Oppositionist

Bronisław Geremek had been a member of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) since 1950. He left the party on 22 August 1968, the day after the Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia. At that time, he found himself under surveillance by the Security Service (SB), which set up a registration questionnaire for him as carrying out “anti-socialist activities”. In 1970, the SB assessed that Geremek “exerts a negative influence on the attitude of many employees of the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN), and has numerous connections with representatives of revisionist tendencies in other scientific institutions of the PAN”.

At the end of 1975, Bronisław Geremek signed the “Letter of Seven” protesting against the amendments to the Constitution of the People’s Republic of Poland (PRL) introducing provisions on the leading role of the communist party (PZPR) and friendship with the Soviet Union. In November 1976, the SB opened a case against B. Geremek with the code name “Lis” (Fox).

On 22 August 1980, together with Tadeusz Mazowiecki, he reached the striking Gdańsk Shipyard with an appeal by 64 intellectuals containing support for the strikers and calling on both sides of the conflict to reach an agreement. B. Geremek had submitted this appeal earlier – on 20 August – to the Submission Office of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR).

From the moment he arrived at the Gdansk shipyard, B. Geremek advised Lech Wałęsa and “Solidarity” for ten years filled with dramatic events leading finally to a free Poland. After the strike ended with Porozumienia Sierpniowe (the August Agreements), he chaired the Programme Commission of the 1st National Congress of Delegates of the Solidarity Trade Union and co-authored Solidarity’s political programme entitled “Self-governing Republic”. In February 1981, B. Geremek was in Brussels, where he met with representatives of international trade union centres.

In the last weeks preceding the imposition of martial law in 1981, B. Geremek and T. Mazowiecki held talks in Brussels on 13 November 1981 on the possibility of mobilising food aid for Poland after the collapse of the supply of foodstuffs in the country.

After martial law was imposed, he was arrested on 12 December 1981 and was held in the Detention Centre in Warsaw-Białołęka, and then in the centres in Jaworze and Darłówek until 23 December 1982. After his release, he was subject to constant surveillance. He was arrested again on 17 May 1983 on charges of organising illegal meetings and was held in the Rakowiecka prison in Warsaw until 29 July 1983.

Throughout the 1980s, B. Geremek was the main architect of the geopolitical strategy of the Solidarity, he largely contributed to the internationalisation of the Polish struggle for freedom. On 14 January 1984, the Security Service searched B. Geremek’s apartment, finding the texts of Lech Wałęsa’s Polish and French speeches with handwritten corrections by B. Geremek prepared for the Nobel Prize ceremony. On 19 April 1985, a week after his meeting with the British Foreign Secretary Geoffrey How, he was dismissed from the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences. At the initiative of the French historian Jacques Le Goff, a group of Parisian academics then signed a petition against his removal from the PAN and the ‘repeated casting of doubt on his scientific reputation’.

In 1985, Bronislaw Geremek and Tadeusz Mazowiecki prepared a report entitled ‘Poland – 5 years after August’, in which they called for a return to the August Agreements and dialogue to reform the country. In the summer of 1986, Bronislaw Geremek was once again detained and subjected to daily interrogations lasting many hours for 20 days. In April 1987, the spokesman for the communist government, Jerzy Urban, accused him at a press conference of collaboration with US intelligence.

In 1989, B. Geremek was Solidarity’s chief strategist and executor of the negotiations on changes to the political system during the Round Table talks.

Sources:

Encyklopedia Solidarności: Bronisław Geremek https://encysol.pl/es/encyklopedia/biogramy/15919,Geremek-Bronislaw.html

Andrzej Friszke „Bronisława Geremka droga do wolnej Polski”, https://wiez.pl/2017/03/06/bronislawa-geremka-droga-do-wolnej-polski/

Halina Manikowska „Bronisław Geremek” https://ihpan.edu.pl/zmarli/bronislaw-geremek-1932-2008/

Magdalena Pasikowska-Schnass „Bronisław Geremek. W poszukiwaniu zjednoczonej Europy” https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/EPRS_BRI(2021)698820

Patryk Pleskot „Siła alternatywnej dyplomacji. Polityka zagraniczna „Solidarności” w latach osiemdziesiątych – rola Bronisława Geremka”, [w:] Bronisław Geremek. Ojciec polskiego liberalizmu, Warszawa 2010

Tomasz Wiślicz „Bronisław Geremek. Historyk niemarginalny”, [w:] Bronisław Geremek. Ojciec polskiego liberalizmu, Warszawa 2010