Interviews with Czeslaw Bielecki

I think after 22 years of freedom in Poland, when we analyze what happened around us in Central Europe, what’s going on in China, in post-Soviet Russia, I can say a few comments which I hope can be useful. First of all, people have to be convinced that freedom is not something which is given. Freedom is something we can grasp from our prosecutors, from rulers of that totalitarian country. And we define the kind of freedom – a corridor of freedom when we are pushing, when we are uniting ourselves. And that’s not something which is given.

When I had meetings discussing my freedom in the –Freedom: A Do-It-Yourself Manual [a book written by Mr. Bielecki] in Cuba during my second trip, and I met some people from the Cuban opposition, they started to tell me, “Look, but you had Perestroika [a reform policy, meaning “restructuring,” initiated by Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985] and the round table [1989 negotiations initiated by Poland’s communist government with Solidarity and other opposition groups to defuse growing social unrest].” My answer was, “you’re kidding.” You think that a good God gave us the round table or very enlightened Russians selected Mr. [Mikhail] Gorbachev to start the perestroika and glasnost [a reform policy, meaning “openness,” initiated by Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985]? Not at all.

You don’t understand what was going on in my country. It was a permanent, long-term resistance and struggle in self-organization. So that’s point one. So we define the future opportunities through recent opportunities. It’s not from zero to eternity. There’s some intermediate stages, what kind of freedom we can manage, how we enlarge the field of action using our courage, our good organization, our intelligence. Point two. These two terms in the American policy and sociology. Lessons learned: when we are analyzing crises, wars and we are concluding after what happened, lessons learned; and this case study as an approach. So we are not of this Marxist, abstract platform, but we are – we start from the bottom in – and we start to analyze how we can develop this grassroots movement. And without the spirit of independence, nothing can happen. Freedom can’t be given, people have to train freedom by themselves. We can make an educational system.

We can send them people from different institutions from abroad. We can sponsor their own institutions. But they – when they don’t know how is organized the future electorate, which is in the beginning just freedom circles, legal, half legal, illegal – it doesn’t work.

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