Solidarity veterans believed that the dictatorship's demise would be followed by their own reign. But guilty communists were not punished, and virtuous Solidarity activists were not rewarded. So feelings of injustice gave rise to resentment, envy, and a destructive energy focused on revenge against former enemies and old friends who seemed successful.
The losers refused to admit that the achievement of freedom was Poland's greatest success in 300 years. For them, Poland remained a country ruled by the communist security apparatus. Such a Poland required a moral revolution in which crimes would be punished, virtue rewarded, and injustice redeemed.
The means chosen by these losers' parties after they won the general election of 2005 was a great purge. Lustration, according to early estimates, would affect 700,000 people and take 17 years to complete.
A list of names found in the reports of the Security Services was to be prepared and made public. Moreover, was the duty of every one of the 700,000 people subjected to lustration to declare that he or she did not collaborate with the security services. Those who refused or filed a false declaration were to be fired and banned from working in their profession for 10 years.
The result of all this was a pervasive climate of fear. But not everyone fell silent. Cardinal Dziwisz of Krakow argued that there could be no place in Poland "for retribution, revenge, lack of respect for human dignity, and reckless accusations."
Never since the fall of communism had a Catholic Cardinal used such words of condemnation.
The goal of Poland's peaceful revolution was freedom, sovereignty, and economic reform, not a hunt for suspected or real secret police agents. If a hunt for agents had been organized in 1990 when the democratic revolution began, neither Leszek Balcerowicz's economic reforms nor the establishment of a state governed by law would have been possible. Poland would not be in NATO or the EU.
Today, two Polands confront each other. A Poland of suspicion, fear and revenge is fighting a Poland of hope, courage and dialogue. This second Poland -- of openness and tolerance, of John Paul II and Czeslaw Milosz, of my friends from the underground and from prison -- must prevail.
I believe that Poles will once again defend their right to be treated with dignity. The Constitutional Tribunal's decision gives hope that the second phase of the Polish revolution will not consume either its father, the will to freedom, or its child, the democratic state.
Adam Michnik, a former leader of Solidarity, is editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza. Copyright: Project Syndicate
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