The electrician who rewired the world

TAIPEI: The flapping of a butterfly’s wing in an Amazon jungle can, it has been well said, whip up a tornado in far-off places. It is, of course, hard to liken the beefy, walrus-mustachioed Lech Walesa to anything so tender as a butterfly, but the events of the last quartile of the 20th century confirm that in terms of cause-and-effect, that “butterfly effect” theory holds good for geopolitics as well.

For, the chain of circumstances that culminated in the collapse of Communist authoritarian rule in eastern Europe (and eventually in the erstwhile Soviet Union) can be traced to a fateful day in 1980 when Walesa, then a 37-year-old electrician, illegally scaled a wall of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk (Poland) and led a strike to make the daring political demand for free trade unions.

That demand led, after years of repression by (and negotiations with) Poland’s authoritarian leadership, to the fall of Communism in Poland, which had a domino effect across eastern Europe and finally in Moscow as well, where Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempts at “reforming” Communism collapsed in a heap. Walesa, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, was elected Poland’s first non-Communist president in 1990, but lost re-election efforts in 1995 and 2000; since then, he’s been on the global lecture circuit as a champion of democratisation.

In Taiwan last week to participate in the inauguration of a Global Forum on New Democracies, Walesa recalled — in his trademark earthy, irreverential manner, punctuated by laugh-a-minute gags — the heady days of the “Polish revolution” and the challenges of democratisation.

DNA caught up with the man whom Time magazine listed among the “100 most important people of the 20th Century”.

To understand why Poland took the lead in the overthrow of Communism, says Walesa, you have to understand the circumstances in which “hardship was imposed on us” after the Second World War. The Communist system was “especially unfit for Poland since its people are free and independent.”  Soviet leader Josef Stalin himself used to laugh about it, noting that “Communism suits the Polish people like a horse saddle suits a pig”.

For a long time, recalls Walesa, Poles tried to get rid of that “saddle” but since there were 2,00,000 Soviet soldiers permanently stationed on Polish territory, and a million more in neighbouring countries, it seemed impossible. The mistake that everyone made, says Walesa, was that “they calculated only the number of soldiers and tanks and missiles”. They forgot “one critical element” — the human factor, and the “values and spirit” that it was hard to enumerate in an equation. And they forgot the capacity of faith to move mountains.

Around that time, recalls Walesa, the Polish Pope John Paul II visited the country of his origin — “and all the world looked on in astonishment when the Polish people, who were thought to be staunchly Communist, attended meetings with the Catholic Pope in their thousands.” Even the secret police were there, jests Walesa.

“They had even learnt how to ‘cross’ themselves. But of course, they didn’t know the words to the prayers, so they would just say ‘12345’!” Around this time, says Walesa, there rose in the Soviet Union power structure a man — Mikhail Gorbachev — who felt that Communism needed to be reformed. He called his reform process perestroika and glasnost, and when it didn’t have the desired effect, he encouraged people to speed up the reforms. “He was a complete failure at every stage — and, as we had predicted, the whole system shattered to pieces. But despite this failure, the whole world was so relieved he hadn’t used the instrument of rape in his possession — that is, pushed the nuclear button — that they awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize!”

I ask Walesa if, despite this manifest disrespect for Gorbachev, the two leaders (Walesa and Gorbachev) were united by one grand irony: that both of them were hugely popular in other countries but couldn’t win an election in their own homeland. My point is to explore whether those whom the world considers “heroes” are forgotten in their own homes, but Walesa misinterprets this question and launches into another chronicling of Gorbachev’s many “failings”. “Gorbachev wanted to reform Communism: I wanted to destroy it,” he says. “He failed with everything he wanted to do, but I won. He won the Nobel for his failure; I for my victory.”

“If you happen to meet Gorbachev, ask him if he has betrayed Communism. Naturally, he will say ‘no’. Ask him then if he wanted to reform it. Those are the only two options: he is either a traitor or someone who is extremely naive: that’s the rude truth about it.” Whereas it was Poland, he emphasises, that “defanged the dangerous bear and made it possible for a whole host of nations to break free because the bear could no longer bite. We paid a high price for being the first.”

When I ask him if Poland has forgotten its hero or if there’s a future political role for him, Walesa responds rather more calmly. “I’ve been a president of 40 million people. What should be my position now? Should I be with the unions? But I haven’t been involved in union activities for 20 years now, and new activists have become leaders. The only union I can lead now is a union of former presidents!” Even a political career didn’t offer much scope because of Poland’s fractured polity. “Today there are 100 political parties, and I don’t have the support of 10 million people as I once did — and in any case, given my personal characteristics, no one will allow me to be No. 1 now — and I don’t want to be anything but No. 1.”

Then again, given that he’s an “idealist” and not given to “dirty tricks”, he isn’t cut out for business either, says Walesa. “I am an electrician by training: how many bulb changes would it take for me to make a million… So you see, under these circumstances I don’t think there’s a position for me in the arena.” He could, he says, have stayed on as president for life — like Castro. “Those guys thought they won, but they lost. Whereas when I won, I gave everything back to democracy, back to the people. And I proved how good that democracy was by losing the election myself. Has anyone consolidated democracy better?”

The subject of China, one of the last remaining (nominally) Communist states where free trade unions of the sort that Walesa founded in Poland are banned, comes up. But the Communist-basher suddenly turns sympathetic to the slow pace of political reform in China. “Poland and Taiwan are like small cars that can zip at 200 kmph; but China is a huge truck with three trailers, and if it drives at our speed, it will crush us all. Which is why China needs to take it a little slow and do it differently.”

Yet, he says, the Chinese people would inevitably overthrow Communism “because the future stands on democracy and free market. I am confident I will live to see it for myself.”