Neither Lenin nor Lennon

Andrea F. Bohlman, Musical Solidarities: Political Action and Music in Late Twentieth-Century Poland (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

The long 1980s, the period from the second half of the 1970s to the middle of the 1990s, was a time of drastic anti-Marxist and anti-communist shifts all across the world. It was epitomized by a slogan chanted by revolutionary youth in the 1970s: “Lennon, not Lenin!”. While many leftist (gauchiste) groups during the 1960s diverged from the main communist parties in France or Italy, demonstrating their repudiation of Stalinist communism and especially its undemocratic, brutal side, radical Maoist and Trotskyist groups embraced Leninism as a point at which the revolutionary Bolshevik party was powerful but still not as “bureaucratic” as it was to become later under Stalin’s rule. The leftist upsurge in the 1960s, with its peak in the May 1968 revolt in France, was at least partially motivated by a wish to return to the “authentic” Marxist-Leninist ideals of Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci and Luxemburg (and often to go further in developing revolutionary theory), while condemning Stalinist repressions, petrified discourse, and the cult of personality that existed in the Soviet Union.¹ Such a standpoint turned out to be problematic and even self-contradictory in many ways, but the point is that the anti-Stalinist bent of radical left-wing youth in the 1960s differed significantly from the anti-communist position widespread across revolutionary youth movements in the following two decades.

Rosi Braidotti has contended that the eighties, fuelled by an anti-Marxist backlash, conservative ideology, and neo-liberal economics, “paved the way for the violent world we inhabit today.”² “With the death of General Tito, also in 1980, the crisis of Western European Marxism became official, while a greater portion of the world’s youth was far more upset about the assassination of John Lennon, in New York, which took place the same year,” the philosopher wrote.³ Moreover, Braidotti claims that the “world forum for progressive and left-wing critiques of Soviet Communism” was located in Paris, where Polish and Russian Nobel Peace Prize winners Lech Walesa and Alexander Solzhenitsyn got public recognition and acclaim.⁴ That observation may serve as a convenient point of departure for reflecting on musical solidarities in the early 1980s in Poland, and “Solidarity’s” musical defiance of the socialist state, both being the subject of Andrea F. Bohlman’s Musical Solidarities: Political Action and Music in Late Twentieth-Century Poland.⁵

Imaginary Lennon, absent Lenin, displaced Walls

In Poland, neither Lenin nor Lennon was on the lips of the masses at the beginning of the eighties and Bohlman’s monograph indicates their absence very convincingly. Despite the fact that Lennon had thousands of fans and the utmost admiration of musical critics in Poland, his songs and statements hardly became an instrument for political action. Perhaps the impact of The Beatles’ and Lennon’s music in Poland was most of all cultural and, only incidentally, overtly political. Even when Antoni Pawlak, poet, writer, journalist and political activist, and a member of “Solidarity” associated with the “second circuit” (“drugi obieg”, essentially an unofficial publishing sector in Poland) of the press, wrote a verse about the Beatles, his tone was ambiguous. In Pawlak’s Najmniejsza elegia
(The Smallest Elegy), the subject recalls his adolescent years when, with two friends, he created another band called The Beatles. The second part brings the reader back to the present:

dziś Paul McCartney jest tokarzem

George Harrison ginekologiem

nasz ostatni Ringo Starr

oficerem Służby Bezpieczeństwa

a ja stoję przed tobą wychylam

kolejną setkę – najmniejszą elegię

własnej śmierci – w jakimś sensie

wciąż nazywam się John Lennon

i umieram w drodze do szpitala

z siedmioma kulami w piersi⁶

The poem is dated December 1980, the month Lennon was murdered. His declaration of continuous self-identification with Lennon, dying on his way to hospital, is far from obvious. What is beyond question, though, is the fact that the youthful dream of playing in a rock’n’roll super group had been dispelled poignantly, as every boy from the band had to get an ordinary job with the bitter exception of the their Ringo Starr, who joined the secret police. It is as if Pawlak was suggesting that The Beatles’ ideas and attitudes had been so at odds with the realities of his Lebenswelt that the last common feature was the experience of slowly dying.

Another example of the depoliticized reception of Lennon in Poland was a stage performance of the group Universe during the National Festival of Polish Song in Opole in 1983. On the stage in Opole, Universe (the name of the band was inspired by the song Across the Universe by Lennon and McCartney) performed the song Mr. Lennon, a lofty cry of sorrow after the death of The Beatles’ leader. The performance showed the existential pain of a young fan asking his dead idol: “Johnny, shall I stay here alone?”. Despite various musical and lyrical drawbacks, exposing the banalization of Lennon’s persona in the popular imagination, the song gained popularity as a tribute to the murdered musician.

The case of Lenin was different. Although authors like Vladimir Tismaneanu dubbed socialist states in Eastern Europe and the Balkans “Leninist autocracies,”⁷ representations of Lenin in the social imagination were rare. When the Lenin Shipyards in the city of Gdańsk became the site of social unrest in the early 1980s in Poland, hardly anyone publicly identified with the ideas of Lenin. The actors in the drama were, on one side, workers from the shipyard (and other plants) together with advisors and journalists from the intelligentsia, and on the other side there were representatives of the ruling Polish United Workers’ Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza, PZPR). Both sides used nationalist and conservative rhetoric, despite the fact that PZPR interwove it with normative socialist discourse.⁸

The nationalist elements in the Party’s rhetoric and actions are well-known. “Solidarity”, in contrast, is often described as grassroots, pluralistic and an inclusive space of dialog between many different groups: workers and intellectuals, clergymen and non-believers, ethnic Poles and national minorities, and so on. Bohlman notes that it “is easy to be enticed by such stories of grassroots power, particularly from a Western perspective, where the promise of movements like Solidarity fuelled ideas about ‘living in truth’ during the Cold War” (3). Consequently, she describes the “power of the nation to cohere” around a myth, one that produces “imagined solidarities” (4). Musical Solidarities complicates this normative, simplistic and purified picture as the author examines the dissonances and discrepancies that underpin smooth narratives. Her study differs from a conventional history of music, which tends to be either appreciative (see multiple “patriotic” narratives devoted to the role of rebellious music in the national fight against communism) or revisionist (portraying musical undertakings as a tool of cultural diplomacy or an element of socio-economical processes). It also differs from usually predictable discussions on the cultural and symbolic aspects of social movements and popular protests. Through an enquiry into the sound and textual archives of the opposition, contemporary fieldwork, and an exploration of transnational media networks, Bohlman analyzes the specific aural culture of the dissent. Against the common opinion that “Solidarity” did not have any distinct musical dimension (unlike e.g. the Czech opposition, with the Plastic People of the Universe at the head of the movement), Musical Solidarities, as the author underlines, “is a music history of a social movement” (6).

In the chapter titled Protest, Bohlman analyzes the participation of sound and music in the political events that took place in the shipyards in August 1980. Following Tony Judt⁹, the author notes that the theological narrative of “Solidarity’s” victorious fight against communism “locates the beginning of successful popular protest at the scene of Solidarity’s formation, follows popular dissent’s increasing presence across Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, and posits the culmination of this corrective revolution at the crumbling Berlin Wall of November 9, 1989” (109) and further “heralded Solidarity as a paradigm for political engagement from below” (110). Bohlman then challenges the discursive conflation of the negotiations in the Lenin Shipyards in August 1980 with the mobilizing impact of the song Walls (Mury) by Jacek Kaczmarski. The song was recorded in 1978 and circulated primarily among Poland’s intelligentsia, which exhibited a strong inclination towards the bardic tradition (something Bohlman erroneously identifies with sung poetry, a genre a bit broader than the vein mined by Vladimir Vysotsky, Bulat Okudzhava or, in the Polish context, Stanislaw Staszewski and Edward Stachura), so it probably remained unknown to the shipyards’ workers. Walls only came to function as a “Solidarity” anthem in 1984, when “the union mobilized the refrain as an identifying sound bite when it was one of the signals for Radio Solidarity”, and after 1989 it could finally “rally Polish nationalism” (110). Thus, an element of the intelligentsia’s culture was appropriated as a symbol of workers solidarity.

“As Poles to Poles”: the Party and “Solidarity”

What were then the sounds and music that shaped the community of strikes and negotiations? In fact, Bohlman claims that protests do not necessarily need protest songs, and that the interest shown in music that belongs to protests and influences them is often over the top and omits more nuanced, heterogeneous characteristics of aural culture. Songs that represent social protests might easily distort them rather than explain their tensions and dynamics. In 1981, a cabaret (and at the same time nationalist, even anti-Semitic)¹⁰ song entitled So That Poland Will Be Poland (Żeby Polska była Polską), written by Jan Pietrzak in 1976, become the title of an American Cold War propaganda show Let Poland Be Poland, dedicated to the Polish nation’s struggle for independence. The song and the show is contrasted by Bohlman with the oppositionist singer-songwriter
Jan Krzysztof Kelus, who sneered (also in 1981), “Poland with Poland about Poland / ... good job Mr. Pietrzak,” and the literary theorist Maria Janion’s frustration with “the little opposition nationalist songs of the 1980s” in 2016 (17). Bohlman concludes: “There is a persistent stubbornness to Solidarity’s aural cultures – songs persist, myths collude the quotidian, powerful individuals speak over others” (18).

Carefully reading and listening to the tapes and writings from the archives of “Solidarity” challenges the national myths and broadens the scope of voices behind the frontmen of the nation. As Bohlman notes: “The stories from Gdańsk’s archive reveal musical stakes that engage the cacophony of crowds, amateur artistic creativity, moments of ritual and repose, the orchestrations of communication media, and thunderous nationalist celebration at the scene of dissent” (112), quite different from the legend associated with Walls. Consequently, in order to “present culture as a site that resists the reduction of protest to binary opposition,” Bohlman focuses on two documents: an almanac titled The Polish August of 1980 (Polski Sierpień 1980), and a radio report Polish August (Polski Sierpień) by Janina Jankowska (112). Such materials show not only how the protest was represented, but also the protest itself as a mediated representation.

Among the many acoustic experiences from the Lenin Shipyards that Bohlman examines, one seems especially meaningful. During the August 1980 strikes, the protesters listened to works by romantic composers Frédéric Chopin and Stanisław Moniuszko, whose compositions formed the Polish nationalist canon in the 19^th century. In addition, they also listened to many amateur
singer-songwriters’ ballads and laments written specially for the events taking place, as well as patriotic and religious chants and hymns such as God Save Poland (Boże, coś Polskę), cabaret tunes, and even a simple, communal rendition of the Polish equivalent of Happy birthday, Sto lat, with an enthusiastic air, dedicated mostly to Lech Wałęsa. The Polish national anthem was of course one of the most important songs, performed in moments of heightened emotion or tension in order to subordinate various participants to the common national denominator. The act of intoning the national anthem, and organizing the protesters in the common singing of the hymn, built up the status of Wałęsa as the leading figure of the “Solidarity” movement. The anthem indicated and emphasized significant moments during the strike. Bohlman’s analysis stems from a critical reading of Timothy Garton Ash’s The Polish Revolution: Solidarity. The scene starts with a television broadcast of the Party’s plenary session:

Many of the strikers watch the end of the Plenum on television. When the Party men on the screen rise to sing The Internationale, the delegates stand up, as if at an inaudible command, to answer them with the national anthem. “Arise ye prisoners of want” pipes the box; “Poland is not yet lost,” thunders the hall.¹¹

In her critique, Bohlman contends that the picture created by Ash might seem like evidence of “the coherence of the opposition and by extension its organization” but points out that Ash’s narrative “reinvests in romantic notions of political rebellion from below” (120). In truth, the songs one could hear in the shipyards were not as spontaneously improvised as Ash wished – they were adapted folk or popular songs performed with an intention to criticize or mock the government’s actions and official discourse. However, Bohlman seems to overlook another aspect of the strikers’ singing of the national anthem in reaction to the performance of The Internationale at the Party plenum. Bohlman writes that the latter song “was firmly in the grips of the Party, since its performance was a ritual part of the Central Committee’s proceedings” (119). However, she does not appear to have noticed that the anthem was equally “in the grips of the Party.” This did not stop the protesters from actively taking it back, however, as though it originally belonged to them and not to the Party. The glue connecting the national anthem with resistance against socialist power was stronger than any repulsion they may have felt toward false propaganda. This national ideology was reproduced jointly by state institutions, the Church, intellectuals, and popular culture.

When the protesters were singing the national anthem in front of the televised performance of The Internationale, they had clearly built their communitas on national foundations, despite their various class divisions. This communitas was thus opposed to the old Marxist tradition that offered a language to reveal and categorize socio-economic interests, stakes, conflicts, and contradictions. The Party, which since seizing power after World War II had practically always sought a nationalist legitimization for its rule,¹² resorted to a similarly nationalist rhetoric. During the negotiations at the Lenin Shipyards, both Lech Wałęsa and Mieczysław Jagielski (the representative of the government) talked about national values. When they finally reached an agreement, the latter underscored that it was achieved because he had spoken “like a Pole with a Pole” (“jak Polak z Polakiem”).¹³ When in an infamous 20-minute TV address on December 13, 1981, prime minister General Wojciech Jaruzelski proclaimed martial law in Poland, he used a deliberately nationalist phraseology, dropping such terms as: “fatherland,” “Polish home,” “Polish nation,” “national economy,” “great national agreement,” “national interest,” “great Poland,” “love of the fatherland,” “our country,” “brothers and sisters,” “Polish blood,” “Polish land,” “fervent patriotism,” “Polish families” etc. At the end of his speech, he pronounced that “Poland has not yet perished as long as we remain alive” (“Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła, póki my żyjemy”), a quote from the first lines of Dąbrowski’s Mazurka. At the turn of the 1980s, nationalist sentiments had become the object of fierce competition between the government and the democratic opposition.

Who dominates in a socialist nation state?

The implicit presupposition that state power and repressions predefined the repertoire of social practices and attitudes seems particularly reductionist when the field of cultural production is concerned. Bohlman employs this presupposition, e.g. when analyzing the Polish United Workers’ Party’s governance over the music industry. She focuses on their bureaucracy, paperwork, and neglectful behavior brought about by “the Party and the officials who sought top-down control of Polish society” (52). Additionally, in the same part of the book she refers to Alexei Yurchak, but she does not apply his conception of late socialism as a discursive formation. Yurchak claims that the disappearance of the metadiscourse on ideology in the 1950s fostered a “performative shift” in the authoritative discourse, which resulted in the appearance of new creative opportunities within the discourse, in accordance with official forms and modes of operating inside socialist organizations. Due to this shift, triggered by Stalin himself in the final years of his rule, diverse, even contradictory utterances could grow and flourish in unexpected ways, making use of the hollow visual, ritual, and textual representations typical for authoritative discourse.¹⁴ Such a theoretical background could be fruitfully used in researching music (especially the popular sort, but also classic as well) in socialist Poland. Martial law heavily disrupted positions and relations of power in the music scene and soon “normalization” brought with it elements of free market and neo-liberal ways of thinking. However, before the imposition of martial law, and in the last years of socialism, one could find elements typical of the formation of late socialism.

Furthermore, when Bohlman contends that “the paperwork reflects a haphazard logic of inclusivity over scrutiny, as though music making is growing beyond the Party’s understanding or bureaucrats’ comprehension” (54), and notes the multitude of musical associations, bureaus and establishments that the Party was compelled to deal with, she seems right only to a certain degree. As Karolina Bittner shows in her monograph Partia z piosenką, piosenka z partią. PZPR wobec muzyki rozrywkowej (Party for the Song, a Song for the Party: the Attitude of the Polish United Worker's Party towards Popular Music) a specific model of popular music crystalized in Poland at the turn of the 1970s, and soon afterwards the Party rejected all attempts at creating a socialist mass culture.¹⁵ Before the Subcommittee of Music within the Culture Department was established in 1984 (only to be dissolved in 1987), music had been neglected, seen as a space where ideological content could spread only on a very abstract, symbolic level (unlike film, theatre, or literature). Its influence on society seemed unimportant from the point of view of the officials. Indeed, the Party had already lost much of its control over music in the 1960s; since then many concerts, contests, and festivals had been organized at the local level by different entities associated with local or regional structures of the PZPR, state enterprises, and musicians’ organizations, such as the Polish Jazz Association (Polskie Stowarzyszenie Jazzowe). Thus, when in the eighties the Party made an effort to centralize the music industry and regain control over music production, it was far too late. The duality of the instances of power (the Party and the Ministry of Art and Culture), as well as a proliferation of musical genres, styles, and audiences, did not make the endeavour any easier. Paradoxically, the music scene was more centralized in the 1970s, under the rule of Edward Gierek, who is commonly associated with openness and reformism.¹⁶ However, strict control was not crucial for the Party. As Bittner writes, “the priority for the Party was to maintain cultural continuity, provide access to culture, create good economic and political conditions for the artists.” ¹⁷ Cultural politics had to remain flexible and inclusive.

Bohlman emphasizes the nationalist ideology of the Party, e.g. the maintenance of Polish culture “defined as heritage groomed by the nation-state” (57), and the “national quotas and language requirements that kept official music making marked as Polish” (58). She also acknowledges that the authorities used popular music and entertainment (rozrywka)¹⁸ to generate financial profits, especially during the recession that hit when the seventies gave way to the eighties, and to shape the opinions of Poland’s youth (60). The contradictions between socialist values and nationalist rhetoric, or the ideological principles and the necessity to make money, were not limited to the Party, though. From the beginning of the 1980s, almost all participants in the music scene – musicians, composers, lyricists, organizers, managers, critics, and journalists – complained about their low earnings and demanded new regulations for the industry. Most of these demands took the shape of neoliberal reforms of the music industry, despite the fact that those complaining did not use that particular term: the music market should self-regulate, professional managers should be permitted to work outside state enterprises and institutions, and musicians should earn money depending only on their popularity measured by albums and tickets sold (actually, the rates of pay for performances were regulated and profits from album sales rarely found their way to the artists).¹⁹ The shift toward a free market and neoliberal economy as a remedy to the music industry’s problems was widespread, and also affected the way that musicians, composers, managers, and journalists participated in the “second circuit”, with its own economic rules outside state control.

Such cases show the limitations of Musical Solidarities, in spite of its very convincing methodology, painstaking analyses, and appropriate choice of subjects. This shortcoming stems from the tacit anti-communist paradigm²⁰ employed by the author, which works as an unspoken, obvious and transparent doxa endued with cultural validity. It is anchored in the “common sense” assumption that the socialist state was “totalitarian” and communists were external to Polish society, not included in the naturalized idea of a nation based on ethnicity. Despite her criticism of Polish nationalism, Bohlman tends to present “Solidarity” as if it constituted a political representation of the whole nation, not just one side of the conflict with tens of thousands of Party members and adherents on the other side. And then there were those who chose to be both Party and “Solidarity” members, and those who felt excluded from both ideological blocs. The latter was the case of the young anarchists who became anarchists precisely because they could not find enough space for their actions inside “Solidarity,” or were even actively pushed out of the union’s ranks. Such was the case of the Alternative Society Movement (Ruch Społeczeństwa Alternatywnego, RSA), an anarchist group in Poland founded by a couple of friends in 1983, after they realised that there was no place for their anti-elitist, anti-clerical, syndicalist and autonomous viewpoint in the conservative structures of “Solidarity.”²¹ The “Solidarity” movement played a similar role in shaping the attitudes of slightly younger anarchists in Warsaw, who created the Pupils’ Refusal Front (Uczniowski Front Odmowy) in 1982, and the A-Cyclists collective (A-Cykliści) in 1987. These adolescent activists were inspired by the “Solidarity” mass movement in 1981, but became disillusioned and radicalised because of the clericalism and moderate strategy of “Solidarity,” as well as the political ambitions of the union’s leaders.²²

The nationalism card could be played effectively simply because the dominant majority in society happened to be conservative and nationalist. One might track the source of this position to the 1960s, when the Party and the Church competed, organizing events to celebrate a thousand years of the Polish state (the Party), and a thousand years since the baptism of Poland (the Church). Their rivalry gained momentum when Karol Wojtyla was elected head of the Catholic Church in 1978 and visited Poland one year later on a pilgrimage. First and foremost, the new pope, now John Paul II, enhanced the popular conflation of “Pole-Catholic” (Polak-katolik) propagated earlier by cardinal Stefan Wyszyński. The idea behind the conflation was not merely anti-atheist but also anti-communist due to the Party’s stance on the secularity of the state and the strict division between church and state. As Marcin Kościelniak put it in his book on Pitch-In Culture (Kultura Zrzuty), this moment was the “the second baptism of Poland.”²³

The power of the “Solidarity” movement was built on this anti-communist, moral, and metaphysical foundation of a re-defined national identity. Hence, the plurality inside the movement in 1980–1981 was severely limited to a tolerance of those non-believers who accepted Christian values as universal ones and Catholicism as the necessary core of Polish identity. Kościelniak called this dominion of the Church over society in the early 1980s a “new counter-reformation,” using the words of art critic Anda Rottenberg, uttered in 1985²⁴. He also cited Adam Michnik’s 1987 opinion on the link between the state’s “autocratic modernization” and the “conservative revolution” reshaping society,²⁵ as well as quoting such phrases as “Revolution under the sign of Cross,” a “moral crusade,” “great national spiritual retreat,” and how the “Solidarity” movement was born “on its knees and with a rosary in one hand,” a phrase formulated by Polish intellectuals.²⁶ Of course, Bohlman notes that by “1980 religious symbols had been established as those of the Polish opposition” (159). However, she does not articulate explicitly that by the beginning of the long 1980s, it was the Church, not the Party, that dominated over the society. If this conclusion is right, was the voice of priest Jerzy Popiełuszko (who continued the line put forward by Wyszyński and Wojtyła, consistently connecting Polishness with Catholicism and anti-communism) – discussed by Bohlman in the fifth chapter of her monograph – “a technology of resistance” (according to Western newspapers cited by the author), or perhaps a voice of domination?

Exclusionary solidarities

In the Introduction, Bohlman notes that “the story of the triumph of the Polish opposition to state socialism is one of collective might against tremendous adversity” (2) and quotes Bożena Keff’s On Mother and Fatherland (Utwór o matce i ojczyźnie)²⁷ in order to describe her own goal, i.e. to “hear, heed, and echo such demands to re-examine, deconstruct, and complicate Polish history by letting its materials resound” (3). A few pages further on, Bohlman defines her objectives:

As much as Poles’ vision for civic reform was inspired by looking to the west— across the Iron Curtain— and to the south— to the rest of East Central Europe— the movement’s core quest was for sovereignty. Likewise, administrators and cultural organizers developed projects focused on Polishness, carrying out the celebration of Nazi Germany’s defeat and a rebuilt Poland as long as concatenations of national holidays would permit. This obsession with (re)defining and (re)confirming the self hides a troubling silence with respect to “contaminating” others, whether powerful Soviet military forces, ethnic minorities who laid claim to Polish lands, or the many individuals with Jewish heritage prominent in the opposition. Further work on the musical solidarities that animated alternative, anarchic, and queer subcultures— discourses frequently trampled out of the public spaces that are the focus of this book— remains to be done. A repeating mantra of Poland for Poland’s sake focused discourse on the Self in some of the opposition’s loudest moments (9).

It seems that a worthy theme for such a broadening of this study’s scope would be Jerzy Popiełuszko’s background, unexplored by Bohlman. Popiełuszko came from a peasant family from Podlasie with nationalist inclinations (his uncle, after whom Popiełuszko received the name Alfons, died fighting as a partisan in the Home Army). Polish nationalism and Catholicism were especially staunch in Eastern Poland because of its multicultural make-up, including Belarusian, Jewish, Tatar, Ukrainian, and Tutejszy (literally: “From here”) neighborhoods.

Bohlman writes about anti-Semitic accusations against some of “Solidarity’s” prominent activists and intellectuals. But only sporadically does she shed light on anti-Semitic prejudices among the movement’s members. One such case would be the religious-cum-national anthem God Save Poland, a song originally written for Tsar Alexander I in 1816. After relatively small but significant changes, it was was ready for use as a manifestation of Polish Catholicism and nationalism (in the version that enjoyed popularity during the Polish People’s Republic, a new element appeared in the song’s text: a plea addressed to God to hep attain a free fatherland, the explicit declaration being that the state was in the wrong hands). Despite the fact that it was not a liturgical song, the hymn functioned as a second, unofficial national anthem for the “Solidarity” movement and became a stable element of the “Fatherland Masses” (Msze za Ojczyznę), celebrated by Father Popiełuszko. The national community projected by the song was normative and exclusionary. Bohlman cites Benjamin Mandelkern, who describes the use of God Save Poland as a test of Polishness during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944: not singing it along with Poles gathered together in courtyards, not performing it while kneeling and crossing oneself, would run the risk of being unmasked as a Jew.²⁸ This, in turn, brought with it the risk of being murdered by Polish companions and neighbors. “The prominence of God Save Poland was also marked in new art music from Poland” in the 1970s and 1980s, Bohlman writes, highlighting the growing importance of religious music and neo-romanticism (266). Among the many composers who referenced the hymn were Krzysztof Penderecki, Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, Krzysztof Meyer, and Zygmunt Krauze – the crème de la crème of Polish classical music.

Another example of anti-Semitic attitudes among “Solidarity” supporters is the historic concert of Leonard Cohen’s in Warsaw in 1985. Many Polish fans saw Cohen as a bard with a guitar who would bravely endorse “Solidarity” and use his performance to take a strong political stance. They were shocked when he offered a very different view from the stage:

I come from a country where we do not have the same struggles as you have. I respect your struggles. And it may surprise you, but I respect both sides of this struggle. It seems to me that in Europe there needs to be a left foot and a right foot to move forward. I wish that both feet moved forward and the body moved towards its proper destiny. This is an intense country; the people are heroic, the spirit is independent. It is a difficult country to govern. It needs a strong government and a strong union. When I was a child I went to synagogue every Saturday morning. Once in this country, there were thousands of synagogues, and thousands of Jewish communities which were wiped out in a few months. In the synagogue which I attended there was a prayer for the government. We were happy and we are happy to pray for the welfare of the government. And I would like to say to you, to the leaders of the left, and the leaders of the right, I sing for everyone. My song has no flag, my song has no party. And I say the prayer that we said in our synagogue, I say it for the leader of your union and the leader of your party. May the Lord put a spirit of wisdom and understanding into the hearts of your leaders and into the hearts of all their counsellors.²⁹

The audience was utterly dismayed by the singer’s words. His fans remained silent and aloof. The tension did not subside until Cohen mentioned “Solidarity.” Although it was in good taste in some circles of the Polish intelligentsia to display philo-Semitism, the 1985 concert revealed that a strong streak of anti-Semitism prevailed, despite a widespread interest in Jewish cuisine and folklore.³⁰

Ethnic and religious minorities were not welcomed at “Solidarity”; neither were youth movements, such as punks. Bohlman writes about the Review of Authentic Song (Przegląd Piosenki Prawdziwej), organized in Gdańsk in 1981, noting that songs chosen to be performed at the event “became canonized as Solidarity’s songs,” even though they were created in the late 1970s and, up to that moment, the event had had little connection with the union’s strikes. Only a “few songs on its program originated at the scene of Solidarity’s inception” (136). Furthermore, as the author of Musical Solidarities is right in noting: “in order not to sensationalize censorship: the festival itself was not banned or forced underground; its subtitle [“Forbidden Songs”] merely alluded to its oppositional tone” (137). Nonetheless, the case of Brygada Kryzys shows that the festival, organized by Maciej Zembaty with the blessing of Lech Wałęsa, was censored on a different level, overlooked by Bohlman. Brygada Kryzys, a punk super group formed by musician Tomasz Lipiński (under the management of the Rock Estrada agency), was to give its first live show ever at the festival. Punk music was on the rise in 1981, so the band became a sensation even before it came out with any song or album. They had been invited to the event as favorites of Poland’s defiant youth, just a month after the band had been founded. The band members planned a theatrical show with spotlights, sirens, and a woman with a child and a rifle. This was all too much for the organizers from “Solidarity.” After a quarrel between them and the musicians, Brygada Kryzys was dropped from the line-up.³¹

Soon after, in autumn 1981, Brygada Kryzys went on their first tour as the support for a British rock band TV21. The Polish musicians were excited by the atmosphere of strikes and protests all over the country, so they decked their bus with a banner proclaiming “COSMIC SOLIDARITY” (“SOLIDARNOŚĆ KOSMICZNA”), written with the distinctive “Solidaryca” typeface. On the one hand, “Cosmic Solidarity” was clearly a demonstration of togetherness and community; on the other, it was an attempt to distance itself from “Solidarity’s” fights for social and political justice. The communitas of rock and punk musicians was by no means the same as the social movement’s: alongside some general moral affinity, there were visible social and aesthetic differences. After the tour, Brygada Kryzys went to Yugoslavia, where the group (as well as the new wave band Maanam) had been invited by Studentski Kulturni Centar in Belgrade to attend the Days of Young Polish Subculture. This time, the punk musicians smuggled some “Solidarity” badges over the border. But the Polish punk scene remained distrustful of “Solidarity’s” intentions, perceiving the union’s bosses to be no different from any other politicians.³²

“Solidarity” through the lens of popular and youth culture

Such stories are omitted by Bohlman, as if she did not find pop-music solidarities interesting. As Bittner shows, the impact of “Solidarity” on entertainment music was unprecedented.³³ Bohlman suggests that the implementation of martial law was literally meant to “silence” the opposition and that it stopped official ways of music production. She contrasts this alleged silence with “a rich musical network that involved prisoners’, amateurs’, and professional musicians’ communal music making” (70). However, such claims misrepresent the specificity of the period. A concert planned by the heavy metal group TSA for December 13, 1981 was not cancelled, and neither was the Soldier’s Song Festival in Kołobrzeg – one of four major popular music festivals in Poland – in summer 1982. The popularity of rock was used by the Party to “normalize” the situation in the country. A series of rock concerts, featuring such huge bands as Maanam, Lombard, TSA, Republika, and Oddział Zamknięty, was inaugurated at Warsaw’s Gwardia Hall on February 13, 1982. The date was by no means accidental. Some rock bands put on shows for soldiers in military units. From the perspective of music fans, the years 1982–1983 were marked by a growing popularity of heavy metal, new wave, synth pop, italo disco, and new romantic, as well as visits from international music groups such as Budgie, UK Subs, Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, Električni Orgazam, and Laibach.³⁴ The latter was invited in spite of the fact that their song, Jaruzelski, was critical toward the Polish head of state.

Laibach’s Jaruzelski is an interesting act of spontaneous solidarity with “Solidarity,” carried out by foreign musicians, similar to the case of Muslimgauze’s Homily to Popieluszko, examined by Bohlman (152). It is also an interesting case of the protest being mediatized. According to Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, Western attention to the brutality exhibited by the secret police agents who murdered Popiełuszko in 1984 ended up “manufacturing consent” for the protests. The priest would become a “worthy victim” for the Western media and politicians, and allow them to denounce communism, while the similar killings of priests in Latin America were not as visible for the public.³⁵ As Bohlman notes:

In other words, while the incarceration of his murderers provided some hope in Poland that the communist regime might be broken down by due process, in a transnational context the plain villainy of Popiełuszko’s assassination lent further emotional charge to the division of the world into two parts — good and evil — in the 1980s (146–147).

The parts in which Bohlman explores the mediatized presence of Popiełuszko’s voice, or the discursive production of Wałęsa’s and Penderecki’s charismatic personas (197–212),³⁶ are undoubtedly a crucial attempt to change the way people thought about “Solidarity” as not just a local movement, but also an event constructed internationally and disseminated through the media according to geopolitical and ideological stakes.

Finally, Bohlman also fails to address the issue of youth culture. She defines the “second circuit” as “the Polish self-publishing culture under state socialism” (33), adding that the circuit “was structured as an alternative economy” and “built on the discourse of the socialist public sphere while claiming moral authority by rejecting its structures” (34). However, she does not pick up on the presence of a third circuit (trzeci obieg) associated with youth culture, especially of punk, alternative, anarchist, and environmentalist milieus. As has been already explained, young punks and anarchists were unwelcome in the “Solidarity” movement. They perceived the second circuit to be an exact reflection of the official socialist public sphere. Thus, the second circuit could be understood as a second public sphere contesting with the first, official and representative, controlled by the Party. The public sphere of the second circuit was unofficial, but it was public, a feature which differentiated it from samizdat in the USSR. The participants in the third circuit, or “the third way” – both terms were emic and imprecisely defined – distanced themselves from both sides of the conflict, the official public sphere and the second public sphere of democratic opposition.
As a phenomenon of youth culture, the third circuit was fluid, fluctuating, and anti-structural, in contrast to the two former circuits, which were elements of the same structure.³⁷

One of the most distinctive elements of the third circuit was the Orange Alternative (Pomarańczowa Alternatywa) movement that originated in 1986 in Wrocław and soon also emerged in Łódź, Lublin, and Warsaw (in Poznań, Cracow, and the Gdansk-Gdynia-Sopot area similar groups functioned). Bohlman discusses the Orange Alternative in a relatively short passage, where she writes that the movement “poked fun at these triumphalist performances [such as May Day parades – X.S.] with explicitly carnivalesque parodies of the state-organized gatherings” and “openly mocked the government” (236). The picture was more complicated, though. The Orange Alternative mocked “Solidarity” even more forcefully than the government. Although it got some support (organizational and financial) from “Solidarity,” it used socialist and revolutionary images, slogans, songs, and rhetoric to a degree that many members and sympathizers of “Solidarity” found unacceptable. The tactics of the Orange Alternative were often based on an overidentification with authoritative discourse – the figures of Lenin, Bierut and Jaruzelski were celebrated as pop-culture heroes, not evil characters that should be erased from public spaces.³⁸ This peculiar tactic was developed by other groups, among them the Twe-Twa movement which sprang up in Gdańsk in the late 1980s. The name of the movement was taken from the nationalist song My Fatherland (Ojczyzno ma) which was, according to Bohlman, labelled Popiełuszko’s hymn (172–173). During masses, believers sang “How long does your suffering last!” (“Jakże długo cierpnienie Twe trwa!”). The last words (“Twe trwa”) sounded like absurd glossolalia and became an inspiration for the alternative group, which parodied opposition songs.

Diedrich Diederichsen recollects that his leftist punk milieu “didn’t exactly stand in solidarity with Solidarity, we thought of it – with punk columnist Julie Burchill in The Face – as an ‘anachronistic’ embodiment of an old workers’ subjectivity.”³⁹ Right or not, this statement illustrated the vital relationship between music and social movements. While Musical Solidarities explores many facets of that relationship, there are still points at which the approach could be broader and more nuanced to challenge the imaginary and ideological representations of the movement.