I was saddened this week to hear that a man who had played a significant role in the fall of Communism, had been killed in a car accident outside of Warsaw.
Bronislaw Geremek is not a name many people outside his native Poland would recognize. As a child, he escaped from the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw. His father died in the ovens of Auschwitz. After the war Geremek dedicated himself to becoming a scholar. He earned his doctorate in medieval French history and was fluent in at least six languages.
In 1980, this kindly, pipe-smoking professor became a major player in Polish politics when he delivered a statement of support from leading Polish intellectuals to the striking workers at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk. It was there he met the Solidarity union leader Lech Walesa, who welcomed the intellectuals’ support and invited them to join the union. This combination of workers and intellectuals would make Solidarity a powerful political movement that would eventually become an inspiration to dissidents throughout the Soviet bloc.
In December 1981, Moscow ordered that martial law be imposed in Poland as a way of breaking Solidarity’s growing influence. Geremek was one of the opposition leaders sent to prison in the crackdown. But eventually he would emerge as one of the leading political strategists in Poland. By the time I met him in the late 1980’s he was described, quite seriously by Solidarity insiders, as Lech Walesa’s brain.
In the early spring of 1989, Geremek was one of the principals in the round-table negotiations between Solidarity and the Polish government about easing the Communist party’s absolute rule. For a few weeks I saw Geremek for an hour or more almost daily, sometimes with a camera rolling. We talked a lot about ancient and recent European history. He was not afraid for his own person. But he did fear for his country. He agonized constantly over the chances the Soviets would once again intervene militarily to squash Poland’s incipient democracy.
Still he kept pushing the Communists for free and fair elections which finally took place in June 1989 when the Polish people gave Solidarity a strong vote of confidence. When Solidarity entered parliament the next month, Geremek was its Parliamentary leader. He would eventually become Poland’s foreign minister.
The fall of the Berlin Wall is usually considered the event that marked the end of the Cold War. But as his obituary writers noted, even before the Wall came down, Geremek and the Solidarity movement broke the lock on power of the Communist party by peaceful means. That turned out to be a seminal event in the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Ultimately Poland paved the way for the integration into the West of most of Eastern Europe and several former Soviet Republics.
To me, Geremek is that perfect example of the importance of individual personalities in the outcome of world history – how personal courage and sound, pragmatic judgment can make all the difference.