Vol. 11 No. 5 (May 2001) pp. 219-222.

PRIVATIZING THE POLICE STATE: THE CASE OF POLAND by Maria Los and Andrzej Zybertowicz. New York: Martin Press, 2000. 270 pp. Cloth $ 69.95 ISBN 0-312-23150-4.

Reviewed by Andras Sajo, Legal Studies Department, Central European University, Budapest.

This is a very important book for those who are interested in communism and in the structures of social domination in post-communism. It is important as an attempt to combine contemporary history, political science and institutional/political sociology. It is an important challenge to the prevailing understanding of communist rule, transition and current social and political structures in Poland. It fits to a great extent to the political position of the Polish right--and it will be criticized for its support by the left and liberals as being politically biased. It will probably trigger an outcry for depriving the Polish resistance movement of its importance. It will be suspect in the eyes of many sociologists, for taking conspiracy theories seriously in social explanation. It will be criticized for the heterogeneity of its approaches, as it combines Adam Podgorecki's assumption regarding the dirty togetherness of 'victims' and oppressors in communism, with Foucault and with Gary T. Marx. I would personally criticize the book for its title, as the book is not about the privatization of the police state. Rather, it is about the secret police going capitalist. It would be too much, or premature, to find the authors at fault for not describing how and to what extent the new secret services in collaboration with the private network of the former servicemen structure Polish state and society today.

The tension in the methodology stemming from the combination of sociological analysis with contemporary history is partly related to the subject, i.e. the operation of surveillance providing forces in communist Poland, and the transition of the service, or servicemen, into post- communism. Perhaps the personal differences among the authors are also contributing to this tension. Professor Los--who was forced to leave Poland in the eighties--teaches at the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa and is well known for relying on grand sociological theory in her analysis of social phenomena. Associate Professor Zybertowicz of Copernicus University is a sociologist interested in transition and published extensively on the Polish secret services.

The authors' main argument is that centralized secret services have ruled Poland to a great extent through infiltration and surveillance since 1981. The secret services played a deliberate and central role in the transition, after the services realized that the communist system could not survive. The Polish Round Table of 1989 and the resulting partially free elections were to a great extent the success of the secret service. The outcome of the elections was not foreseeable for the Services, but they had built enough guarantees into the transition process-

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including control over the Ministry of Interior--to transfer the skills, knowledge and social networks of many of the members into private business, from banking to private security services. Many servicemen remained operative and, perhaps, were able to run agents, or at least keep them in dependence while serving private or political/organizational interests. In light of the authors' contentions, it is likely that the private business operations of the former members originate in the organized efforts of the previous services. Also, at least informal communities continue to exist, contributing to a hard-to- specify extent to the impunity of former servicemen, including the Minister of Interior and President (ex Secretary General) President Jaruzelski. At least at the level of path dependency contemporary Polish society is conditioned by its police-state past of ruling through secret surveillance, and, although this is not made explicit by the authors, by the actual contemporary influence of former agents as a network of private entrepreneurs in economy and politics. "The 1980s mobilization of police- state resources, aiming first at suppressing Solidarity and later at tying it to the process of top-down reform and class conversion of the nomenklatura has contributed to the enduring strength and influence of former secret-service networks. They form an invisible but powerful web that pervades the new state security services, private security companies, the criminal underground, the private and state economy and agencies of the state apparatus. The lack of openness about past secret collaborators currently active in important areas of policymaking, the legislature, administration the criminal justice system and the media has left these institutions vulnerable to hidden pressures and the effects of covert actions, both past and present, sponsored by state secret services and private agencies or networks."

It is nearly impossible to find empirical evidence regarding conspiracies of secret services. Also, it is dangerous. The authors rely on statistics and interviews, as well as journalistic accounts, including reports on legal procedures. It seems that archival materials were not available, except, perhaps, for what privilege made accessible for the researchers. Certainly, there was a systematic destruction of secret archival materials, although many people believe that materials were retained or copied and used, as suggests the case of Socialist Prime Minister Oleksy in 1996. The authors rely on a kind of a contrario argument: if events are odd, or contradict logic, than it is a good assumption to assume that the unexplainable event is due to the activities of the Service (e.g. a disinformation campaign.) This approach might result in some embarrassing questions to the authors too. Namely, if the services are so tainted, how is it possible that the two right wing governments did not take any action against the services for eight years? Of course, there is at least one logical answer to that question. The reason for inaction, lack of decommunization, lustration, no access to personal files, and no fundamental reform in the Procuracy is that the secret services continued to rule the country even under these anticommunist regimes.

Obviously, there is no way to corroborate the findings of the authors directly. One alternative way the evaluate their analysis (or accusations, as many people may find) is to compare the explanatory power of their argument with that of other theories. The most important competitor is the view that holds that it was the communist elite that managed to

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transfer their power into economic power and wealth, partly because of their social capital. Certainly, this approach is vehemently denied by most of those communists who participated in the transition to their own personal benefit. The difference between these theories is that the present authors single out the secret services and find the role of other communist elites secondary to the partly organized efforts of the Services. A more recent study by Szelenyi denies that former communist elites are among the big winners of the transition in the Hungarian context. On the other hand, if one looks at the key political position holders in Russia, it seems that the positions of the institutional successor of KGB did improve, and at the personal level KGB officers are ruling Russia.

To some extent Los, the primary author of the last chapter of the book entitled, "The Globalization of the Post-Communist Transformation," offers a critique of the book's core theory by offering a brilliant addition to it. This last chapter puts the whole Polish transition into the context of global processes. The earlier chapters presented a picture of the Polish working classes, the mass basis of the anticommunist resistance as one that was deeply penetrated by the secret services and controlled through surveillance. This infiltration made total confrontation with the communists impossible around 1985 and onwards, and this is what created the possibility for the intelligence leadership to lead the country to a transformation according to its own script. The last chapter adds an important dimension to this sketch. The Polish working class was weakened not only because of the police-state control but also because in the meantime its "objective importance" diminished as the bases of global economy were shifting from unskilled labor towards knowledge-based jobs. Further, the legitimacy and the agenda of the elected anticommunist governments was built not on the basis of mass scale opposition to the communist regime, but with reference to the defense of national independence. They could not easily shift from that pattern and this turned out to be a disadvantage at a historic moment when "supra-state blocs and agencies and transnational companies increasingly play a preponderant role, diluting the meaning of sovereignty and leaving the former resistance activists with a diminished case" (p. 203). "The postmodern state of mind. offered the former Communist elite a unique chance to escape their past."

It is in this context that the skills of the servicemen became valuable. Because of their skills, the servicemen became part of the postmodern global economy, establishing contacts outside and against traditional national boundaries. They were successful not that much because they had a network, although the network might have helped them to neutralize the past, their personal, often criminal past against the anti- Communists who tried to use past-based justice against their new/old enemies. Further, it was not necessarily the manipulation of the remaining services that helped the old perpetrators not only to survive, but also to survive with success. Instead, their success is the product of the postmodern mindset where fantasy replaces reality. "Security services, secret files and mafia networks became media stories consumed in the same way as Dallas. Large segments of society, tired of the grand designs of communism, Solidarity, Church and democracy, found this new offer refreshingly free of . historic visions.." In the transition economies business depends on government to a very

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great extent, therefore the business competition depends on political competition. In these circumstances the refurbished elite--to my mind a much broader set than the emancipated service--successfully lowered the value of moral capital in the business/political competition. It is likely that the original source of success of the servicemen, namely, that they could serve as intermediaries between the global economy and Poland, is not that important, but many of those who had a head start advantage continue to be successful. Some of the servicemen acted as intermediaries of a special very important and very present form of global economy: the international crime organizations dealing with drugs and arms.

This book is a rare attempt to explain the social control over Polish society under communism, and as such it offers a general lesson in secret surveillance as a social control technique. Although this contribution would already make the book valuable in the fields of criminal justice, history of communism and transitology, the authors achieve more than that. They help to understand the legal problem that is called transition justice, i.e. the lack of legal responsibility for the crimes of communism. This might become the originator of a major intellectual and political debate on the continued control of secret services and control methods over society, beyond the boundaries of Poland or of Eastern Europe. There is more than enough intellectual provocation in the book. If, however, the clarifying debate will not take place, this will give additional credit to the book. In this case the post-modern mindset or the all-powerful interests of the secret services will prevail, just as predicted.