THE SOLIDARITY DECADE 507maximum but where democratization was moving at a snail's pace. After much
delay, Jaruzelski agreed to the shortening of his term; and the political vacuum
was filled by the announcement in September of the universal and direct election
of a new President to be held in eight weeks' time.
In the course of Mazowiecki's government, the state censorship lost the will
to function. One result was that several long-standing historical taboos were
lifted. In December 1989, the director of the State Museum at Auschwitz
(Oswiecim) confessed that the previous official figure of four million victims
had been a fabrication. A more realistic estimate of between 1.2 million and 1.5
million victims was issued, the majority of them Jews. Whilst giving prominence
to the Jewish tragedy, this news also confirmed the fact that several hundred
thousand non-Jews perished in that one camp alone. The stage was set for an
unseemly and long-running confrontation between Catholics and Jews over the
proper means of mourning Auschwitz. In March 1990, on the fiftieth anniver-
sary of the Katyn Massacres, President Jaruzelski formally received documen-
tary evidence from President Gorbachev proving that the mass murder of
c. 25,000 Polish officers and other prisoners had been perpetrated by the Soviet
NKVD in 1940 and not by the German SS in 1941. This caused little surprise to
the Polish public, except for the fact that a Russian leader had finally confessed
to a historic crime. But it opened up further worrying questions. How many of
the estimated twenty-seven million people lost in the USSR during the Second
World War were Polish citizens — Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews? And how many
of these lost millions were victims not of the Nazi occupation but of the Stalinist
terror? The old Communist fiction that all war crimes and all crimes against
humanity must be attributed to the Fascists had been blown apart.
The presidential election was conducted in two stages on 25 November and
9 December. Its conduct came close to farce. In the first stage, Walesa had to run
against three rivals from the former Opposition, Mazowiecki Moczulski and
Bartoszcze, against a member of the former Communist coalition,
Cimoszewicz, and against a mysterious entrant called Tyminski. The latter was
said to be a Polish entrepreneur from Canada, though he was totally unknown
to Polish Canadians. He was almost certainly a wild card thrown in by the secret
police. On the basis of no credentials whatsoever, he declared himself to be the
proponent of a 'third way' and to everyone's utter amazement collected more
votes than all the candidates except Waif sa. Mazowiecki in particular, the hero
of 1989, became a laughing stock. In the second round, Walesa defeated
Tyminski by a decent but not crushing margin. The turn-out was a mere fifty-
three per cent. It was less than ecstatic. Popular disillusionment was already in
train. Walgsa celebrated his victory by promptly dismissing the Government,
and by setting up a new Cabinet headed by a young colleague from Gdansk, Jan
Krzysztof Bielecki.
One final detail remained to be settled. The Polish Government-in-Exile had
kept the flame of legitimacy burning for fifty-one long years. From their resid-
ence in London, a series of exiled presidents had carried the torch first handed