Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are unpacking
a story that, honestly, if you wrote it as a
movie script, I think a Hollywood studio would
reject it for being too unrealistic. Oh, absolutely.
It's just a little too on the nose. The plot
points are almost too perfect in their absurdity.
Right. We're talking about a man who started
out as a simple electrician. A guy with, you
know... Zero higher education, who spent his
days wiring fuse boxes. Fixing cars. And somehow,
this guy becomes the global face of the anti
-communist movement, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate,
and the first democratically elected president
of Poland since 1926. It's one of those life
trajectories that just shouldn't exist, statistically.
If you look at the history of revolutions, or
even just state building, you usually see a certain
type emerge. The intellectual. The general. Exactly.
You see the lawyer like a Robespierre or a Lincoln.
You see the general, your Washingtons, your Napoleons.
You get the writer, the philosopher. You very,
very rarely see a guy who just a few years before
he's shaking hands with the president of the
United States was literally jumping over a fence
to get into a shipyard. We are, of course, talking
about La Quixota. Yeah. And I think to really
grasp the weight of this, we need to strip away
that. icon status for a second and just look
at the stakes. Yeah. We aren't talking about
a union boss negotiating for like better dental
coverage for his workers. We're talking about
Cold War Poland. We're talking about the Soviet
bloc. And we are talking about a movement solidarity
that grew to 10 million members. Which is a number
that is just so hard to wrap your head around.
To put that in perspective for a modern context,
that was over a quarter of the entire Polish
population at the time. A quarter of the population.
Imagine a movement today in the United States
having 80 or 90 million active card -carrying
members. That is the scale of social mobilization
we are dealing with. It wasn't just, you know,
a political party. It was a societal tidal wave.
It's massive. But here's why we're doing this
deep dive today. Lectua Josa is... Well, he's
messy. He is complicated. That's putting it mildly.
He is the hero who jumped the fence, yes. But
he's also the controversial president who arguably
didn't really know how to govern. He's the Nobel
laureate who later in life made some truly...
bizarre comments about minorities. And this is
the big one. He is the subject of a spy thriller
subplot involving secret police files that has
been running for 40 years. That's the mission
for today. We aren't here to polish the statue.
We want to look at the cracks. We have a massive
stack of source material, biographical records,
investigation files from the Institute of National
Remembrance, political analyses. We are going
to try to figure out how the hero, the politician
and the alleged informant can all be the same
person. To unpack the man behind the legend.
Exactly. So let's get into it. I'm going to rewind
all the way back. Because usually when you read
biographies of great leaders, there's this sense
of destiny, or at least a privileged upbringing
that prepares them for power. Right. There's
a path. But where Raz's start wasn't just humble.
It was genuinely traumatic. It was incredibly
rough. He was born in 1943 in a village called
Popowell. Now you have to pause on that date.
1943. This is the dead center of World War II.
In Poland. In Poland. It is arguably the worst
place in time to be born in the entire 20th century.
The country is under brutal Nazi occupation.
And his family had already been shattered before
he even took his first breath. They had. His
father, Bleszow, was a carpenter, just a regular
guy. But before Leisch was even born, the German
occupying forces rounded him up. He was sent
to a forced labor camp called Muniek. Now, this
wasn't just a prison, right? No, not at all.
You have to understand, Muniek was an outpost.
hosted the Stutthof concentration camp system.
So the conditions were just horrific. We're talking
starvation, rampant disease, brutal, back -breaking
labor. So Leach never really knew his father.
Not really, no. Baleso actually survived the
camp itself, which is, I mean, a statistical
miracle. He came home after the war, but he was
a broken man. The source material is clear on
this. He was completely destroyed by the experience.
Physically and mentally. Completely. The exhaustion
and the illness he contracted in the camp, it
killed him just two months after he got back.
Leach was an infant, so he grew up in the shadow
of that loss with the story of what happened
to his father. That has to shape your worldview.
It's not an abstract political idea. It's knowing
that an authoritarian regime literally worked
your father to death. It absolutely instills
a deep seated, you know, personal resentment
of that kind of authority. He was raised primarily
by his mother, Felixa, and later a stepfather.
And if you look at the psychological profiles
and the source material we have. Everyone points
to Felixa. She was the core of the family. She
was the one who shaped his tenacity, stubbornness.
She taught him that you don't back down. But
you have to understand, this wasn't a let's sit
around and discuss political philosophy kind
of household. No, it was about survival. It was
a survival household, pure and simple. So he
went to vocational school. That was the path.
He graduated as a qualified electrician in 1961.
Then worked as a car mechanic. Did his mandatory
two years in the military. It all sounds like
a very standard, very blue -collar life in the
People's Republic of Poland. It was. For a while,
he was just a guy trying to get by, trying to
make a living. But in 1967, he lands the job
that sets the stage for everything that follows.
He starts working as an electrician at the Lenin
Shipyard in Gdysk. The Lenin Shipyard. I always
find that irony so delicious. It is perfect,
isn't it? The shipyard named after the father
of communism. becomes the birthplace of the movement
that ultimately destroys it. History loves a
good joke. But we have to be really clear here.
He didn't just walk into the shipyard in 67 and
start a revolution. He was a worker. He was doing
his job. But the environment in Poland was shifting.
The pressure was building. And this brings us
to 1970. You simply cannot understand Letwosza,
the man he became, without understanding the
trauma of 1970. Talk me through that, because
in the popular history, 1980 gets all the glory,
but 1970 feels like the dark, bloody prequel.
It was the crucible. It was where he learned
all the hard lessons. In December of 1970, the
communist government announced a massive, sudden
price hike on basic food items. The essentials.
The absolute essentials. Meat. flour, sugar.
Now, in a communist state, you have to remember
the government sets all the prices. So when you
suddenly can't afford to feed your kids, you
blame the state directly. There's no one else
to blame. The workers at the shipyard, they walked
out. They went on strike and they took to the
streets. But this wasn't a peaceful sit -in with
guitars and signs. No. No. It turned violent
very quickly. It turned into street fighting.
The regime sent in the militia, the Zumo, and
then the army. and they opened fire on the workers
with live ammunition. In the streets of Gdansk
and the neighboring city of Edinia, the official
death toll was over 30, but it was likely higher.
Wojosa was there. He was just 27 years old, and
he was one of the organizers on the strike committee.
So he saw it firsthand. He saw people, his friends,
his co -workers, dying on the pavement, shot
down by their own government for protesting the
price of bread. I can't imagine how terrifying
that must have been. I mean, you're a young guy
with a family and you see the state, your state,
mowing down your colleagues. It changed him completely.
It taught him a lesson that became the absolute
core of his strategy 10 years later. Unorganized
chaos gets you killed. Right. Throwing stones
at tanks. It doesn't work. You cannot win a military
confrontation with the state. They have all the
guns. He realized you have to be smarter. You
have to be more organized. But in the short term,
that activism cost him dearly. You got fired.
Eventually, yes. After 1970, he was branded a
troublemaker, a dissident. In 1976, he was finally
fired from the shipyard for his involvement in
what the state called illegal unions and for
his constant campaigning to build a monument
to commemorate the victims of that 1970 crackdown.
And being fired in communist Poland in the 70s
wasn't like it is today. It didn't just mean
you went and looked for a new job on LinkedIn.
No, it meant you were on a blacklist. Your name
was circulated. You were an enemy of the state.
So how did he survive? How did he support his
family? Barely. He bounced between temporary
jobs. He'd get hired by some small garage to
fix cars or a company to do electrical work.
And then the secret police, the SB, the Suba
Bespiseswa, they'd pay a visit to his boss. And
he'd be let go. Immediately. He was constantly
under surveillance. The source material from
the archives details it all, how his apartment
was bugged, his phone was tapped. He had agents
following him to church, following his wife to
the market. That kind of constant pressure breaks
most people. You have a wife, you have a growing
family, and you have guys in trench coats watching
your every single move. It's suffocating. But
this is where he makes a crucial connection.
This period of being an outcast is when he links
up with the broader opposition movement, specifically
a group called KOR, the Workers' Defense Committee.
OK, explain KOR for a second, because this seems
like a pivotal moment where the worker meets
the intellectual. That is exactly what it is.
It's a hugely important development. Before KOR,
the Polish opposition was basically split into
two camps that didn't talk to each other. You
had the intellectuals in Warsaw and Krakow writing
essays about freedom and democracy that nobody
read. And then you had the workers. And you had
the workers in places like Gidesque who were
angry about food prices and working conditions.
KOR was the bridge. It was founded by intellectuals
specifically to help workers who were being persecuted
by the state. They provided legal aid, financial
support. So they gave them a support network.
And an education. Washa started working with
them, distributing underground newspapers, what
they called bibura. He was learning. He was getting
a crash course in political strategy from seasoned
dissidents. He was no longer just an angry worker.
He was becoming an organizer. So he's unemployed.
He's watching his back. But he's also organizing.
Which brings us to August of 1980, the sequel
to 1970. But this time, the ending is completely
different. August 14th, 1980, the government,
in its infinite wisdom, raises food prices again.
It's almost like they didn't learn from history
either. Unbelievable. The strike starts at the
Lenin shipyard, just like before. But here's
the problem. Wojcicki doesn't work there anymore.
He's been fired. He is legally barred from even
entering the premises. So we get the famous jump.
The jump. It is the founding myth of modern Poland.
It's the equivalent of Washington crossing the
Delaware. Woshusa arrives at the shipyard perimeter.
The gates are locked. They're guarded by security.
So he finds a spot in the wall or a fence. It
counts very slightly on the exact geometry of
it. But he gets over. He scrambles over it. I
have to ask. Is there any skepticism about this
moment? Or is it generally accepted that he definitely
jumped the fence? Oh, he definitely went over
the fence. There were too many witnesses. But
the symbolic weight of it is what matters. An
outsider, a worker they cast out, breaking back
in to lead his people. It's pure cinema. And
he immediately takes charge. He finds the strike
committee. And because he has that natural charisma,
that booming voice, and most importantly, the
street cred from being there in 1970, he takes
over. But this time, he doesn't lead them out
to the streets to get shot. Precisely. This is
the lesson of 1970 in action. His first major
decision is to order an occupation strike. We
stay inside. They lock the gates from the inside.
They protect the machinery. And they keep everyone
sober. No alcohol was allowed on the premises.
Discipline. Incredible discipline. And then he
does something even smarter. He expands the fight.
This is the Enterprise Strike Committee. MKS,
yes. He realized that if it's just the Lenin
shipyard striking, the government can eventually
wait them out or starve them out. But what if
the buses in the city stop running? And the other
factories stopped producing. What if the whole
region shuts down? That's real leverage. That
is leverage. They coordinated strikes across
20 different plants at first, and it grew from
there. It became a network, a general strike.
And the government blinked. They had no other
choice. The entire coastal economy was paralyzed.
And they couldn't just send in the tanks and
shoot 10 ,000 workers inside a shipyard without
triggering a full -blown civil war. So they sent
a government delegation to negotiate. Which leads
to the signing of the Ghidasur Agreement on August
31, 1980. A historic moment. But I want to talk
about the pen. Because in all the photos and
the television footage of this incredibly serious,
somber treaty signing, Wajiza is using this ridiculous
object. The giant pen. It was this massive, oversized
souvenir pen. Like, comically large. And it had
a picture of Pope John Paul II on it. It looked
like something you'd win at a carnival. Why do
that? I mean, was it just him being a character,
being weird, or was it a calculated move? I think
it was a brilliant... perhaps instinctive piece
of political theater. Think about the aesthetic
of communism. It's all gray suits, gray concrete,
small print, serious, unsmiling faces. It's faceless
bureaucracy. And then there's Wojessa. And then
you have Wajoso with his big mustache and his
chaotic energy signing this historic document
with a giant, colorful, kitschy religious pen.
It was a visual statement. It signaled humanity.
It signaled, we are not like you. We are the
people. We are colorful and messy and alive and
faithful. It made the government officials across
the table look like lifeless robots. And the
agreement itself was completely groundbreaking.
It was the beginning of the end for the Soviet
Union, though nobody knew it at the time. The
key point was that it granted the right to form
independent trade unions. That sounds kind of
dry, but it was everything. It was everything.
In a communist state, the party is supposed to
control everything. To allow a massive independent
organization to exist outside of party control,
that broke the monopoly on power. And that organization
born from that agreement was Solidarity Solidarność.
And while she said the electrician becomes the
chairman, suddenly he's not just a local hero.
He's a global superstar. He's on the cover of
Time magazine. He's meeting with international
dignitaries. And he's immediately in these high
stakes meetings with the hardliners. There's
a fantastic anecdote from a meeting in March
1981. He's sitting across from General Wojciech
Jaruzelski. The man in charge. The man in charge.
Jaruzelski is a stiff. formal military man, always
in his uniform, always behind those dark glasses.
The face of the regime, he's trying to intimidate
Wachas. He accuses Solidarity of being manipulated
by Western powers, of taking foreign money. And
Wachas doesn't flinch. Not for a second. He hits
back with this very specific, very Wachasa -style
wit. And he looks at Jaruzelski and says, we
don't have to take only dollars. We can take
corn, fertilizer, anything is okay. I would take
everything from the enemy. The more, the better.
until the enemy was weakened no more. He's basically
telling the general to his face, yes, I will
take your enemy's stuff to beat you. It's incredibly
ballsy. But it also shows his philosophy perfectly.
Practical results over ideological purity. He
didn't care where the help came from as long
as it helped the workers. But that honeymoon
period, that sort of festival of freedom, it
couldn't last. The Soviet Union was watching.
Moscow was watching very, very closely. And they
were getting extremely nervous. They were putting
immense pressure on the Polish government to
crush this counter -revolution before it spread.
And on December 13th, 1981, the hammer comes
down. Martial law. It was a cold Sunday morning.
You woke up and the phones were dead. There were
tanks in the streets, snow on the ground. General
Jaruzelski appears on television and announces
a state of war. Martial law. Solidarity is outlawed.
Banned overnight. And thousands of people are
arrested in the middle of the night. Dragged
from their homes. Including Wayaza. They came
for him immediately. He was interned for 11 months.
They didn't put him in a normal prison, though.
They moved him around to these isolated, guarded
government villas in the east of the country
places like Chilis, Otwock, and finally, Aramo.
Aramo's deep in the mountains, right? Near the
Soviet border. It's desolate. It's completely
cut off from the world. What was the government's
strategy there? Were they trying to turn him
or just silence him? Both. The goal was to break
him psychologically. They wanted him to sign
some sort of confession to appear on state television
and say, solidarity was a mistake. Let's all
go back to work peacefully. They tried to ply
him with luxury. He had good food, plenty of
alcohol, while his friends and followers were
being beaten in the streets. It's a classic golden
cage. It's a golden cage. But he refused to cooperate.
He was incredibly stubborn. He refused to negotiate
unless his advisors from solidarity were present
and all the other prisoners were. released. So
he just sat there for nearly a year, mostly alone,
holding the line. And while he was in there,
in that cage, his legend just grew. He became
a martyr, a living symbol of resistance. Exactly.
You can imprison the man, but you can't imprison
the symbol. In fact, locking him up just made
the legend stronger, both inside Poland and internationally.
And the world definitely recognized this. In
1983, shortly after he was released, but while
Poland was still under the thumb of martial law,
he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. A huge
moment. But he didn't actually go to Oslo to
accept it. Whoa, he was too smart for that. He
knew the game the regime was playing. He knew
that if he left Poland, they would simply cancel
his passport and refuse to let him back in. They
would love to exile him. It would have been the
perfect solution for them. Get the troublemaker
out of the country for good. So he stayed. So
who went in his place? His wife, Danuta. And
we really need to pause here and talk about Danuta
Wajisa. For a long time, she was just seen as
the wife behind the great man, you know, raising
their eight children while he was off making
history. But the source material. And her own
autobiography, which came out much later, paints
a very different picture. She was the backbone
of the entire family. She was fearless. The sources
have these great stories about when the Secret
Service agents, the SB, would come to their apartment,
which they did constantly, to search it or to
arrest. leech again she wasn't intimidated she
would open the door and openly mock them she
would yell at them shame them in front of the
neighbors she was in many ways just as tough
as he was and so she was the one who went to
oslo she accepted the nobel prize on his behalf
in front of the world while her husband was back
in gazesk wait He'd gone back to work as an electrician
after all this, after winning the Nobel Prize.
Yes. That is the absolute absurdity of life in
1980s Poland. You have a Nobel Peace Prize laureate
working the morning shift at the shipyard because
the union is still illegal and he has bills to
pay. But he was also, of course, leading the
underground movement. He was publishing essays
and messages in the clandestine weekly newspaper
Tagodnik Mazauze. His motto during that time
was, solidarity will not be divided or destroyed.
And that message was everywhere, scrawled on
walls across the country. So this stalemate lasts
for years. The government has the guns and the
control, but the people have the numbers and
the moral high ground. And the whole time, the
economy is just collapsing, the store shelves
are empty. By 1988, the country is essentially
bankrupt. The system isn't working. A new wave
of strikes breaks out across Poland. The communists
finally realize they are driving the car directly
off a cliff. They need a way out. They need someone
who can calm the workers down, someone that people
will actually listen to. There's only one guy
who can do that. They have to call the electrician.
This leads to the roundtable negotiations in
1989. And visually, this is just as iconic as
the giant pen. They custom built a massive round
wooden table so that symbolically no one was
at the head, where the communist generals and
ministers sat across from the dissidents they
had thrown in prison just a few years earlier.
And Wojessa was the informal leader of the opposition
side. Informal, but clearly the boss. Everyone
knew he was the one with the real power, the
one who had the support of the people. And he
played his hand perfectly. He knew the government
was desperate. So what was the deal they struck?
The deal was historic. First, Solidarity becomes
a legal organization again. And second, they
agree to hold semi -free elections. OK, you have
to explain semi -free. That sounds like a trap.
It was designed to be a trap that would keep
the communists in power. The deal was this. In
the Sej, which is the more powerful lower house
of parliament, 65 % of the seats were reserved,
automatically given to the Communist Party and
its satellite parties. Only the remaining 35
% were up for a free, open election. So they
guaranteed themselves a majority. They thought
so. However, as part of the deal, they created
a new upper house, the Senate, and that was going
to be 100 percent open for a free election. The
communists thought, OK, we'll keep our majority
in the south. We still control the government,
but we'll let the opposition have a voice in
this new Senate. It'll let off some steam. They
completely underestimated how much the Polish
people hated them. Drastically. It was one of
the biggest political miscalculations of the
20th century. Wojtyla didn't run for office himself,
but. He became the face of the entire opposition
campaign. He lent his image to everyone who did
run. This is the Lecce's team idea. Exactly.
They created these very simple, very powerful
posters. Just a black and white photo of the
local solidarity candidate standing next to a
smiling Lecce. It was called Lecce's team. It
was the ultimate celebrity endorsement. If Lecce
was with you, you were legitimate. And it worked.
It worked beyond anyone's wildest dreams. In
the June 1989 election, solidarity candidates
won every single seat that was available to them
in the Sejmall, 161 of them. A clean sweep. And
in the new Senate. In the Senate, they won 99
out of 100 seats. The one guy who lost was some
independent weirdo who nobody liked. It was an
absolute total humiliation for the Communist
Party. So even though the communists technically
still had their 65 percent of reserved seats,
they had lost all moral authority. They had no
mandate to rule. None whatsoever. And Wajdaza
brilliantly used that momentum. He went to the
leaders of those small satellite parties, the
ones that had been puppets of the communists
for 40 years. And he convinced them to switch
sides. He basically said, look at the scoreboard.
The ship is sinking. Come join us on the lifeboat.
And they did. They did. They abandoned the communists
and formed a coalition with Solidarity. And suddenly
the communists didn't have a majority in the
SIG anymore. Poland got its first non -communist
prime minister in over four decades, Tadeusz
Mazowiecki. And then the dominoes just start
to fall across Europe. The Berlin Wall comes
down a few months later. Then Czechoslovakia,
Romania, the whole Soviet bloc crumbles. It does.
And Wojtyla takes a well -deserved victory lap.
In November of 1989, he stands before a joint
meeting of the U .S. Congress. He is only the
third foreigner in history to address a joint
meeting without being a head of state. Who were
the others? The Marquis de Lafayette and Winston
Churchill. So, you know, pretty good company.
And he opens his speech with three very famous
words. We the people. He starts with the opening
words of the U .S. Constitution. The applause
was just deafening. It was the moment that Poland
symbolically and politically rejoined the West.
So here we are. It's the end of 1989. Washosa
is a living god. He has defeated communism. He
is a hero to the entire world. If the movie ends
right here, it's a masterpiece. But real life
doesn't end when the credits roll. And this is
where the story gets really difficult. Because
being a revolutionary is a very, very different
job from being a president. Washosa decides he
needs to be president. He runs in 1990. And this
is the first real crack in the armor of solidarity.
His slogan was, I don't want to, but I have to.
Which sounds a little arrogant. It came across
that way to many. He believed that the transition
to democracy was happening too slowly. He thought
the new government, led by Prime Minister Mazowiecki,
his own longtime ally, was too soft on the old
communists. He wanted to accelerate the changes.
This is what became known as the war at the top.
Yes, the war at the top. And it was really a
class conflict within the opposition. On one
side, you had what some called the Warsaw Salon.
the educated, polite, glasses -wearing intellectuals
like Mazowiecki. And on the other side, you had
Washissa and the workers. Rough, loud, impatient.
Washissa felt they were trying to sideline him.
He felt that the intellectuals were treating
him like a mascot. Like they were saying, thanks
for the revolution, Light, you did great. Now
go back to the shipyard and let the smart people
handle the government. He absolutely hated that.
So he runs for president against his own prime
minister, Mazowiecki. It's a fratricidal war
within the solidarity movement. And it got nasty.
It was a really ugly campaign that shattered
the unity of the anti -communist front. Wojtyla
won, becoming the first freely elected president
of Poland in 63 years. But he burned a lot of
bridges to get there. And once he got into the
presidential palace? Well, it turns out running
a country is a lot harder than organizing a strike.
A completely different skill set. Let's look
at his presidency. It's from 1990 to 1995. On
paper, if you just look at the big achievements,
there are some huge successes. Monumental successes.
We have to give him credit where it's due. He
personally oversaw the negotiations for the withdrawal
of all Soviet troops from Polish soil. Imagine
the skill and the sheer force of will required
to get the Russian army to pack up and leave
without firing a single shot. That's a massive
deal. It's a massive deal. He also pushed very
hard for debt reduction, traveling the world
and convincing Western governments to forgive
billions of dollars of Poland's communist era
debt. And he was the one who really started hammering
on the door of NATO and the European Union, setting
Poland on the path to join both. But the day
-to -day business of governing, that was another
story. It was chaotic. Wojosa fundamentally didn't
understand or didn't respect parliamentary democracy.
He was used to being a union boss. You give an
order and... The line holds. In a parliament,
you have to build coalitions. You have to read
boring documents. You have to compromise. He
called it idle chatter. He had no patience for
it. He wanted to rule by decree. He was constantly
in conflict with the parliament, with his own
ministers. He kept firing prime ministers. The
government changed almost every single year.
It created immense political instability right
when the country needed stability the most. And
he had some terrible foreign policy ideas, too,
like this NATO -BIS concept. Oh, NATO -BIS. What
a disaster. BIS means second or encore. So this
was his idea for a NATO part two. Plan B security
alliance for Eastern Europe. Who was supposed
to be in it? It was a vague idea for a regional
bloc, including Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia,
and maybe even Russia in some way. His logic
was that the real NATO wouldn't let Poland in
quickly enough, so they needed an alternative.
How did Poland's neighbors react to that? They
hated it. Countries like Lithuania and Ukraine,
who had historical reasons to be wary of Polish
influence, saw it as Poland trying to become
a mini -empire, a kind of Neo -Russia. They saw
it as Polish neo -imperialism. And what did the
actual NATO think? They were just confused. They
were like, wait, do you want to join our club
or are you trying to start your own rival club?
It made him look amateurish and erratic on the
world stage. In his personal style. He was still
the electrician from Gosk, not a polished spadesman.
And the Waschacisms, his unique way of speaking,
became a real problem. He spoke in these convoluted,
often contradictory metaphors that often didn't
make any sense. He would say things like, I am
for and even against. Which means nothing. Exactly.
Yeah. He would also wear casual clothes when
protocol demanded formal suits. The Polish intelligentsia,
the people he had fought with during the war
at the top, were deeply embarrassed by him. They
felt he lacked the dignity of a head of state.
Which all leads us to the 1995 election. He runs
for re -election. And he loses. He loses. And
the ultimate irony is who he loses to. Aleksander
Kwasniewski. A former communist. A former communist
youth minister. Kwasniewski was everything Wojtasza
wasn't. He was young. He was smooth. He spoke
good English. He wore perfectly tailored suits.
He represented modernity and a move away from
the constant fighting of the transition period.
There was a moment in their televised debate
that really sealed Weishus' fate. The shake my
leg incident. It was brutal to watch. Weishus
was frustrated throughout the debate. He came
across as rude, arrogant, and condescending.
At the very end, Kwasińewski, playing the part
of the civilized, modern politician, walks over
to Wysza to offer a handshake. And Wysza refuses.
He refuses to shake his hand and barks at him.
I can give you my leg to shake. Oof, that's bad.
It was just so petty. It looked small. And I
think a lot of Polish people looked at that moment
and thought, we are tired of the fighting. We
are tired of the chaos. We just want a normal
country with a normal president. Westerlost narrowly.
The hero of solidarity was voted out of office
by the very people he had liberated. That is
a Shakespearean tragedy right there. But the
tragedy gets even darker. Because all this time,
we haven't touched on the shadow that followed
him through his entire career. The allegations.
The Bolek files. We need to tread very carefully
here, because this is still a raging, deeply
emotional debate in Poland today. But we have
to explain it. What is the core accusation? The
accusation in its simplest form is that in the
early 1970s, specifically after that bloody 1970
massacre we talked about, but before he became
the great leader in 1980, Lech Wachasa was broken
by the secret police. Broken how? The claim is
that he signed an official commitment to cooperate,
was given the secret code name Bolek, and for
several years he informed on his co -workers
at the shipyard. The source material mentions
the years 1970 to 1976 very specifically. Correct.
The allegation is that during this six -year
period, he provided information on who was organizing
strikes, who was distributing illegal leaflets,
and critically, that he took payments for this
information. The files mention a total of over
13 ,000 zlotys. Which wasn't a fortune, but it
wasn't nothing either. No. For a poor worker
with a young family in the 1970s, it was a significant
amount of money. Now, Wyjosa has defended himself
against this furiously for decades. Absolutely.
But the problem for him is that his defense has
been, well, inconsistent over the years. At times,
he has said something like, OK, I signed some
sort of paper just to get them to stop beating
me during interrogation, but I never told them
anything real. I ran rings around them. At other
times, he has said, it's all forgeries. The secret
police created these documents to destroy me.
And there was another explanation he offered,
right? Yes. At one point, he wrote on his blog
that he did sign some financial receipts, but
it was to help a secret police officer who had
lost some money that was entrusted to him. It's
messy. The story keeps changing. But in 2000,
a special court actually cleared him of collaboration,
didn't it? Yes, the Luz Estration Court, which
was set up to vet public officials, ruled that
there was a lack of sufficient evidence to prove
he was a conscious collaborator. But, and this
is a huge but, that ruling was based on the files
that were available at that time. And everyone
knew the files were missing. Everyone knew that
the communists had burned truckloads of secret
police files in 1989 and 1990 as they were losing
power. But then, in 2008, a book comes out. That
ignites the whole debate again. Right. A book
by two historians from the Institute of National
Remembrance, Sienkiewicz and Gontarczyk. It's
called S .B. Alek Wajesa. And they lay out the
case based on surviving documents that Wajesa
was indeed Bulek from 1970 to 1976. And they
added another accusation, a cover up theory.
They did. They alleged that later, when Wajesa
was president in the early 90s, he borrowed his
own secret police files from the state archives
and returned them with key pages missing. Which
is a very serious charge. Extremely serious.
But the story still wasn't over. Because then,
2016 happens. And this whole affair turns from
a historical debate into a bizarre crime novel.
The Cusack Archives. The Cusack Archives. General
Chesasa Cusack had been the Minister of the Interior
for most of the 1980s. He was the head of the
entire secret police apparatus, the Big Boss.
He died in late 2015. And a few months later,
his widow pays a visit. His widow, Maria Kisak,
walks into the Institute of National Remembrance,
the state archive, and she tells them that her
husband kept secret official documents in his
private house for decades as a form of, you know,
Insurance. And she wants to sell them. She offers
to sell them to the government for 90 ,000 zlotes.
She tried to pawn state secrets. She literally
did. The prosecutors were, as you can imagine,
stunned. They immediately got a warrant, went
to her house, and seized all the documents. And
inside this Kazakh archive, they found two folders,
a personal file and a work file for an agent
with the codename Bolek. And what was in them?
The motherlode. A handwritten, signed commitment
to cooperation, dozens of handwritten reports
on other activists, and handwritten receipts
for money, all signed with the name Boett. And
they tested the handwriting. In 2017, a team
of forensic handwriting experts commissioned
by the Institute concluded that the signatures
on those key documents were, in fact, authentic
signatures of Lech Wachizzo. So where does that
leave us? Does this destroy the legend entirely?
This is where the nuance comes in. And this is
where I think we, as people looking at history,
have to be mature about it. Let's, for the sake
of argument, assume the files are 100 % real.
What does that story tell us? Go on. It means
that a 27 -year -old worker traumatized by seeing
his friend shot dead in the street, terrified
for his wife and his newborn baby, broke under
intense interrogation and signed a deal with
the devil to protect his family. And then, in
1976, he stopped. He broke free. And four years
later, in 1980, he summoned the courage to lead
the movement that destroyed the very people he
had supposedly worked for. So you could actually
argue that his experience as an informant made
him a better revolutionary later. Because he
knew exactly how the secret police operated from
the inside. Exactly. It makes him human. It makes
him more complex. It's not a story of a perfect
Mark Saint. It's a story of a terrible mistake
and then a historic redemption. But for Washosa
himself, he can't accept that narrative. He seems
to view any admission of weakness as a total
crushing defeat. So he continues to deny everything,
calling it all a conspiracy, which unfortunately
just alienates a lot of people who might otherwise
be willing to forgive a mistake he made. a young
man half a century ago. Let's move to the post
-presidency years. Because he doesn't just fade
away after losing in 95. He's still around. He's
still active. But politically? Politically, he
is, to be blunt, irrelevant. He ran for president
again in 2000. Do you know what percentage of
the vote he got? Tell me. 1 .01%. 1%. Wow. That
is just heartbreaking for a figure of his stature.
It showed that Poland as a country had moved
on from him, but he didn't disappear. He became
this sort of grumpy, outspoken grandfather of
the nation. And his publicly stated views have
been a complete roller coaster. We have to talk
about his comments on LGBT rights. This was a
huge international controversy. Waza is and always
has been a devout Catholic. He wears a badge
of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa on his lapel
every single day of his life. In 2013, he said
on Polish television that homosexual MPs should
have to sit in the back of the parliament or
maybe even behind a wall separate from the other
legislators. And the world exploded. Absolutely.
The city of San Francisco renamed a street that
had been named after him. He was disinvited from
speaking events. The backlash was immense. But
then, and this is what makes him so endlessly
fascinating and unpredictable. He evolved. It
changed his mind. Years later, he apologized
for those comments. He started publicly supporting
same -sex marriage. And he even publicly praised
Robert Biedro, who is a prominent, openly gay
Polish politician, calling him a great talent
for the country. That is a massive shift for
a man in his 70s from a rural Catholic background.
It is. He's completely unpredictable. In 2015,
during the European migration crisis, he said
some very inflammatory things, warning that refugees
might start exercising their own customs, including
beheading. Very fear mongering stuff. But then
on Russia. On Russia and Ukraine, he's more radical
and hawkish than almost anyone. He strongly supports
Ukraine. He recently made this radical suggestion
that the Russian Federation should be forcibly
broken up and its population reduced to less
than 50 million by organizing uprisings of all
the peoples annexed by Moscow over the centuries.
He wants to completely dismantle Russia. He wants
to free the annexed nations, Chechnya, Tatarstan,
and so on. He is a revolutionary to the bitter
end. He also despises Donald Trump. He called
a potential Trump victory in 2024 a misfortune
for the whole world. You just can't put him in
a neat political box. He isn't a Republican or
a Democrat or a conservative or a liberal. He's
just wasasa. And his cultural legacy is just
as complex. Oh, the mustache alone is an icon.
And the language, the wazirsisms. He has this
completely unique, peculiar way of speaking in
these. riddles. I am for and even against. There
are positive pluses and negative pluses. It's
almost Yoda -like, but much more confusing. And
he inspired a U2 song. New Year's Day. Bono wrote
the lyrics inspired by the images he saw of the
Solidarity Movement under martial law. The image
of the Grides standing together in the snow,
defiant. Peter Gabriel also wrote a song about
him, Wallflower. And he's been in movies. He
appeared as himself in Andrzej Wajda's classic
film Man of Iron, which won the Palme d 'Or at
Cannes. And then Wajda made a full biopic about
him, Wachosa, Man of Hope. He was even a playable
leader for the Polish civilization in the video
game Civilization V. He's everywhere. So bringing
this all back, we started with the idea that
this group was too crazy for Hollywood. We have
the tragic origin story, the dark middle chapter
with the spy allegations, the heroic triumph
over an empire, the messy and chaotic reign as
king, and this complicated, controversial twilight.
It really is the ultimate human story, isn't
it? We want our heroes to be marble statues.
We want them to be perfect and pure. But Le Cuecheza
is profoundly flawed. He can be petty. He can
be arrogant. He can be rude. And he might have
had a very dark moment of weakness in the 1970s.
But he also, undeniably, had the courage to jump
that fence when nobody else did. He once said,
I don't want to, but I have to. It really feels
like that one phrase sums up his entire life.
He was dragged into history and he dragged Poland
with him, kicking and screaming towards freedom,
whether they like his personal style or not.
And that raises the big provocative question
for you, for the listener, to think about. Can
a revolutionary ever be a good ruler? Or are
the skills that are required to destroy a dictatorship,
stubbornness, confrontation, a cult of personality,
the exact opposite of the skills required to
build a stable democracy? That is something to
chew on. Wajusa won the war, but maybe he was
always destined to lose the peace that followed.
That's it for this deep dive into the electrician
of Gdesk. Thanks for listening. See you next
time.