A THOUSAND YEARS OF HISTORY 19Poland's Catholic heritage was brought back into prominence at a stroke.
People abroad suddenly wanted to know more about the country that had so
unexpectedly produced the head of the Universal Church.^25 People in Poland
wanted to know why the regime's disdainful assessment of the Church's role in
Polish life, both ancient and modern, was so obviously misjudged.
The emergence of Solidarity, which was accompanied by a relaxation of
political controls, revealed a great hunger for the full and free discussion of all
the historical subjects that had long remained taboo. Solidarity's intellectual
leadership contained many dissident historians, such as Adam Michnik,
Bronislaw Geremek, and Karol Modzelewski. And the demand for popular lec-
tures to mass audiences could not be satisfied. Yet time was too short in 1980-1
for much serious publication to be undertaken. Solidarity's achievements at that
juncture were twofold. First, it thoroughly discredited the official interpreta-
tions of Polish History that had held sway in the preceding decades. Secondly, it
inspired the flood of underground publications in the Drugi Obieg, illegal or
'Alternative Circulation', which persisted throughout the 1980s and which pro-
moted large numbers of previously unknown authors and subjects. The
Communist regime had lived on myths and fictions. The systematic demolition
of all the sacred historical cows was inexorably preparing the ground for the
regime's downfall.
Thanks to the rush of fresh air provided by Solidarity, Poles also came to
realise something specialists had long taken for granted - that the best work on
recent Polish History had been pursued or published abroad. The most
respected journal in the field was undoubtedly the Zeszyty Historyczne (1947),
faithfully put out for over forty years by the Kultura Literary Institute in Paris.
The most authoritative writers, whether professional historians like Marian
Kukiel (1885-1973) Jozef Garlinski (b. 1913), or J.M. Ciechanowski or others
with powerful and independent views on history, like Joseph Czapski, Gustaw
Herling Grudzinski, or Czeslaw Milosz, had all been obliged to write in exile.
The best works of historians resident inside Poland, like Michnik's History of
Honour (1985) or his Letters from Prison (1985), had all appeared outside
Poland. So, too, had the valuable writings of Adam Zamoyski and
W.H. Zawadzki.^26
Not that writing about Poland abroad was necessarily a guarantee of quality.
Freedom is not the same thing as skill or wisdom. As Poles often learned to their
horror, many western scholars, who were free to work without any sort of
restriction, were perfectly capable either of mindlessly repeating the lies of the
regime or of reducing Polish History to a turgid hotpotch of politico-socio-
economico processes.^27 Once the regimes of the Soviet Bloc had collapsed, a
whole academic industry of dubious sovietological studies, which had fed off
these regimes, collapsed with them.
In the 1990s,when Poland had again become a sovereign Republic, one might
have expected that Polish history-writing would burst into bloom, like
the desert after long delayed rain. Yet, surprisingly, the blooms were relatively