secret Police files in 1990. The original Czech lustration law of 1991, the earliest and most radical of its kind, did not even use the word. Instead it bore the inscrutably vague title, “On some further prerequisites for the discharge of some functions in state organs.”[15] Nonetheless, the classical derivation swiftly and completely usurped this mundane derivation, as if the peculiar “discharge state organs,” so similar to the unutterable word “purge,” could not be named without a covering of sacrificial blood and ritual purity.

Czech Lustration

It is no coincidence that lustration entered contemporary language in Czech, as lustrace. Of all the post-Communist states, Czechoslovakia and the former East Germany initiated the most extensive and most immediate screening policies.[16] But while East Germany’s screening was administered by the newly unified BRD, Czechoslovakia pursued its far-reaching and ambitious policy on its own (after 1993, it lapsed in Slovakia and only remained in effect in the Czech Republic). The Czech policy of lustration swiftly became paradigmatic, serving as both a model and a deterrent to other countries in the region.

The Czech lustration law of October 4, 1991 was originally proposed as a measure to defend democracy, not to seek revenge or arrive at a reckoning with the past. It was intended to root out any lingering influence of the old Communist government, which had been voted out of power a little more than a year before, by removing former collaborators of the Czech Secret Police (StB) from a range of public offices — the upper reaches of the civil service, the judiciary and procuracy, the security service, army positions above the rank of colonel, the management of state-owned enterprises, the central bank, the railways, high academic positions, and the public electronic media.[17] It was hoped that this would prevent a repetition of the Communist coup of February, 1948 –a fear made all the more grave by the widespread belief that the student protests leading up to the Velvet Revolution had in fact been Secret Police provocations. The independent commission set up by the law screened some 300,000 applicants in its first seven years, and found that 15,000 had been collaborators. Few of these lost their jobs however, as most were either in non-lustrable positions or were quickly transferred to ones.[18]

Though the Czech lustration did not lead to anything resembling a wide-scale purge — not even of the security services, most of whose agents had already been dismissed before it went in to effect — it did end the careers of a number of notable dissidents and politicians. More damaging than the official lustration itself was the so-called ‘wild’ lustration that preceded it, in which public accusations were leveled at politicians — most spectacularly during a televised session of the Federal Assembly in March 1991, when ten deputies were named as being listed in the register of informers — and in which long lists of supposed informers were leaked to the press, without differentiating between informers, ‘candidates’ and persons of interest. American journalists like Tina Rosenberg and Lawrence Weschler have documented two notable cases, those of Rudolf Zukal and Jan Kavan respectively.[19] Zukal, after twenty years of underground work and political persecution, had to give up his parliament seat when it was revealed that he had spied on an American student in Vienna in 1966, before the Prague Spring which marked his political conversion. Kavan, for twenty years a political exile in London and editor of the anti-government “Palach Press Agency” was accused on national television of having worked for the secret police in London from 1969–70, of which charge he was cleared in court several years later. Lustration remains in place though, and a hundred thousand people have been lustrated since 1999.

Polish Lustration

If Czechoslovakia became the paradigmatic case of maximal lustration, Poland has until fairly recently been seen a model of restraint. In a conversation with Czech-president Vaclav Havel, Adam Michnik the leading Polish dissident and editor of Poland’s leading newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, sketched these contrasting approaches as that of the Polish “policy of the thick line” (polityka grubej kreski) between the past and present, and the Czech way “symbolized by the term ‘lustration.’”[20] Havel, although he had signed the Czech lustration bill into law, replied that he would prefer to find a middle way between the two, to “steer between Scylla and Charybdis.” On one hand, the “ulcer” of the past had to be dealt with, and justice administered, and on the other hand, it lustration bears with it the danger of “unlawful revenge” which could bring with it “fanaticism, lawlessness, and injustice.”

Although Poland had a rather mild lustration bill on the books from 1997, and had engaged in fairly extensive, but discreet, vetting before that, its approach to the question of transitional justice has been viewed as one of the more cautious and conciliatory. Indeed, a number of political scientists created explanatory models for how this contrast could be generalized across the former Soviet Bloc. Samuel Huntington and John Welsh argued that each nation’s approach to lustration was conditioned by the nature of it Communist regime– repressive regimes like Czechoslovakia’s “frozen post-totalitarianism” produced rapid transitions and harsh reckonings, while Poland and Hungary’s “national-accommodative” regimes fostered negotiated transitions and mild settlements.[21]

The events of the past decade have sadly made a shambles of this model. Since 1993, Poland and Hungary have both embarked on ambitious programs of lustration, and Lithuania, Bulgaria, Albania and Romania have embarked on more modest versions.[22] Since 2006, the Polish government, under the leadership of the Law and Justice Party, has embarked on an especially ambitious lustration policy, which would affect some 700,000 people. The Law was especially notable for its capacious definition of what constituted a public figure — it covered all “public officials, from the president of the Republic down to local councilors, board members of companies whose stock is half or more state-owned; all members of the legal profession from judges to notaries public; all public-school headmasters; academics of all ranks in public and private universities, colleges, and science institutes; publishers, editors, and journalists of public and private media; and occupants of several other specifically named positions.”[23] All those subject to lustration were required to submit affidavits confirming or denying collaboration, in any form, with state-security organs active in communist Poland between July 22, 1944 and July 21, 1990. It was also remarkable for vesting control over the lustration process to a historical institute, the IPN, which was now asked to both prepare lists of informers and verify lustration statements.

Although Poland’s Constitutional Court struck down the lustration law before it went in to effect, the IPN’s lustration bureau remains in existence, although its legal function remains unclear. Certainly though the Institute has not left the lustration business — it has simply shifted the arena of combat from the courts to the press.

The Myth of the Fourth Republic

Instead of having a single clearly defined national approach to its Communist past, Polish politics since the transition to democracy has been characterized by a number of competing, contradictory programs. Unlike the Czech Republic and East Germany, where lustration or screening was carried out swiftly and fairly thoroughly, if often also carelessly and brutally, in Poland lustration has been subject to shifting circumstances. If in East Germany and Czechoslovakia the reckoning with the past was like chicken pox — early, unpleasant, and conclusive — in Poland it has been like malaria — a fever which periodically grips the country and shakes it to the root.

Poland’s first post-Communist government under prime minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, established before the fall of the Berlin Wall or the dissolution of Soviet Union, avoided any explicit policy of lustration of de-communization. However, the notion of the “thick line” with the past which has been irreversibly associated with the Mazowiecki government is, like lustration, another case of rapid semantic drift. The term comes from a speech given by Mazowiecki, the longer text of which reads: “We divide the past with a thick line. We will be responsible only for what we do to help Poland in her present condition.”[24] Far from being a call to a Spanish-style Pact of Silence, Mazowiecki’s speech was a call for his government, and public officials more generally, to be judged on their own merits and the handling of the economic crisis, without recourse to excuses about past mismanagement. Nonetheless, the “Thick Line” (gruba linia or gruba kreska) is routinely invoked to condemn previous Polish government for their supposed forbearance in dealing with the past. In fact, Mazowiecki’s government did undertake a number of personnel changes and set up verification committees for the judiciary which removed 10% of prosecutors and 33% of the staff in the Office of the General Prosecutor.[25]

De-communization then became an issue in Lech Wałęsa’s 1991 presidential campaign and became a main plank in Jan Olszewski’s right-wing minority government of 1991, which decided that the Interior Ministry should verify all elected officials for links to the Communist Secret Police (UB), and prepare a bill for a more encompassing lustration. Their fairly unsystematic efforts culminated in the “Night of the Files” (noc teczek) of June 4–5th 1992, when Olszewski’s Interior Minister Antoni Macierewicz delivered a list of 64 alleged collaborators to the Sejm. “Macierewicz’s List,” as it quickly became known in Polish political lore, had the twin disadvantages of being tainted by transparent political motivation — it was delivered on the eve of a no-confidence vote and contained mostly members of the opposition — and inaccuracy; even Macierewicz would not vouch for it completely.

This spectacular shock, which swiftly brought Olszewski’s government down, delayed the advent of regular lustration by several years. Between 1993 and 1997, governments dominated by former-Communists of the SLD Party were naturally disinclined from pursuing an aggressive policy of lustration. At the same time, the far-right, which had been behind Olszewski, now endured its time in the wilderness. The origins of the second lustration lie in this period, as the Polish right struggled to find a coherent voice and a way back into political life.

Over the next decade, lustration slowly crept back on the agenda, though in a more limited form than the Czech one. Once again, a scandal was the spur for policy — in this case the allegations that that the ex-Communist premier, Józef Oleksy, had been a Soviet and Russian spy operating under the codename Olin.[26] In response, Poland adopted a lustration law in June 1997, which covered all elected state officials from the president downwards, including parliamentary candidates, as well as ministers and senior state functionaries; judges and prosecutors; and leading figures in the public electronic and print media, and was later broadened to include all barristers, bringing the total number of officials subject to lustration to approximately 20,000. In 1998, this was followed by the creation of the Institute of National Memory.

At this same time, the Kaczyński twins, Lech and Jarosław, and the Polish right more generally, were looking for a way out of the political wilderness. In 2005 they found it; winning the presidency and a plurality in parliament (making Lech president and Jarosław prime minister) with a party formed only four years before out of fragments of other right-wing parties, like the Solidarity Electoral Action coalition and the Movement for Reconstruction of Poland.

Part of the key to their success might be found in their electoral posters for the 2005 elections. They showed Lech Kaczyński in a book-lined study under a banner announcing him as the “President of the Fourth Republic.”[27] Poland’s first Republic ended in the third partitions of 1795; the second Republic began after WWI and ended with the German invasion in 1939; the Third Republic began sometime after the end of Communism (this sometime is problematic — it might be dated alternately to the first free election, in June of 1989, the formation of the first non-Communist majority government that September, the restoration of the title ‘Republic’ (Rzeczpospolita) in January 1990, or the beginning of Lech Walesa’s presidency, in December 1990). PiS and the Kaczyński twins explicitly challenged this narrative, calling for a sharp break with the past and the formation of a new moral order. Their raison d’être derives from a particular reading of the Polish past, one already discernible in Macieriewicz’s allegations.

A critical aspect of their program is the denigration of the Third Republic, and the twins have developed their own Joycean vocabulary of scorn. At different times they have called the Third Republic UBekistan, a “gigantic scandal,” “a soft, postcolonial beast,” “a chaotic anti-state.”[28] The lustration decree itself is a sort of calculated insult; the terminal date for “Communist collaboration,” July 21, 1990, was a full year into the rule of the Mazowiecki government.

A few other key terms and moments structure Law and Justice’s guiding historical myth. One is a conspiratorial reading of the Round Table negotiations between the Communist government and the opposition, in 1989, which ushered in the first democratic elections in the Soviet Bloc. In this version, the talks were a subterfuge designed to allow the Communists to strengthen their hold on the economy even as they appeared to loosen their grip on the politics. The Kaczyńskis themselves took part in the Round Table, as Walesa’s negotiators, and so have not much emphasized this brand of conspiratorial rhetoric. They have seized upon two related terms for the subterranean forces which ruled Poland throughout the life of the Third Republic from the Round Table on. These are the ‘system’ or ‘network’ (układ) and the ‘quadrilateral’ (czworokąt). The quadrilateral is the system of criminals, politicians, the secret service, and businessmen.[29]

These conspiratorial myths surfaced in the arguments surrounding lustration. Lustration’s proponents argued that it was meant to uproot this supposed ‘network’ which dominates Poland’s government and economy, a system “comprising ex-communists and some of their former adversaries, now joined in a web of greed, bribery, nepotism, and cronyism.”[30] They also argued that it would forestall the possibility of blackmail, by depriving former secret police officers of the influence they could wield over their former toadies. There is an odd circularity to this logic: in order to emasculate the blackmailers, all their possible targets first had to be publicly shamed. The threat of the układ nonetheless made this reasoning credible, despite the fact that no case of blackmail by a former UB agent has ever been reported.

The other thing driving the re-emergence of official lustration was the return of wild lustration. Wild lustration, the publication of lists of supposed agents and informants by people outside state agencies, such as journalists, citizens groups and insider whistleblowers, helped to drive lustration forward in Czechoslovakia. In Poland, the scandal around the night of the files restricted wild lustration for about a decade. It came back in dramatic fashion on February 5, 2005, when a list of 240,000 supposed former collaborators, secret informants and Ministry of the Interior employees, was anonymously posted on the internet. In short order it was revealed that the list had been leaked (or smuggled out) of IPN, and posted by Bronisław Wildstein, a right-wing journalist and former member of KOR. Wildstein lost his job at his newspaper, only to be rewarded with the chairmanship of Polish state television when PiS won the election later that year.[31]

The Freedom and Justice Party (PiS) leveraged the furor surrounding Wildstein’s list into their proposal for expanded lustration, again with the somewhat circular logic that to prevent unsystematic vetting, everyone needed to be vetted. In this way, PiS was able to rehabilitate the old right-wing project of a general social cleansing begun by Macierewicz. The old military intelligence chief’s rehabilitation continues: he was recently the keynote speaker at a conference sponsored by the IPN, which sought to describe how Solidarity had been undermined and corrupted by an alien, left-wing faction during the Round Table talks. His opening act was a singer-songwriter who sang a composition entitled „Lustration” — sample lyrics: “every big shot turns out to have been an informer or a stoolie, who degraded himself ratting out his pals.”[32]

Since it came to power, Freedom and Justice has used lustration as a blunt political weapon, finding files to discredit its opponents in parliament and force the resignation of hostile justices on the Supreme Court. But the Party also needs a historical narrative to support its use of this weapon. Unless the transition was truly flawed, and the Third Republic profoundly corrupt, their entire project, ‘The Fourth Republic, the moral transformation of Poland on which they premised their campaign, would be meaningless. This is why the IPN has become so large and so powerful: its historians can supply the story (or counter-history) and its files provide the ammunition. This is why the role of historian has come so close to that of the judge, or even inquisitor. In the Fourth Republic, it is the historians who write the sermons and sharpen the stakes.

IPN: Purity and Danger

In its first few years, the IPN mostly sought justice against external enemies, “criminals against the Polish nation.’ It concentrated on the second of its stated functions, documenting and prosecuting crimes against the Polish nation and ‘humanity’ at large. Its targets included the Katyń Massacre, in which thousands of Polish officers were shot by the NKVD, a variety of pogroms carried out against Poles by German, Ukrainians, Byelorussians and Lithuanians, post-war Communist actions against the Home Army, and the Holocaust. It investigated the imprisonment of Archbishop Stefan Wyszyński, and tried to extradite Stefan Michnik, Adam Michnik’s half-brother and a hanging judge in the days of Stalinism, from Sweden, and pursued surviving members of the Galician (West Ukrainian) SS.[33]

Although the IPN has published a mass of valuable source material on the Holocaust, its relationship to the topic is rather fraught. On the one hand, it is dedicated to pursuing crimes against humanity committed on Polish soil and against Polish citizens (the two categories blur all too often). On the other, the IPN has worked to defend Polish honor against charges of collaboration in genocide. Most famously, it played a leading role in the debate surrounding Jan Gross’ Neighbors. IPN historians lead the investigation into the massacres, (somewhat oddly, since the killings had already been prosecuted in a Polish court in the 1950s) and published a two volume study of the case, Wokół Jedwabnego (Around Jedwabne).[34] Despite intense political pressure to deny the charges, the IPN team confirmed their truth overall, while questioning the exact number of victims. However, a few years later the Institute weighed in on Gross’ subsequent book, Fear, about post-war Kielce pogrom. It published a counter-history of post-war Polish-Jewish relations which sought to absolve Poles of guilt by setting up an insidious parallelism between Polish violence against Jews and Jewish (Communist) violence against Poles.[35]

As it became more closely tied with the Freedom and Justice Party, IPN’s program shifted from identifying foreign enemies to re-writing the history of modern Poland. This mission had both a positive and a negative dimension; in the IPN’s counter-history, Poland had a new set of enemies and heroes. The positive program has concentrated on documenting the memory of the Polish Underground State and Home Army during WWII. Its student history club is named after Stefan Rowecki, or “Grot,” (Lightning Bolt), the head of the underground Home Army, executed by the Nazis in 1944. Last month, the IPN has exhumed the body of Władysław Sikorski, head of the Polish Government-in-Exile who died under mysterious circumstances in 1943, to see if he had been poisoned (allegedly by the Soviet Union).

The keystone of the program however is the rehabilitation and sanctification of the memory of the Warsaw Uprising. This project culminated in 2006 with the opening of the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising opened in Warsaw in 2006, by far the most modern and best-designed museum in the country. Many of the museum’s holdings were assembled from collections made surreptitiously during Communist rule, when the Uprising was generally downplayed or ignored.[36] It is the local equivalent of Hungary’s Terror Museum (or Terror Háza), which is devoted to the 1956 Revolution and its aftermath. Indeed, as Andrzej Romanowski points out, the Polish government celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution, but not of the Polish October which directly preceded it.[37] The Polish ’44 and the Hungarian ’56 serve the same function in each country; they are Cartesian points around which each national history has been structured. On one hand they exemplify the valorous part of the nation’s past, and on the other, mark the lowest point of perfidy of the opposing side — the dungeons of the Secret Police in Hungary, the inaction of the Soviet Army on the right bank of the Vistula in Poland.[38]

The Warsaw Uprising is a pivot point separating the just from the unjust. It might be the last place in the historical narrative where heroes are clearly discernible from villains, for in more recent history the negative program of the IPN has triumphed over the positive one.

The bulk of the IPN’s recent research has focused on the “apparatus of repression,” or the secret police. The IPN has been at work examining its structure, methods, strategies, and minute documentation of its personnel. In a series of volumes, it has published the complete staff registers of various local divisions of the UB, from the colonels down to the washerwomen. The IPN has also sought to try and punish ‘Communist Crimes,’ and has attempted to establish this as a specific legal category. When in 2004, a court sentenced General Czesław Kiszczak to two years in prison for his role in the deaths of miners in 1981 strikes, IPN prosecutor said “I am unsatisfied for a single reason; that the court did not this as a Communist crime.”[39] It has also repeatedly sought to try General Wojciech Jaruzelski. Even more recently it has moved to try and stop pension payments to some former Secret Police Agents.

This last action points to the central paradox of historical justice in post-Communist countries: the problem of ex-post facto justice. The legal prohibition against trying acts which were not illegal at the time — non juris ex post facto- bedevils the question of retroactive justice. With only a few exceptions, the Secret Police is all but untouchable. Not only can its members not be charged with any wrongdoing, unless they clearly violated the laws of People’s Poland, they cannot, or at least have not, been denied their (quite rich) pensions. Discontent with this state of affairs has helped fuel desire for lustration. The prohibition has also focused lustration on some odd targets — the very dissidents who helped bring down the old regime.

The myth of the Fourth Republic states that the transition from Communism was never elite, and that the leaders — dissidents and Communists alike — who brought it about were fundamentally corrupt. Lustration can do nothing against the actual “apparatus of repression” — but it can be used to shame and punish the old anti-Communist activists, who now make up most of Poland’s political and media elite. There is also a factor of publicity at work: historians and journalists stand to gain more from accusing the famous than from compiling lists of janitorial staff. The combination of legal impotence with a historical narrative predicated on sorting the just from the un-just has resulted in a situation where these elites — political, cultural, and even religious — are the primary focus of lustration, be it ‘wild’ or official.

Over the past years, leaks from IPN have implicated scores of Polish notables of collaboration with the Communist Regime. These include journalists, like Ryszard Kapuściński, intellectuals, like the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, writers like Andrzej Sczypiorski and Zbigniew Herbert, several foreign ministers, Solidarity leaders like Jacek Kuroń, and church leaders, like the renowned theologian Michał Czajkowski, Father Konrad Hejmo, an intimate of Pope John Paul II.[40] Some of these charges aroused widespread protest and were later proven to be false, as with Herbert and Kuroń. Others, like Kapuściński and Sczypiorski are not alive to defend themselves.

After PiS came to power in 2005, the tenor of the denunciations shifted. Instead of random leaks out of the IPN, journalists and historians affiliated with the Institute began writing their own articles and books, and the scope of the accusations broadened from collaboration to moral decrepitude. An article by Tomasz Pompowski in the Dziennik, “The Greatness and Weakness of the Old Opposition,” which claimed on the basis of secret police files that various leading Solidarity and KOR activists had led a double life full of orgiastic sex and drug addiction was symptomatic of this new direction.[41] The article concluded with a statement from Janusz Kurtyka, the newly appointed head of the IPN, who claimed that “opening the archives of the SB must lead to the writing of recent Polish History anew.”

The IPN was now explicitly in the business of sorting Poles into the righteous and the wicked. This sorting had always been part of the Institute’s statutes covering the access of files. In order to receive one’s own file, one had to be first certified as a victim of Communism. If one was confirmed as a victim, then all the names mentioned in the files (informers, agents, etc.) could not be withheld. Andrzej Romanowski, one of the most active and persistent anti-lustration and anti-IPN polemicists in Poland, points out that this divides Poles into two categories of citizens, in his view, against the Constitution. Now this division was woven into the Institute’s historiography. Kurtyka, the new chief, himself owed seat to some file-related shenanigans; when another candidate (Andrzej Przewoźnik), less friendly to PiS was in the running for the post, files surfaced implicating him as a secret informant.[42]

The decision of the Constitutional Court in 2006 striking down PiS’s attempt to vastly expand the scope of lustration, has left the IPN in a sort of limbo. The 2006 Lustration law is officially a dead letter. Yet at the same time, the IPN maintains its lustration office, and remains committed to unearthing the secrets contained in its files. Thus, lustration continues, but in a form that is neither fully wild nor wholly official. Instead, lustration is being carried out by the proper authorities, IPN historians and journalists authorized to access its archives for research purposes, but through ‘wild’ channels — the press and publishing industry. Lustration now serves the interests of historians and journalists at least as much as those of the ruling party.

If there was a clear political logic to lustration, it has since become subordinated to lustration’s own logic. Whatever political gains were made by promising renewed lustration and moral reform have since been spent by the widening gyre of accusations. In the past year it has provoked widespread outrage by striking at two of the most hallowed institutions in Poland: Lech Wałęsa and the Catholic Church. Last summer (2008), the IPN published a book on Wałęsa, which claims that the former president and Solidarity leader (and now private citizen, with minimal political influence) worked as a secret informer in the 1970s under the codename “Bolek.” The Kaczynski brothers have a long history with Wałęsa: they were his negotiators at the Round Table and after the first elections, worked as parliamentary enforcers in his political party. The two parted ways in the early 90s, and have politely loathed each other ever since. Rumors about ‘Bolek’ have also been circulating since the early nineties. Now these rumors, long dismissed, come packaged with over 600 pages of replicated primary source documents and the seal of the Institute of National Memory.

For all the furor surrounding the ‘Bolek’ affair, the scandals involving the Catholic Church have arguably had an even greater negative impact on PiS’s popularity. The most dramatic episode even involved the Holy See. In January 2007, Stanisław Wielgus assumed the archbishop of Warsaw, the highest clerical office in Poland and almost always a step on the road to a Cardinal’s hat; two days later he resigned, after the Gazeta Polska published a report accusing him of longtime cooperation with the SB. A month later, a priest and former Solidarity activist Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski published a book based on his research into his own Secret Police file, accusing thirty-nine Krakow priests (four of whom are now bishops) of cooperation with the secret police.[43] These incidents have provoked widespread anger and criticism of lustration by the Catholic Church, normally a solid support of the Polish right-wing. They also highlight the peculiar change in course of ‘historical’ lustration over the past few years. It began as an essentially political program, which dictated a mode of historical research. Now the historical research drives the agenda forwards on its own, “writing the history of Poland anew” regardless of the political costs — hence the perverse choice of targets. As Joseph de Maistre said, “men do not lead the Revolution; it is the Revolution that uses men.”

* * *

But what is in those 85 kilometers of files, and what should be done with it? Do they really contain materials with which to “write Polish history anew?”

We do know that the secret police archives contain a great deal of misinformation and outright falsehood. Officers were paid by the amount of informants they recruited; they routinely inflated their numbers and the amount of information they provided. Apparently, in the 1980s, it was also standard policy to create fraudulent files for opposition members in order to compromise them in the eyes of their comrades. The case of Małgorzata Niezabitowska, a former underground journalist and the press secretary for the first non-Communist government, has become especially famous. She was accused by the IPN of having worked as a secret informer under the codename ‘Jan Nowak.’ In a series of court cases (which are still continuing, on an appeal by the IPN), which she described in her book, in her book, Prawdy jak Chleba, Niezabitowska was able to prove that the file had been entirely falsified, and was cobbled together out of documents seized at airport and transcripts of wiretaps. Former secret police officers provided the key evidence in her case. This perverse situation — in which the former blackmailer becomes the only person capable of vindicating the blackmailed — has by now been repeated many times.[44]

Most of what is in the IPN archives, however, is true — or at least not deliberately falsified. Last year, one Polish journalist, Roman Graczyk, conducted a small experiment to find out what the IPN archives could be made to reveal about the texture of life in People’s Poland. He examined the files of four Krakow priests who were active in Catholic intellectual circles (around the journals Znak and Tygodnik Powszechny) in the 1950s and 60s, and each of whom, to some extent, cooperated with the SB.[45] Graczyk finds that the story told by the files is complex; some of the priests seem to have signed something in order to say as little as possible; others struggle to keep their heads above water, one says much more than he needed to. Graczyk develops their biographies over three hundred pages, both as informers, intellectuals and friends, and ends up beings a fine portrait of a particular milieu. It is also an example, as the author admits (though he objects to the term) of ‘wild lustration,’ of making bringing private citizen’s secret dealings into the light without their consent or permission. At the same time, Graczyk makes a sustained argument against lustration, as carried out by the courts or IPN — but in favor of historical judgment, based on close and critical reading of the files, coupled with interviews and an investigation of all available sources. And finally, it is an argument for openness, dropping all restrictions on access to the archives and bringing their contents to the light of day.

Meanwhile, the lustration in the press continues. Last month, Poland’s most famous scientist, the astronomer Aleksander Wołszczan, the discoverer of the first extra-solar planet and a candidate for the Nobel Prize, was charged with accepting money from the SB over the course of the 1970s and cooperating with agents in order to be permitted to travel abroad. His colleagues say they were not harmed in any way; his explanation for taking the money is that he ‘never refuses a gift.’

The story of lustration and the IPN is far from over. Nor is its end set in stone. Given how it has gone thus far, the historians and journalists involved might do well to remember that every action is open to multiple interpretations, and that ritual purity does not have to be paired with blood sacrifice. Even lustration is open to multiple meanings; after all, the Greek word for it is catharsis.

[1] Confino, Alon, “Collective Memory and Collective History: Problems of Method,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 102, №5 (Dec., 1997), p. 1386.

[2] Really it should be translated as the “Institute of National Memory,” but the IPN’s own English language materials always insist on “Remembrance.”

[3] For exemplars of these two approaches, see Siegel, Richard L., “Transitional Justice: A Decade of Debate and Experience,” Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 20, no. 2, May 1998, pp. 431–454, and Ebenshade, Richard S, “Remembering to Forget: Memory, History, National Identity in Postwar East-Central Europe,” Representations, №49, Special Issue: Identifying Histories: Eastern Europe Before and After 1989 (Winter, 1995), pp. 72–96.

[4] This is an oversimplification. For a sourcebook on the changing fortunes of lustration and IPN’s involvement in it, see Grzelak, Piotr, Wojna o lustrację, Warszawa: 2005.

[5] Kirszak, Jerzy, Szlakiem pamięci narodowej. Kronika VII Międzynarodowego Motocyklowego Rajdu Katyńskiego (25 VIII — 9 IX 2007), Wrocław: 2008. The book comes with an accompanying DVD.

[6] http://www.crimelecomunismului.ro/en/about_iiccr/institute/

[7] Ginzburg, Carlo, “Checking the Evidence: The Judge and the Historian,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 18, №1 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 79–92. An expanded version was published as The Judge and the Historian. Marginal Notes an a Late-Twentieth-century Miscarriage of Justice, (London: 1999).

[8] Rév, István, “Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-communism, (Stanford, 2005), p. 1

[9] William Smith, William Wayte, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, London, 1891, p. 101.

[10] William Smith, D.C.L., LL.D., A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, John Murray, London, 1875, p. 719.

[11] Ash, Timothy Garton, “Poland has made a humiliating farce out of dealing with its red ghosts,” Guardian, May 24, 2007.

[12] Woleński, Jan, Lustracja Jako Zwierciadło, (Krakow: Universitas, 2007), p. 13.

[13] Vojtech Cepl, “Ritual Sacrifices: Lustration in the CSFR,” East European Constitutional Review, 1 (Spring 1994) 24–26, and Woleński, Jan, Lustracja Jako Zwierciadło, (Krakow: Universitas, 2007).

[14] Kieran Williams, Aleks Szczerbiak, and Brigid Fowler, “Explaining Lustration in Eastern Europe: ’A Post-communist politics approach,” SEI Working Paper No 62, p.21.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Letki, Natalia, “Lustration and Democratisation in East-Central Europe,” Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 54, №4 (Jun., 2002), pp. 529–552.

[17] Williams, Kieran, “A Scorecard for Czech Lustration,” Central Europe Review, vol.1, №19, (November, 1999).

[18] Letki, Natalia, p. 539. As of 2002, the number was slightly more than 400,000 (Williams, Szczerbiak, and Fowler, p. 22).

[19] Rosenberg, Tina, The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts after Communism, (New York: Vintage, 1996), and Weschler, Lawrence, “The Trials of Jan Kavan,” The New Yorker, (October 19, 1992).

[20] Michnik Adam, Havel, Vaclav, “Justice or Revenge?” Journal of Democracy, Volume 4, Number 1, January 1993, pp. 20–27.

[21] (Williams, Szcerbiak and Fowler), takes stock of this literature in light of the developments of the past decade. To be fair to political science, another scholar, Helga Welsh, realized early on that vetting could be a tool in political combat with post-Communist parties.

[22] See Williams, Szcerbiak and Fowler on Hungary and Letki on Albania, Lithuania and Bulgaria. Letki’s 2002 study is the most recent attempt at a comprehensive comparison of lustration policies — however it is now sorely in need of updating.

[23] Jasiewicz, p. 31.

[24] Woleński, Jan, Lustracja Jako Zwierciadło, (Krakow: Universitas, 2007), p. 37

[25] Szczerbiak, Aleks, “Dealing with the Communist Past or the Politics of the Present? Lustration in Post- Communist Poland,” Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 54, №4 (Jun., 2002), p.556.

[26] Williams, Szcerbiak and Fowler, p. 8. The charges against Oleksy were never confirmed, and he eventually returned to politics, only to be accused of lying on his lustration application in 2004. This charge was then overturned in court, which stated that he had “lied by accident.” In 2007 Oleksy was secretly taped discussing his fellow party-member’s alleged crimes, leading to his final (?) exit from political life.

[27] Ash, Timothy Garton, “The Twins’ New Poland,” New York Review of Books, Volume 53, Number 2 · February 9, 2006.

[28] See the satirical “Museum of the Fourth Republic” for these and many more: http://www.spieprzajdziadu.com/muzeum/index.php?title=Strona_g%C5%82%C3%B3wna

[29] Woleński, Jan, Lustracja Jako Zwierciadło, (Krakow: Universitas, 2007), p. 35

[30] Jasiewicz, Krzysztof, “Is East-Central Europe Backsliding? The Political-Party Landscape,” Journal of Democracy, Volume 18, Number 4, October 2007, pp. 26–33.

[31] Wildstein’s story is even more complicated: as a student, he and two close friends, Stanisław Pyjas and Lesław Maleszką were dedicated underground activists in late 1970s. In 1976, all three were interrogated by the Secret Police. In 1977, Pyjas was found dead, most likely killed by the UB. Wildstein emigrated to Paris after the murder, and developed paranoid tendencies. Maleszka went on to have a career in Solidarity and in journalism, eventually rose to one of the top editor’s positions at the Gazeta Wyborcza, where he was an outspoken critic of lustration. In 2001, Wildstein discovered that Maleszka had been a secret informant from their student days, operating under the codename ‘ketman.’ Maleszka has since been forced to retire from the Gazeta; Wildstein lost his job at TVP after a year. He remains a forceful polemicist and advocate of lustration, a darling of the far right (rather uniquely for a Jew) and a Freemason. The story of the three friends is ably told in the documentary Trzech Kumpli by Ewa Stankiewicz and Anna Ferens.

[32] Czuchnowwski, Wojciech, „Jak Michnik z Geremkiem przejęli “Solidarność,” Gazeta Wyborcza, Dec. 15, 2008.

[33] Romanowski, Andrzej, Rozkosze Lustracji, (Krakow: Universitas, 2007), p. 50.

[34] Wokół Jedwabnego, Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2002.

[35] Chodakiewicz, Marek Jan, Po Zagładzie. Stosunki polsko-żydowskie 1944–1947, Warszawa: IPN, 2008. Here I am relying solely on second-hand assessments and run the risk of caricaturing Chodakiewicz’s arguments. Much more remains to be written on the subject of IPN’s relations to the Holocaust and Polish anti-Semitism.

[36] My local informant tells me that throughout the 1950’s and 60’s, on the anniversary of the first day of the Uprising surviving veterans would move through the city placing votive candles, like ghosts of a pre-war city that had no place to call its own.

[37] Romanowski, p. 156.

[38] That said, Warsaw’s museum does less to sort out the wicked from the good than Budapest’s. While nearly all the exhibits in the Terror Museum are centered on condemning past malefactors, the Museum of the Uprising concentrates on the minutiae of Home Army lore and courage. Characteristically, the section devoted to Communist treachery (both in ’44 and in the PRL’s later disregard of the memory of ’44) is confined to a hallway, painted red, leading to the Museum café.

[39] Romanowski, p. 49

[40] Woleński, p. 49 provides a more comprehensive list.

[41] Pompowski, Tadeusz, „Wielkość i słabość dawnej opozycji,” Dziennik Powszechny, August 26, 2006. See Durczok, Kamil and Mucharski, Piotr, Krótki Kurs IV RP, (Znak: Krakow, 2007), pp.115–32 for a response from a former IPN historian.

[42] Woleński, pp. 56–7.

[43] Isakowicz-Zaleski, Tadeusz, “Ksieza wobec bezpieki na przykladzie archidiecezji krakowskiej,” (Krakow: Znak, 2007). Isakowicz-Zaleski has since moved on to another area of historical politics — calling attention to the massacre of Poles in the eastern borderlands during WWII by local Ukrainians.

[44] Most famously in the case of the former deputy prime minister Zyta Gilowska.

[45] Graczyk, Roman, “Tropem SB: Jak czytać teczki,” (Krakow: Znak, 2007).