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PARTISAN REVIEW
LK:
Solzhenitsyn, much as I admire him as a writer, as a great wit–
ness of our century, seems unable to realize that there is no free–
dom without some social cost. To have freedom is always costly in
social and moral terms. We have no choice between Western so–
ciety as it is today and a society where there would be freedom
and no pornography, no possibility of spreading harmful , dan–
gerous or absurd ideas; these are necessary costs of freedom . On
the other hand, he is right in pointing out the lack of moral pre–
paredness of the West. But as I said, it seems to me there are no
reasons to fall in despair about it, because this civilization proved
to be resilient on many occasions when it seemed that it was al–
ready doomed .
If
we had lived in the sixteenth century, we could
have believed that the Ottoman Empire would very soon dom–
inate Europe . This didn't happen .
EK:
A ghost haunts the Kremlin nights and this conversation: Po–
land. There are voices who speak of the possibility of a "kadariza–
tion" of Poland under Jaruzelski , the taming-so to say-of Soli–
darity. What are the scenarios that you foresee in the near future?
Is there still a chance of a transformation from below?
LK:
I don't believe at all in this "kadarization" idea.
It
will not work
in Poland for several reasons. After all, the quite relative success
of the Hungarian economic experiment followed several years
of very severe and cruel repression. Many years have elapsed
between 1956 and the beginning of this economic experiment.
J aruzelski will not have those years . Secondly, Hungary after the
1956 revolution has never been in the state of economic catas–
trophe as is Poland today. The Soviet Union, in the face of that
situation, could and in fact did help Hungary economically after
1956 . It is unable to do this now for Poland, both because it is a
much larger country and because the Soviet Union itself is in ter–
rible economic trouble.
It
will rather exploit poor Poland, as it is
now, than help it. And thirdly, the relative success of the Hun–
garian reforms in the last years is based, psychologically, on de–
spair, on the fact that the rulers succeeded in convincing the peo–
ple that they should not think of any political changes, that the
status of Hungary as a Soviet colony cannot be changed, that it
will be so forever. So people should abandon all political thinking
and concentrate instead on daily life and possible economic im–
provement. This state of despair is unlikely to be implemented in
Poland. The situation now is that of a stalemate. The government
is unable either to crush the underground resistance or to deliver
