His speech also included the later famous words: “We have marked the past with a thick line. We will only be responsible for what we have done to bring Poland out of its present state of collapse.” It is clear that Mazowiecki wanted to distance himself from the era of communist rule and to emphasise the fact that a new period in Polish history had begun. However, the subsequent failure of his government to make a radical break with the legacy of the Polish People’s Republic meant that critics of Mazowiecki’s policy credited him with formulating the principle of a so-called thick line, meaning far-reaching tolerance towards post-communist forces. This was not in line with the thinking expressed by Mazowiecki in his August speech, but it was justified in relation to the domestic policy implemented by his cabinet in 1990. Interestingly, Mazowiecki was warned by his own son about the risk of reading this phrase differently than intended, but in response he heard the evangelical formula: “What I have written, I have written.”
Mazowiecki considered that the most important goal was to overcome the economic crisis by “returning to a market economy and a role for the state similar to that of economically developed countries”. Waldemar Kuczyński, the author of the economic part of this speech, recalls that Mazowiecki removed from the quoted sentence the phrase about the Polish economy striving to reach the “ownership structure” of highly developed countries, which would be tantamount to announcing privatization. This seemingly minor correction reveals the essence of the policy that Mazowiecki tried to pursue in the following months; a policy whose basic principle was to avoid general conflicts with the Polish United Workers’ Party and its heirs. “Putting the PZPR in strict opposition and strict denial would be a trap for us and for the country,” he had said a few days earlier at the OKP meeting. “There is no opposition in the world that has an army and a security service – and it remains an opposition.”
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Of the 24 members of Tadeusz Mazowiecki’s government, 12 came from Solidarity, 4 from ZSL and PZPR, 3 from SD and 1 was described as “independent”, which should be considered a kind of camouflage. An expert in international law, Prof. Krzysztof Skubiszewski, because that is who he is, in the 1980s was a member of the Social Council of the Primate and the Advisory Council of the President of the State Council. For this last reason, as Mazowiecki later explained, he predicted that “President Jaruzelski, who had a say in this matter, would not question this candidacy”.
“I want the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to be in our hands with the consent of General Jaruzelski, and you are the right candidate,” Skubiszewski heard from Mazowiecki on September 4, completely surprised by the proposal that had been made to him.
This is exactly the kind of person Mazowiecki was looking for. However, Skubiszewski believed from the beginning that Poland should reduce the scope of its dependence on the Kremlin and that new people should appear in its diplomatic service. As the international situation changed exceptionally rapidly between 1989 and 1993, his position became increasingly pro-Western. The effectiveness with which he carried out his mission, as well as his good relations, first with Prime Minister Mazowiecki, and later with President Wałęsa, made him the only minister to serve continuously in four consecutive Solidarity governments.
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Jacek Ambroziak took over as head of the Cabinet of the Council of Ministers, which was then responsible for the entire administration of the local government. The fact that both Skubiszewski and especially Ambroziak were trusted by the Episcopal Secretary, Archbishop Bronisław Dąbrowski, is of course no coincidence. The leadership of the Polish Church, which was deeply involved in the entire process of political change initiated by the Round Table talks, was determined to provide the new government with very clear support. Mazowiecki was fully aware of this, and his decision to go to a meeting with Pope John Paul II during his first trip abroad as head of government turned out to be an exceptionally good move. The Catholic Church, which then held enormous social authority, provided the new government, which was initiating painful economic changes, with the necessary cover.
Ambroziak, together with economist Waldemar Kuczyński, historian Aleksander Hall (who was appointed minister without portfolio responsible for “cooperation with political organizations and associations”) and lawyer Jerzy Ciemniewski (who became secretary of the Council of Ministers), formed the prime minister’s closest circle. “We debated in the prime minister’s recreation room,” Kuczyński recalls. “There was a small low table and a sofa where Mazowiecki used to sit, and sometimes lie down. Over a bottle of cognac, usually bad, Albanian, which was supposed to brighten our tired minds in the early hours, we discussed other candidates.
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Mazowiecki influenced personnel changes, but also decided to leave many people inherited from his predecessors in his immediate circle. A symbolic figure in this group was Ryszard Wojtkowski, who served as Director of the Prime Minister’s Office. He held this position during the government of Zbigniew Messner, outlived Mieczysław Rakowski and, to his own surprise, served in this position under both Mazowiecki and Jan Krzysztof Bielecki. As Director of the Office, he apparently played only a technical role, but at the same time participated in many conversations – including those at the highest level – and took notes on them. When asked why he was not fired, he admitted that initially he was supposed to stay only for a transitional period of several weeks, but in the end he managed to convince the Prime Minister with his organizational skills and… fluent knowledge of English, which, as he emphasizes, the Prime Minister was not very familiar with generally. According to his report, the breakthrough was a joint visit to the Vatican and a Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica. Peter, during which – unlike most BOR officers and diplomats from the Polish People’s Republic embassy in Rome – he did not show that he was Catholic. “Mazowiecki realized that I was not pretending to be someone I was not and he obviously liked that, but he certainly also tested me in a certain way,” Wojtkowski adds.
Mazowiecki, however, must have been aware of the impression made on many people in the former Solidarity opposition by the information that the head of his cabinet was the same man who had served in this role for both Rakowski and Messner. However, for hundreds of civil servants employed in the URM, it was a clear signal that personnel changes at lower levels would be very limited. A signal that confirms the statement also made openly at the exhibition: “The government does not intend to carry out a mass change of state employees.”60
The following opinion of Hall seems significant in this matter:
“I came to the government with the attitude that bad things could be expected from the state apparatus, and I was in favor of introducing as many new people as possible. Later, however, I realized that the attitudes of the old officials were somehow, so to speak, pluralizing. There were also those who somehow sympathized with us; others just wanted to show off and finally feel free to breathe. I didn’t show it, so I didn’t feel that they were functioning as a bloc, that they formed a faction, an impenetrable force.
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[…] One of the main problems turned out to be finding a suitable candidate for Minister of Finance. […] There was no shortage of economists in the Solidarity community, but the most famous ones at the time (such as professors Witold Trzeciakowski and Cezary Józefiak) refused despite negotiations with them, while others – such as Ryszard Bugaj – were not introduced to the proposal, because, as Kuczyński clearly explained later, it was “the question of the dispute and choice between liberal and social-democratic policies.
A liberal, and as time has shown, an orthodox, was Leszek Balcerowicz, then 42, an economist at the Warsaw School of Planning and Statistics. In the past, he was a member of the Polish United Workers’ Party (he left it after the introduction of martial law) and even worked for several years at the Institute for Fundamental Problems of Marxism-Leninism, but his views were already quite far from Marxism. Like other talented Polish economists of the younger generation, in the 1970s he took the opportunity to complete his training in the USA and since then he had no doubts about which socio-economic model was the most effective. Already at the end of the Gierek decade, he organized a team of scientists who prepared a project for a far-reaching transformation of the economic system, published in 1980 by the Polish Economic Society. At the time it was completely unrealistic, but nine years later, after short-term hesitations, Balcerowicz decided to accept Mazowiecki’s offer.
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[…] Adam Michnik was not entirely satisfied with the new prime minister, although Mazowiecki implemented his own political project. Therefore, in his first comment after Mazowiecki’s appointment as prime minister, he did not fail to remind readers of the main theses of the article Hurry Slowly and concluded: “I must admit that so far none of my opponents has publicly admitted their mistake in such a short time and in such a gentlemanly manner.” Then, after being informed that one of the new prime minister’s favorite heroes is the Russian commander of the Napoleonic Wars, Mikhail Kutuzov, who, like Mazowiecki, was characterized by the ability to “wait long and patiently,” he asked the following question: “But are these qualities enough for the prime minister of this government to function in this reality? [podkreślenie w oryginale – A.D.] I think that the Prime Minister of this government must have dynamism and a sense of risk. He must have the courage to make decisions quickly”68.
A few months later, when the call for war was on the mountain, Michnik completely sided with Mazowiecki, but at the end of August 1989 he very accurately assessed the personality of the new head of government.
Among the 24 members of the Masovian government, there were 8 deputies and 2 senators, and the average age of the ministers was 51.6 years. The youngest of them was Aleksander Hall (36 years old), and the oldest was Florian Siwicki (64 years old)77. Enough of dry statistics. Jerzy Morawski wrote about the geographical origin of the ministers in “Przegląd Tygodniowy” shortly after the government was announced: “Warsaw took 12 portfolios, Kraków 4, Poznań 3, one each – Rzeszów, Gdańsk, Łódź and the island of Wolin (farmer Artur Balazs). After “For the first time in a long time, there is no representative of Katowice in the government, and this has more than a symbolic meaning. to support the heavy and mining industry.”
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415 MPs took part in the vote to appoint the government on 12 September, of which 402 voted in favour and 13 abstained. There were no votes against. Never before has a Polish government been appointed by such an overwhelming majority.
Fragment of the book “From Mazowiecki to Suchocka. The First Rules of Free Poland” published by Znak Horyzont. Title, lead and abbreviations by the editorial staff of “Newsweek”
