The crossings to the south, by contrast, between Central Europe and what we again call the Balkans, are much less sharp. To walk from Hungary into northern Romania is not to enter a different world. Partly that is because Hungarians live on both sides of the frontier. Both Transylvania and the Banat, which between them make up more than a third of Romania, are positively marked by the Austro-Hungarian heritage. But even if you take the southern parts of Romania that belonged to the Ottoman empire, the differences in society, politics, and economics between Hungary and Romania are nothing like as marked as those between Slovakia and Ukraine.
If you go from the Slovenian part of Istria to the Croatian part, you hardly notice the difference at all. As my Guida alla Mitteleuropa rightly suggests, Catholic, formerly Habsburg Croatia clearly qualifies historically as part of Central Europe. Politically, in the 1990s, Croatia has been part of the Balkans. But there is a good chance that it will come back, with Tudjman’s demokratura crumbling either before or after his death. A new ethnic homogeneity—achieved by ethnic cleansing while the West looked the other way—provides favorable conditions for a return to Central Europe.
There is work for at least another ten years ahead before all those states that have credible claims to belong to Central Europe by virtue of geography, history, and culture will also be part of Central Europe, in the 1990s sense, on account of their current politics and the way they are viewed in the West. It will be longer still before this Central Europe becomes just central Europe, another region of Western Europe, as northern Europe and southern Europe are today. Meanwhile, countries such as Ukraine may lift themselves up, especially if the West does more to help them.
Yet Central Europe does have to stop somewhere. To have a purely political, voluntarist definition of it is as absurd as it is to have a purely cultural-determinist one. It has been reasonable enough for the West to make political behavior the prime criterion of acceptance, saying, in effect, “Central European is as Central European does.” But you can’t go on forever suggesting that whichever among the postcommunist states exhibits the rule of law, democracy, tolerance, respect for minority rights, and interest in peaceful international cooperation will ipso facto become part of Central Europe. For example, even if Serbia one day meets all these political criteria, it will not be part of Central Europe. It will still be in the Balkans.
The trouble is that, at the moment, these are not neutral statements. They are heavily charged: positively in the first case, negatively in the second. This is the danger in making any association of a geographical expression with a set of values or aspirations. It’s a problem not just with “Central Europe,” but with “Europe” (as in “European values”) and “the West” (as in “Western civilization” or “Western values” contrasted with “Asian values”).
Yet the difficulty lies precisely in the fact that this association with Central Europe (as with Europe and the West) is not completely arbitrary. There is some truth in it. There was a core and a periphery in European historical development. The difference between western Christianity—with its seminal separation of Church and state—and eastern Christianity—with its legacy of “Caesaro-Papism”—has deeply marked the political history of, say, France as opposed to Russia. And this truth is not just historical. It is also hard contemporary experience. As I was preparing to fly to Slovakia from Heathrow Airport, I met a banker of my acquaintance who travels extensively in CEE. He bluntly summed up his personal findings thus: “The further east and south you go, the more corruption and chaos.”
The cardinal fault, it seems to me, is to turn probabilities into certainties, gray zones into lines between black and white, and, above all, working descriptions into self-fulfilling prophecies. We know, for example, that the following pairings will be difficult to achieve: Balkan tolerance, Ukrainian prosperity, Russian democracy, Turkish respect for human rights. But to suggest that these are contradictions in terms is not just to relativize our own values. It is also to betray the many, many people who are fighting for these things in these places, against the odds, and sometimes at the risk of their lives.
I have made the case for Central Europe over two decades. I believe it has been a good cause, which has helped to transform the central region of Europe for the better. But I am appalled at the way the idea has now been recruited into the service of these politics of relativism and exclusion. Whatever and wherever Central Europe is, it should never be part of that.
HELENA’S KITCHEN
ONE GLOOMY AUTUMN AFTERNOON IN 1980, A PALE, SHORT, slightly built woman, with untidy brown hair and intense gray-green eyes, greeted me at the door of her small apartment in one of the ugly new housing estates that the communist regime had thrown up around Warsaw. I was in Poland to witness the workers’ revolution led by the solidarity movement, the greatest challenge to the soviet empire in Eastern Europe since its creation at the end of the Second World War, and I had been told that Helena Łuczywo would be a good source.
Her tiny kitchen, cloudy with cigarette smoke, was packed with people arguing, gesticulating, and laughing, pausing only for rapid sips of tea, drunk from glass mugs. in the living room, someone was laying out the next edition of a samizdat magazine called Robotnik (“The worker”), while a real, live worker from Gdansk, birthplace of Solidarity, held forth in one corner. In another corner sat a pretty seven-year-old, Łucja, Helena’s daughter. The phone was ringing—it seemed always to be ringing—and Helena picked it up, shouted into it, talked to me, took a drag on her cigarette, and giggled, all at the same time. Life in this crowded apartment was being lived at a mad tempo. Partly this was because there was a revolution on and at any minute Russian tanks might roll across Poland’s eastern frontier. But mainly it was because this place was, well, Helena’s.
I visited Helena’s kitchen many times during the revolution, until, in December 1981, General Jaruzelski declared martial law to crush Solidarity. Then the authorities made it difficult for me to reenter the country. But whenever I could get a visa, I headed straight for Helena’s—not telephoning beforehand, for fear of alerting the secret police, just turning up at the door. Poland was a police state again, and Helena was now running an underground paper covertly distributed among Solidarity members and supporters. Our conversations in the kitchen were interrupted by her colleagues— wan, intense women, dashing in with news of some crisis. But now, rather than shouting, they scribbled their messages on scraps of paper. Then they burned the paper in a candle while chattering loudly about something else, for the benefit of hidden police microphones.
Helena and I became firm friends, but I would never have imagined the development that has led me to write about her now. Today, she is the key figure behind the most successful newspaper in the whole of postcommunist Europe. Gazeta Wyborcza (The Electoral Paper), of which she is deputy editor and an executive-board member, sells more than half a million copies on weekdays and an additional two hundred thousand on the weekend. On its own custom-built web offset presses, it prints a full-color weekly magazine, a television guide, eighteen different local sections, and book, property, car, job, and computer supplements, plus acres of highly lucrative advertising. It employs more than 2,400 people. Its parent company, Agora, has invested in radio stations and satellite television.
This is a multimedia giant in the making—a Polish multimedia giant. And a hugely profitable one: so profitable that it is about to go public. Advised by Credit Suisse First Boston, Agora will soon be making an initial public offering on the Warsaw and London stock exchanges. Its senior managers will be wooing institutional investors in a road show through Europe and the United States. Estimates put its value as high as $600 million. Suddenly, my old friend Helena is a very powerful woman. She is about to be a rich one, too.
“The Electoral,” as most people call it, has a distinctive style—sometimes abrasive, often sarcastic, always irreverent. The political line laid down by its editor in chief, Adam Michnik, is a source of constant and even venom
ous controversy. The nationalist right attacks the paper for being part of a conspiracy—a Jewish—ex-Bolshevik—capitalist conspiracy, you understand—that is sapping the moral fiber of a nation in which to be Polish should mean to be Catholic. Others, such as Trybuna, the paper of the former communists, denounce “Adam Michnik’s media cartel,” screaming, “Agora builds an empire!” Trybuna has called for the company’s radio and television interests to be referred to Poland’s Anti-Monopoly Office—an ironic demand from what was once the central organ of the communist party.
I don’t like everything about the new paper. But I do like the way it perfectly upends so many Western clichés about Poland as a nation of tall, drunken, bragging, mustachioed, male-chauvinist, anti-Semitic noblemen, making doomed cavalry charges against tanks. Or the old German jibe about polnische Wirtschaft, implying that “Polish economy” is a contradiction in terms. Or another cliché—meant to characterize the whole of postcommunist Europe—which has former communist apparatchiks raking in the millions while embittered former dissidents sit in freezing attics, wrapped in nothing but a blanket of woolly memories.
The truth is that Poland is rapidly and quietly building a normal consumer democracy. It has a burgeoning middle class and one of the highest growth rates in Europe. It has started negotiations to enter the European Union and will join NATO in the spring of 1999. And near the heart of the Polish miracle is this hugely successful paper run by ebullient former dissidents, several of them Jewish and many of them women.
How do you write about someone who has become a close friend? Helena and I had our first formal “interview” seated in a quiet, modern conference room in the paper’s Warsaw offices, talking over the Polish version of a light executive lunch—thick soup, then meat and potatoes. We both laughed at our predicament. There were so many basic things I didn’t know. For example, when and where was she born?
During the first winter after the war, in Warsaw. Her father, Ferdynand Chaber, the son of wealthy Jewish wine merchants, had become a communist during the 1920s, spent the war in Russia, and returned after the Polish communists came to power on the back of Russian tanks. He worked in the propaganda department of the new ruling party. The detail suggests an obvious conceit: “from the father’s communist propaganda to the daughter’s battle against communist propaganda.” But Helena resists this fiercely. Her mother, she says, had been the more influential figure in her life.
Dorota Guter, who came from a family of Jewish small traders, was a model of industry, discipline, commitment—and deep Polish patriotism. She earned a university degree in law; when the Germans invaded, she fled to Russia, where she took a second degree, in engineering, and was reunited with her husband. On their return, she raised two children and held a position as a senior engineer at a car factory near Warsaw. At the same time—and this is so important—this determined Jewish mother was deeply immersed in the Polish Romantic tradition represented by poets such as Adam Mickiewicz, the Polish Byron.
Helena was brought up to think of herself as simply Polish. That proved to be difficult. In 1968, while she was studying economics at Warsaw University, she experienced a revolting anti-Semitic campaign orchestrated by communist leaders. Week after week, the communist press was full of tirades against rootless cosmopolitans, parasites on the Polish nation. Polish Jews were denounced as “a gallery of traitors.” When Warsaw students protested, some were beaten up and others imprisoned, including Adam Michnik, one of their leaders. Most of Poland’s surviving Jews—few enough already, after the Holocaust—left the country as a result, and those who stayed were marked for life. Yet the experience also shaped an extraordinarily dynamic generation of Polish ’68ers, both Jewish and non-Jewish activists, so similar in some ways to Western ’68ers (informal dress and lifestyle; much drink, sex), so different in other, more important ways. Many came to revere an older generation of fighters against communism, whom their Western counterparts tended to abhor, and, while permanently immunized against Utopian politics, they found ideals worth suffering and even dying for.
The year 1968 formed Helena’s generation, but her own personal moment of truth came later. She went on to complete her degree in economics, worked in a bank for three years, got married to a bearded engineer named Witold, and gave birth to Łucja. Then she went back to Warsaw University to study English, intending to be a translator and interpreter: set fair, it seemed, for an ordinary, unpolitical, life. But in the summer of 1976, a message reached her from an opposition leader, Jacek Kuroń. She had good English, so would she accompany a Swedish television team to interview persecuted workers in the industrial town of Ursus? She agonized for three days. She did not want to be a political activist. She was afraid of another anti-Semitic campaign. And what about her three-year-old daughter?
Finally, she decided to go. Why? She lights a cigarette, glances away for a second’s thought, then says in her quick way, “Oh, I don’t know. Just a sense of decency.” Decency, Orwell’s cardinal virtue. She doesn’t stop to reconstruct the way she was then. Yet this was what in Poland is sometimes called “the Conradian moment”—that single personal decision that makes or mars a whole life. Conrad’s Lord Jim jumped the wrong way when he abandoned what he thought was the sinking ship. Helena jumped the right way.
A year later, in 1977, she joined a group of friends—’68ers all—to start the samizdat paper that I found her producing when I visited her three years later. The first issue of Robotnik—the title was taken from a famous paper edited by the Polish independence hero Józef Pilsudski before the First World War—appeared that September: four letter-size sheets of paper, with smudged print on one side only. Helena was among those who insisted that its opening editorial should express a clear commitment to the ultimate goal of Polish independence. With Leonid Brezhnev still in power in the Kremlin, that seemed like aiming your bicycle at Mars. But the romantic tradition taught that politics is the art of the impossible. As Byron put it, in lines memorably translated into Polish by Adam Mickiewicz:
For Freedom’s battle once begun,
Bequeath’d by bleeding Sire to Son,
Though baffled oft is ever won.
Or, in this case, bequeathed by reading mother to daughter.
More immediately, she discovered the first requirement of being an editor: saying no. She remembers one article that her colleagues thought they should print because it was by a friend. She read it. It was no good. She told the author so and spiked it. Basta—an editor is born. The style they developed in this and other publications connected with KOR, the Workers’ Defense Committee, was short, sharp, factual, colloquial. Friends jokingly referred to it as the “popgun” style. (In Polish, a popgun is a “corky”—korkowiec—thus making a pun on KOR.) Partly this was a conscious reaction against the bloated Newspeak of the communist media. Partly it was because the magazine had so little space. Partly, I think, it was because they just wrote the way they spoke: bang, bang, bang.
The “printing” of that first issue was done on an ancient duplicator, three hundred copies rolled from a revolving drum covered in blue ink. Later editions were produced by a homemade process involving a wooden frame and an inked silk-screen across which a squeegee was run by hand. Despite frequent harassment by the secret police, the paper’s print run grew; by early 1980, they were distributing twenty thousand copies. In August of that year came the Solidarity revolution, and for sixteen months the paper was produced without fear of immediate police action. Since she also ran a news agency for the movement, Helena scarcely slept.
Then, on 13 December 1981, everything changed with General Jaruzelski’s declaration of a “state of war.” That night, as army and police patrols arrested Solidarity members on Warsaw’s snow-covered streets, Helena went into hiding. Within two months, she and her colleagues had organized twenty hidden printing places—a small offset press in a cellar, a duplicator in an attic, an old silk-screen machine pressed back into service—and were publishing a new underground paper fo
r the Warsaw region of Solidarity: Tygodnik Mazowsze (The Mazovia Weekly). Many of the staff were women. They puttered around the city in their tiny Fiat 126 cars, with samizdat in the trunks, benefiting from the male chauvinism of the police. For how could a pale young woman, with a small child, in a little Fiat, be any threat to the manly police state? The publication, with the jumbly red Solidarity logo on its masthead (and a quotation from the union’s leader, Lech Wałȩsa, “Solidarity will not allow itself to be divided or destroyed”), continued to appear regularly for seven years, until 1989, with print runs eventually as high as sixty thousand copies.
Helena remembers this time as awful and exhausting. Although she no longer had to spend her whole life in hiding, everything to do with the paper had to be conspiratorial. The experience, she says, was “insufferable”—especially with a young daughter to look after. Her marriage disintegrated. Most of her energy was spent on dodging the police. And there was “no perspective”: She did not know—none of us knew—that it would all end in 1989. As far as she could see, it would go on and on and on.
One spring day, she found herself walking past someone’s allotment garden and looking at it almost longingly. What the hell was she doing with her life? Would she end up an isolated, fanatical activist, as her father had been as a communist before the war? After five years, she needed a break, and the communist authorities let her out to spend a year in the United States, as a “peace fellow” at Radcliffe College in Harvard. It took an effort to return to Warsaw and go back to the endless grind of underground work. But she carried on producing Tygodnik Mazowsze out of cussed loyalty. Loyalty to the great idea of Solidarity. Loyalty to the readers who went on buying the weekly. Loyalty, above all, to her own underground team.
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