Marcin Krol
FROM A POLISH WRITER IN NEW HAVEN
There is something strange about getting news of my country
exclusively from American sources, after having been involved in its
everyday political life and privy to
all
kinds of informed gossip in Warsaw.
Before the events in Poland and Eastern Europe became so chaotic, I
accepted an invitation from Yale University to come here, as Visiting
Professor in its Department of History. For several months now, I have
been teaching young Americans about the ideological struggles in Russia,
Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Since my arrival, I have followed closely the
American reporting of events in Eastern Europe, not because I do not have
access to other sources, but because I wanted to get a sense of the whole
adventure from the American angle. So far, although I could have predicted
some of the views expressed in the Western media, my impressions have
led me to venture some new ones.
I read
The N ew York Times
and
The Christian Science Monitor
every
day, and I watch various television newscasts, including Cable News Net–
work and
The MacNeil Lehrer News Hour ,
both of which do an excellent
reporting job; this
all
amounts to taking in a lot of news. Nevertheless, there
is little news of the politics of Eastern Europe. Poland and the other countries
are portrayed as though they are but one bloc, and sometimes the whole of
Eastern (or Central or East-Central) Europe is treated as ifit were one solid
entity. This is of course natural-
The New York Times
headline, "Upheaval in
the East," is but one example - and it is ofcourse not true.
The notion of "Eastern Europe" rightly was used for decades, because
under Soviet domination we Eastern Europeans had no chance to
demonstrate that in reality we belong to worlds different from each other;
we have different traditions, and we have responded differently to oppres–
sion. The matter of how different people react to similar deprivation was in
itself not interesting to the West, where an oversimplifYing attitude - that
all
Eastern European countres were poor, one was supposed to help them, and
so on - prevailed. Now, the distinctiveness of reactions in individual Eastern
European countries has given us an unprecedented opportunity to study in
the field the childhood and youth of new democracies. In the West, democ–
racy grew very slowly; in Eastern Europe the process can be likened to the
kind of time-lapse photography where a flower grows from bud to bloom in a
span of several seconds
In both Poland and Hungary there are roughly fifty political parties,
about six to eight ofwhich are really serious.
As
these are not horse races, I
do not want to speculate which country is further away from totalitarianism
or closer to fuller democracy than the other; yet although both countries
