Ost Discusses Death of Polish President
13 April 2010 Ost Discusses Death of Polish President
In a guest essay that appeared in The Nation, Professor of Political Science David Ost shared his thoughts about Polish President Lech Kaczynski on the day he died. Ost knew Kaczynski and reflected on him, Kaczynski seemed more to want to be a quiet, unassuming representative of the marginalized than a big political leader. He wrote of his career and his death earlier this week in a plane crash over Russia. Ost also noted other notable Polish dignitaries who died in the crash, Izabela Jaruga-Nowacka, Polands leading parliamentary feminist, and Anna Walentynowicz, 80 years old, the unassuming yet inspiring Gdansk shipyard worker whose dismissal led to the formation of Solidarity in 1980.
Ost, who joined the Political Science faculty at HWS in 1986, holds a bachelors degree from State University of New York at Stony Brook and his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin. His current scholarly interests include postcommunist politics in Eastern Europe (particularly Poland), labor and democracy comparative explorations, Europe and America the changing relationship, Eastern Europe and between the United States and the European Union, globalization protests and chances for a new international order.
His recent publications include After Postcommunism and the Decline of Labor in the East: Lessons From Poland and Elsewhere, in Sociologie du Travail (2009); The End of Postcommunism: Trade Unions in Eastern Europes Future in East European Politics and Societies (2009); Using America Against Europe: Polands National Reactions to Transnational Pressure in Transnational and National Politics in Postcommunism Europe (2008); and Euroskepticism as Path of Inclusion: Multi-Level Governance in the European Union as Seen From the East in Multilevel Governance and Democracy (2008).
His book The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe is in its second printing; European Politics in Transition is in its sixth edition.
Osts full article as it appeared in The Nation follows.
The Nation
The Polish Catastrophe
David Ost April 10, 2010
Did what happened today really happen? The Polish president dead in a plane crash, together with his wife, dozens of parliamentary deputies and dozens more political dignitaries, party officials, military leaders? A crash in Russiaa place to where Polish politicians never travel en masse, indeed rarely travel at allbut where they were going today to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Katyn forest mass murder of thousands of Polish reserve officers by Stalinist Russia.
I knew Lech Kaczynski, the deceased president. Met him en route to a conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1999 marking the tenth anniversary of the Round Table accords that brought the old system to an end. What was so striking is that he seemed so shy, so reticent, so insecure. That is not something one hears often in recollections of future presidents. But Kaczynski seemed more to want to be a quiet, unassuming representative of the marginalized than a big political leader. He had been a child movie star, a tough anti-communist oppositionist, and then a Solidarity trade union official in the 1980s, serving even as the unions de facto president in 1990 when others in the union turned to politics. But then he allowed himself to get drawn to politics, perhaps under the pressure of his twin brother, Jaroslaw, a loner by personality who committed his life to politics but who seemed to be unable to do it happily without having his brother do it with him.
If President Kaczynski in fact got into politics out of sympathy with his brother, it would be consistent with his personality. For he maintained a social sensitivity his entire life. He looked out for people who didnt always seem able to do it themselves. In fact, he might well have been one of those people himself.
When I met Lech in 1999, he kept a distance from the more colorful politicians at the conference with him. I remember walking with a group of them to a bar after the evening panel. Lech was walking alone, about five paces behind. As the others were about to go insidesuperstar dissident theorist Adam Michnik, famous underground journalist Dawid Warszawski, former prime minister Mieczyslaw Rakowski leading the wayone of them turned to Kaczynski and gestured for him to come inside too. May I?, sheepishly asked the future president.
So Kaczynskis sympathy with the little guy seemed to come from the fact that he felt like one himself. Its not surprising that even when he became president, he didnt particularly seem to like the job. His body language oozed discomfort at state functions, foreign visits, or on TV. This contributed to the bad press he got in the West: foreign leaders thought he was trying to send a message that he would not deliver straightforwardly. But Kaczynski was uncomfortable with all government officials, laying back only in private conversations with those not in the elite. I remember conversations with him in Polands parliamentary cafeteria in 1999, his broad smile and big laugh, which dropped from his face only when some parliamentarian or government official noticed him and came by to share a few words.
Why then did he run for president? Weirdly, this too sometimes seemed to be a favor for his brother. At campaign headquarters when news came in of his victory, he turned to his brother and, with his first words as president-elect, said, Mr. Prime Minister, mission accomplished! He was a self-effacing president during the two years when his brother served as prime minister. But when the opposition party Civic Platform won elections in 2007, President Kaczynski become more activetoo often in a shrill and strident way, though this too seemed to result from his own discomfort in the role, his inability to inhabit it fully. He really didnt seem to care for eliteseven when he became one of them.
True, aside from a couple of timely vetoes, he didnt do much for common people during his presidency. And he could be mean and dismissive to those who didnt share his view of what Polishness entailed, as he showed in his nasty policies toward gays. Still, just like with Lech Walesa before him, there was something oddly radicalpopulist in the best sense of the termin having someone so ill at ease with officialdom serving as the president.
Its not surprising that he was likely to lose the presidential elections that were scheduled for later this year. An introspective personality and awkward public presence do not inspire confidence in media-age electorates, and his cantankerous quarrels with the popular prime minister had alienated many, particularly young voters. Now, elections will be held in about a month and everything is up for grabs. The candidate who was going to run against him, Parliamentary Speaker Bronislaw Komorowski, has himself just been sworn in as president due to constitutional rules of succession. Who will he run against now? Kaczynskis Law and Justice party does not have a natural replacement. His brother is too divisive a personality to be elected. The partys second-most-popular leader, however, is even more divisive. The partys vice-chairman, meanwhile, also died in the plane crash.
What a tragic irony that this happened in Russia! Yet the only good that might come out of this is a thaw in Polish-Russian relations, something that in fact began when Polish Prime Minister Tusk and Vladimir Putin met in Katyn to commemorate the massacre just a couple of days ago. Kaczynski was traveling today both because he did not want to appear with Putin, and because he and others wanted a uniquely Polish commemoration of the 1940 events.
Putin has announced he will chair the official investigation into the causes of the crash, and it is likely that it will be a fully open investigation, particularly since all signs are that the Russian side actually tried to avert the impending disaster: the president and his crew tried to land the plane against the advice of Russian air traffic controllers, who had turned other planes away but who lacked the authority to do so with Polands Air Force One.
Moscow residents are now laying flowers at the Polish embassy in Moscow, and Polish officials and family survivors who now begin to travel to the crash site will likely find themselves experiencing an unexpected bond with the Russian officials arranging accommodations for their grief, with the emergency workers excavating the wreck in the forest. Poles who have not often known the nurturing side of Russian nature will come face to face with it now. Of all the unexpected developments we might imagine, how unimaginable remains this possibility that the site of the horrific war crime of 1940 might be where a reconciliation begins today.
Meanwhile, the staggering death toll boggles the imagination. It was only in the third article I read in the Polish press that I learned of the death of Izabela Jaruga-Nowacka, Polands leading parliamentary feminist. And only in the fourth did I learn of the one truly legendary person who died, and about whom the world press still says almost nothing: Anna Walentynowicz, 80 years old, the unassuming yet inspiring Gdansk shipyard worker whose dismissal led to the formation of Solidarity in 1980. Her death alone would have triggered national mourning in Poland. Today, one learns of it only in passing, after reading about those in the political class who died with her.