ABSTRACT
For the liberals, legitimate decommunization has been contaminated by those who they perceive as using it as a diversion to hide political redundancy in the face of the huge task of the political and structural transformation of Poland. In Poland the problem was compounded by the fact that totalitiarianism was negotiated out of existence. In early 1992 Poland’s new Interior Minister, Antoni Macierewicz, told a press conference that the new government intended to vet the past of public officials. The ‘Bolek’ and security files affair highlighted, as if it needed highlighting, the distrust and fragmentation of Poland’s post-communist political elites. The defensible notion of protecting society from people whose former allegiances might compromise their support for post-communist Poland has been destroyed in a web of false accusation where informer and innocent were deliberately bungled up together. Poland’s first non-communist Defence Minister was adamant that he would resign were the measures introduced.
