Recently Irena Grudzińska Gross interviewed Adam Michnik. Their conversation about current events in Poland, the war in Ukraine, Rusophobia, church and state, and much more, was published on June 9th, 2023, in Project Syndicate.
We wanted to share with you their interview, The View from Poland, available here.
Here's an excerpt:
"Irena Grudzińska Gross: Much is happening in Poland these days. For starters, the government is launching a commission to investigate “Russian influence” ahead of this fall’s general election, in what many see as a direct effort to disqualify opposition leader Donald Tusk. In response, all the democratic opposition parties, as well as hundreds of thousands of Poles, came out to protest the “Tusk Law” on June 4. Can we expect these groups to unite before the election?
Adam Michnik: Yes, everyone who took part felt that it was the biggest demonstration they had joined since the beginning of 1989 – that is, since the end of communism in Poland. The ruling, Law and Justice (PiS) party wants to create a body modeled after the House Un-American Activities Committee and the 1950-54 McCarthy hearings in the United States – only its version is even more primitive and barbaric. Indeed, it is reminiscent of the fascists’ or Bolsheviks’ methods in the 1930s."
— from Project Syndicate
Adam Michnik, a leader of Solidarity in 1989 and a participant in the round table talks that ended communist rule in Poland, is Editor-in-Chief of Gazeta Wyborcza.
Irena Grudzińska Gross is a professor at the Institute of Slavic Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences and a 2018 Fellow at the Guggenheim Foundation. Her books include Miłosz and the Long Shadow of War (Pogranicze, 2020), and Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets (Yale University Press, 2009).