“At the time the circumstances of my arrest in Poland seemed trivial. I hardly thought about them afterward. But now, when I consider the fall of 1989, and the fall of communism, my little run in with the Polish authorities seems highly suggestive of how things were then and what has since come to be.”

With these words, I opened my book After the Fall: The Pursuit of Democracy in Central Europe. I used a description of my brief detention in Lublin at a student theater festival to reveal the struggle for a free public in Communist times. I used my memory of the event to open my exploration of the relationships between public and private, and how the relationships formed the bases for the pursuit of democracy of post communist Central Europe.

In today’s post, I return to my experience in 1974 (drawing from the report in my book) to further my dialogue with Dayan Dayan, as we explore together the relationship between “monstration” and power. I report here first my recollections of my “trivial day” and why what seemed so unimportant at the time was of practical significance in Poland back then. I close by highlighting what I take to be the theoretical significance of my little story.

The Arrest

Disorientation is what I remember about that April afternoon in Lublin, when the People’s Militia detained me for a couple of hours. I was attending a Festival of Youth Theaters. The bulk of the theater presentations in Lublin that week were not very interesting. Some of the best theater groups of the Polish youth movement were not represented in this relatively minor festival, and others of mediocre quality were in great number. Veteran theater critics, journalists, directors, and actors were generally dissatisfied, particularly with one performance I attended, billed as a “happening.” It took place in a gymnasium and involved little more than a rock soundtrack, a colorful slide show, and some student actors playing with an orange and yellow sheet. When it ended, a group of Polish journalists wanted to make things more interesting. They grabbed the sheet and spread it over themselves. They stood on one another’s shoulders, made pyramids, and horsed around. And then they decided to go outside with their merrymaking and turn the pseudo-happening into the real thing.

The journalists under the sheet led the other members of the audience, along with the actors of the failed performance, down two flights of stairs onto a busy thoroughfare in downtown Lublin. And as soon as they hit the street, their act of ordinary horseplay became a public event. Crowds formed on both sides of the street. Theater participants mingled with shoppers, clerks, and workers in marveling at an open spontaneous public event.

But a few others, particularly one man in an oversized trench coat, seemed to be offended. He and a woman companion started shouting at those under the sheet: “You will hurt yourselves!” “Not only yourselves, but others!” “You can’t breathe properly under there!” And the like. With a refined, cosmopolitan sense of what happenings were supposed to provoke, the theater people laughed and enjoyed the couple’s contribution to the show. Others just scoffed at them and shouted back at them to leave the kids alone. The couple left. With that the interest of the passersby dissipated, and the happening moved on. The sheet-being turned up a side street and draped itself over a small Italian Fiat 850-S with German tourist license plates: my car.

Some friends coaxed me into the car with the sheet performers. When it was clear that the next logical step was to start the engine, at my Polish colleagues’ instigation, I turned on the ignition. Ten seconds later, the man in the oversized trench coat swept the sheet off my car and, with a paddy wagon behind him, showed us his identification. He was with the People’s Militia, and he politely indicated that we were to follow him.

At the militia headquarters, we had to hand in our papers. The Poles presented their personal “legitimacja,” I my American passport. Then we were taken to a secured lockup area. I presented unanticipated problems. They hadn’t expected an American to be at this obscure performance, let alone at a place where the divide between theater performance and political order had been breached. They wanted to put an end to the event in as uncompromising a way as possible. But the officers on duty did not seem to have the authority to either release us, or further process our detention.

They told us that they had to confirm our story with the theater festival organizers. But first they confiscated film from the cameras of the journalist photographers. And then we waited.

While we were locked up in the militia station, my Polish friends, veterans of Poland’s subtle politics of cultural life, assured me that nothing serious would happen. They realistically assessed our situation. If I weren’t there, some greater unpleasantness might ensue. Maybe they would be detained without being formally charged for the permissible forty-eight hours. But our little escapade on the street was not really significant, and the city wouldn’t want to risk an international incident over it. Indeed, the local party hacks might have been afraid that their actions would meet disapproval in Warsaw. It was the era of détente. Poland was experiencing an apparent economic boom based on loans from Western governments and banks. Tensions were relaxed and political muscle was not to be flexed. Therefore, the Poles predicted that we would wait for a few hours and then would be warned and released. And they turned out to be right. After two hours, our papers were returned (though not the film) and we were released with a warning not to take part again in “an unauthorized theater event.”

In spite of the benign outcome, when I returned to the festival and later to my apartment in Warsaw, I was shaken up. I had not intended to become involved in Polish politics, except to study its relation to Polish culture. I knew the relationship was intimate, but hadn’t expected to be caught up in it. Yet, the whole adventure almost immediately became the subject of jokes, and I soon forgot it. But I was to be reminded of it again.

A photographer in our group, it seemed, had somehow managed to retain a roll of film documenting what had happened. And months after the event, a weekly newspaper in Krakow, Student, published an account – not a news story, but a comic-book rendition of Little Red Riding Hood. The sheet-being was depicted as Little Red Riding Hood, and the city street became the forest in which we met the Big Bad Wolf: the undercover agent who finally showed his teeth when we were in Grandmother’s House – my car. The newspaper didn’t reveal all of the circumstances of the arrest, but it clearly showed the political police doing its work.

In retrospect, I realize that this happening was more successful than any other I have observed or read about. It crossed the divide between the aesthetic and the social, and it developed a life of its own, encompassing a large and formidable territory. These reflections included. It began inside its own repressive context: it was confined to a gymnasium, because the authorities did not permit performances outside of conventional settings. The authorities wanted only channeled innovation, knowing that without the proper channels, cultural autonomy might not easily find acceptable limits. But those in the world of theater, as well as in the other arts and sciences, pushed limits as a matter of fundamental principle; and in Lublin that day, they improvised.

This activity of the young intellectuals was part of a long struggle with totalized political regimes over the issue of free public space. The happening revealed the nature of the battlefield. On the one side were the soft and hard totalitarians. On the other side were those who provoked the rulers, who struggled for room to act on their own, who were true to their cultural vocations, and those who saw the room so created, enjoyed it, and became collaborators with their resistance.

For the authorities, youth theater was a safety valve. For those involved in this theater, well understanding their situation, it was a base for freedom and for what I call the politics of small things.

The Ironies of Consequence

I discussed this event in Paris with Daniel Dayan and his student at Sciences Po. My key reasons for recalling that long ago, far away event here and in Paris: the Polish authorities worked to keep free speech and action as invisible as possible. The project of monstration, of showing such speech and action to a public, was enacted on that day in an improvised street theater happening, leading to my arrest. The authorities worked to restrict visibility, as my Polish friends and I worked to expand it. They wanted to block the show, but months later a Polish newspaper, retold the story as a fairy tale, elliptically but clearly monstrated the repressive apparatus in action. This media institution witnessed, recorded, translated (avoiding censorship) and illustrated the workings of both the power of the Party State and of an emerging opposition to this power before this opposition was organized. Later this power developed more fully in Poland and around the old Soviet bloc, with internal and international media reporting. It is important to note that the showing on that day in Lublin and later in the Krakow newspaper in important ways made the later developments possible. A seemingly trivial event, after the fact, was consequential. Dayan and I are struck by this, by the ironies of consequence, when the small turns out to be large, and the large, small. The monstration of official politics and the politics of small thing, needs careful examination.

To be continued…

A while ago, I read a frightening piece in The New York Times, on looted weapons in Libya. The hopeful side of the report is that the opposition to the brutal dictator (who has systematically attacked unarmed citizens) is militarily empowered, using the weapons of the dictatorial regime against the dictatorship. But the Times report emphasized the dangers. With arms now circulating outside the formal control of the state, there is a high likelihood that some of them will reach the black market and get into the hands of terrorists outside this zone of conflict. C.J. Chives, the Times reporter examines particularly this dangerous side of recent events there.

Indeed it’s scary. Nihilists of various sorts might obtain missiles that are capable of attacking commercial airliners. As someone who often flies abroad for professional and family purposes, I am particularly concerned. This security threat is very real, Chives reports, because in relatively recent past examples of state arsenals being looted by civilians, Uganda in 1979, Albania in 1997 and Iraq in 2003, the fear has been confirmed.

When I was reading this article, I thought about another circumstance when such fear in the end seems to have proven unfounded, and in which I was peripherally involved. The collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989 led many to worry that terrorists, who had been armed and supported by the Soviet bloc, would become rogue and free floating. Further, there was the fear that their preferred weapons, sophisticated plastic explosives, specifically semtex, might be used in new ways, not disciplined by the logic of the cold war. It was in this context that I became a suspected terrorist.

I was coming home from a two month trip around the old Soviet bloc in the late winter of 1990. This visit would later become the basis of my theoretical travelogue, After the Fall: The Pursuit of Democracy in Central Europe. I met colleagues in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, what would become the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Poland, and the Soviet Union, specifically Leningrad. I was on a mission to lend support to those who sought to develop new curricula in the social sciences, and meeting with democratic oppositionists of various sorts, some who were advancing the constitution of new democracies, others, who still had a long way to go. In Poland and Hungary, a new stability was already apparent, while in Leningrad there had been little change. In Sofia, a week before I arrived, the Communist Party headquarters across the street from my hotel had burned down. I spent part of my time with an opposition group in a demonstration for democratic change. In Bucharest, I saw the militia brutally beating people on Victory Square. I had no understanding of who was being brutalized and why they were being attacked. It was a tough trip.

My last stop was Leningrad, an odd stay where I went to explore the possibility of developing a cooperative relationship with a group purporting to be an independent institution of higher learning. Two representatives of the group had approached, through a State Department contact, the New School president, Jonathan Fanton. We had initial discussions in New York, which raised some doubts about the real standing of this endeavor. I went to Leningrad to check things out, quickly discovering that they were charlatans. But I had to hang around for two days, giving lectures that the two were using to enhance their local authority, meeting very interesting people at the Academy of Sciences under very strange circumstances. A number of them gave me letters and parcels to send to American colleagues, thus, avoiding the Soviet censors. As an old Soviet bloc veteran, this was completely normal, contrasting the continuation of Soviet ways with the rapid changes occurring in Central Europe.

My departure was on Aeroflot to Stockholm and from there on American Airlines to New York. U.S. carriers were then under a terrorist alert in the aftermath of the Lockerbie bombing, coupled with the fear of rogue terrorists. Because of this, there was an additional security review before entering the waiting room for American flights. When the security guards reviewed my passport, I was taken to another room and an interrogation began. I fit a profile. I look Jewish, but also vaguely Middle Eastern, Mediterranean. I was traveling over an eight week period around the region, saturated with suspected rogue terrorists. Over the past ten years I had been in and out of the region, particularly in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, actually as an observer and collaborator of the democratic oppositions, but the quick review of my passport, of course, didn’t reveal that. The questioning went on for about an hour. For forty-five minutes, I was a suspected terrorist. But my answers to their questions made sense and as the questioning proceeded the tone changed. They became more interested in who I met, whether I was inadvertently carrying a package that might be dangerous. Because I had the Russian letters and packages, the flight was delayed to do a thorough examination of my luggage.

That settled, the rest of my flight home was a pleasure. The security officials apologized for the inconvenience they caused me. My seat was upgraded from coach to business class. Even during the interrogation, I was at all points treated with courtesy. And I have often wondered since 9/11 why all profile searches couldn’t be conducted in this fashion. Search, verify, respect, and compensate for the inconvenience.