In 2008 it was my privilege to visit a Polish friend
of mine at his home in Warsaw. We
had become first acquainted back in the 1980s when it was his privilege, as a
university professor of electrical engineering, to leave what was then a
Communist country for a one-year sabbatical accompanied by his wife and two sons at the University of Massachusetts
Amherst, where I was also teaching.
Some people would have defected and just stayed in the U. S., but
Andrezj (pronounced “Andrey”) loved his native Poland enough to return and work
for a brighter future, which as it turned out came to pass in 1989, just before
the fall of the old Soviet Union. His sons are both thriving young professionals in Poland now,
and he does not regret his decision to return.
I was reminded of my friendship with Andrezj and his
family when I read in a recent historical journal about a little-known aspect
of the Solidarity movement in Poland.
Officially a trade union, Solidarity formed around Lech Walesa, a
shipyard electrician who led the movement and became modern Poland’s first freely
elected President in 1990. During
the 1980s, the Communist government of Poland imposed martial law and rigidly
suppressed and controlled speech.
All media outlets, including radio and TV, were under government
supervision. As the Solidarity
movement grew, however, a group of radio and television engineers joined with
other technical types (mainly university professors) to do (what we would term
today) hacking of the official radio and TV networks. Pretty soon after that, TV-watching Poles began to see
images of things like the words of the national anthem superimposed on the
video feed of dull official programs.
Now and then, the audio of the TV channel would give way to music of the
national anthem, a joke, or some popular song that had nothing to do with the
official program. At other
times, Poles listening to their radios began to receive signals from “pirate”
radio stations broadcasting information that the government did not want them
to hear.
The content of the messages sent by what came to be
called “Radio Solidarity” was not as significant as the mere fact that
somebody, somewhere, was messing with the government’s system, and could get
away with it. These activities
were not without risk. While
routine protests such as marches were usually punished merely by fines, the
Polish government pursued the Radio Solidarity hackers more vigorously and put
many into prison. But as the
movement grew, more volunteers arose to replace those who were arrested among technicians
and scientists who were technically proficient enough to tap into the
broadcasting network, or build and hide radio transmitters in houses of
sympathetic citizens. At one
point, an underground flyer called for people to wear radio resistors pinned to
their lapels in memory of two brutal police actions against Polish workers in
1970 and 1981. Evidently, large
numbers of Poles did so, and once the authorities caught on to this form of
“resistance,” you could go to jail for it.
Opinions differ as to how effective Radio Solidarity
was in aiding the movement toward democracy. One industrial worker happened to be high on a crane one
evening in Gdansk as a Radio Solidarity broadcaster asked his listeners to turn
out their lights for a minute if they were listening. According to the witness, he saw half the city go dark. A precise assessment at this point is
impossible, but the emotional encouragement that such activities brought to
people who might otherwise have thought they were struggling alone against the
system could have been invaluable.
The story of Radio Solidarity brings to mind the more
recent social-media-powered actions of those in the Middle East who have
attempted to free themselves from oppressive regimes. Unlike the largely successful Solidarity movement in Poland,
which not only brought about regime change in that country but may have
contributed to the downfall of the Soviet Union itself, the record of recent opposition
to governments in Middle Eastern regions is more mixed so far. Perhaps it is fair to say that technical
means of communication in a political movement is necessary these days, but not
sufficient by itself to insure a smooth transition from oppression to
freedom. If citizens do not have a
clear, united vision of what a democracy should be like and what goals they
should strive for, all the communications facilities in the world are not going
to make much difference.
Revolutions are always a last resort, and while some can turn out
peacefully, the result is always unpredictable.
Ironically, the limited nature of network systems in
the 1980s may actually have helped Radio Solidarity reach more people than
hackers today can easily manage to do.
If the Polish national TV network back then resembled those of most
other totalitarian countries, there was basically one channel and one
program. That meant if you hacked
into the network feed, you had the entire country as an audience
automatically. Today, of course,
with the multitudes of various communications media—TV, radio, the Internet,
mobile apps, social media, texting, and so on and so forth—it is much harder to
reach an audience that is not already primed to hunt for a particular website
or participate in a particular meeting, and so it can be harder now to reach
large numbers of people. But this
problem can be overcome, especially in times when young media-savvy people are
eager to help out.
We can be grateful to the Radio Solidarity engineers
and professors who did their part in overthrowing the oppressive Polish regime
and catalyzing the downfall of the Soviet Union. And we can hope their example can be learned by those today
who are dealing with similar problems in their own countries. It seems, though, that freedom of
communication is not a magic bullet that keeps away the real bullets a hostile
government can use against its citizens.
Syria is a current bad example of this. Despite repeated internal and international calls for the
Syrian government to relinquish its stranglehold, its rulers persist in
shooting thousands of protesters.
I don’t know whether anyone in Syria reads this blog, but I would
consider it an honor to be in trouble with the government of Syria, and hope
that those fighting for true freedom in that country can use all the means at
their disposal, including electronic ones, to find a good way out.
Sources: The article “Dissident Visions through
Technological Use: Radio and
Television Solidarity in Poland, 1982-1989” by Carmen Krol appeared in the
Autumn 2011 issue of “Antenna,” a newsletter published by the Mercurians, a
special-interest group of the Society for the History of Technology.
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