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risk publishing anything more ambitious). What the government's opponents
still point to as the remnant of the state's control over information and culture
are mostly mass media, and particularly television. Polish television, while
commendably open to differing and controversial views, is formally still a
monopolistic, state-owned institution, and serious debates on its deregulation
have only recently started. Moreover, if there is any government official in
the field of culture more mercilessly criticized than Minister Cywinska, it is
certainly the General Director ofTelevision, Andrzej Drawicz.
I happen to know Drawicz quite well personally: in the late seventies
we used to meet often, along with a few other dissident writers, in the War–
saw apartments ofJacek Bochenski or the poet Wiktor Woroszylski to dis–
cuss the contents of the next issues of the uncensored literary journal
lapis,
which we then coedited. A brilliant literary critic and scholar (his field of ex–
pertise is twentieth-century Russian literature) as well as an energetic man of
action, Drawicz seemed at first to be a startling but promising choice for the
head of the "new" television. The trouble was that within the basically un–
changed administrative framework of that institution, Drawicz has not had
much of a chance to introduce anything genuinely new. He also grossly mis–
calculated in announcing publicly, upon taking up his duties, that he would not
engage in any witch hunts but instead would try to solve the personnel diffi–
culties "in the Christian spirit." The idea behind his phrase was to move the
most compromised sycophants of the Communist regime to less visible posi–
tions (for instance, he took off the air the most shameless liar among the
television reporters, Marek Tumanowicz, and offered him an insignificant
technical job) and eventually remove them in a gradual manner rather than
to fire all of them on the spot. In fact, the rationale for such tactics lay in
practical considerations rather than in Christian etllics: a radical purge would
have stopped television's operation for at least several months, before new
crews would have a chance to learn the basics of their jobs. But, as it turned
out, Drawicz underestimated the degree of the public's resentment toward
the old network. Everyone in Poland had vivid memories of the news an–
chors appearing on the air in military uniforms in December 1981, and of the
impudence with which outrageous lies had flowed from television screens
ever since. It was precisely a witch hunt that the average television viewer
wished for and expected. Soon after Drawicz's nomination, enraged letters
started pouring in from all over the country, accusing him of dragging his feet
and protecting "the Reds," if not of actually being a downright "crypto-Com–
munist." (His, and Polish television's, approval rate, though, has climbed con–
siderably over the past few months.)
Drawicz's miscalculation and the public reaction to it are characteristic of
a conllict of much greater magnitude, perhaps the cenu"al conllict in Poland's
political life these days. I am referring to the conllict between the supporters
of Mazowiecki's program of reform and the followers of Lech Walesa's slo-
