Interviews with Czeslaw Bielecki

So ’68, this first direct connection with the system was the beginning of my political education [Mr. Bielecki refers to his involvement in a student protest movement and first arrest]. After those years I tried with my schoolmates, with my colleagues from the Boy Scouts, I started to organize kind of conspiracy circle, thinking about Polish independence, thinking about changing the system. But it was very, very hard. We were a very small group.

We called ourselves without false modesty ‘Fighting Poland’, but we were just a couple of friends. And the situation changed completely when the so-called democratic opposition, which is called in the West ‘dissidents,’ but we were starting an opposition, as we know now – when we started to act on different levels in different places. In the whole of Warsaw, my native city, where my grandfathers lived, in this city, the whole of Warsaw there were a couple of hundred people who were activists, visionaries, or writers or publicists, journalists.

Ironically, we were meeting once a week in a saloon called Valandovski Saloon. But why ironically? Because the location of the saloon was the corner of Pulawska and Rakowiecka Street. And Rakowiecka Street is called the longest street in Poland because on one end we have Interior Ministry, and on other end, we have Mokotow Prison, which was established under the [Russian] tsar, and his main jail in Warsaw, known from Stalinist epoch as the most awful, the most bloody place for political prisoners. And political police was hunting for us on the terrace of this building, but they never, ever visited us upstairs.

So when we analyze it years later, we know that we were just a small group, but from this small group, we started a movement, and the movement for independence started.

Born in Warsaw in 1948, Czeslaw Bielecki is an architect who graduated from the Warsaw University of Technology in 1973 and received his Ph.D. from the Krakow University of Technology in 1997.

Under Communist rule in Poland, Bielecki was a freedom activist who joined the 1968 pro-democracy demonstrations. Despite harassment and imprisonment, Bielecki remained committed to nonviolent struggle throughout the 1970s. He joined the Solidarity independent trade union in 1980. Bielecki was a key figure in Solidarity’s clandestine publishing efforts, including the Solidarity Weekly newspaper. Bielecki also applied his experience and professional artistic background to the development and management of and independent underground publishing house, challenging official censorship and offering Poles alternative news to that offered by the regime. He was twice arrested for his anti-government activities and was held in prison for two years.

From 1997 to 2001, Bielecki was a member of parliament, during which time he served as the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. He also served as an advisor to President Lech Walesa between 1990 and 1995.

Bielecki has authored and coauthored a variety of publications describing strategies and experiences from Poland’s freedom movement including The Little Conspirator and Freedom: A Do-It-Yourself Manual. His writings offer advice on how dissidents can organize more effectively and maintain their resilience against tyranny.

www.bielecki.pl