In Reconciling Its Past, Poland Is Divided Anew

The Kaczynskis -- Lech is president, while Jaroslaw serves as prime minister -- have called for a "moral renewal" in Poland. "The problem of confronting the communist past in Poland was always addressed in a weak and inefficient way," said Ludwik Dorn, a deputy prime minister and a close ally of the Kaczynski brothers. "If problems are left unresolved, it's quite normal for them to resurface."

In an interview, Dorn said the new government had already had a cleansing effect: About 1,200 local police officers who had worked for the communists have resigned in the past 18 months.

The Kaczynski government is also targeting the country's military intelligence agencies, he said, prompted in part by Polish voters who came of age after 1989 and are demanding to know why the purges didn't happen earlier.

"They are the judges," Dorn said. "They were 4-year-olds during martial law, and they're asking their fathers and grandfathers: 'Who are you? Who were you?' "

The backbone of the de-communization campaign is the new law that requires civil servants, journalists and academics to declare whether they ever collaborated.

Critics said the law could be easily abused. Jacek Zakowski, a television commentator and columnist for Polityka magazine, said the statute was poorly worded, defining a collaborator as anyone who was in "a position of trust" with the communist authorities.

"I was in the underground in the 1980s, but even I don't know if I could be labeled a 'person of trust' or not," he said. "This is a way to blackmail people, because anybody who says, 'No, I did not collaborate,' could be in trouble."

Jacek Kucharczyk, deputy director of the Institute of Public Affairs in Warsaw, said the vetting law is likely to be overturned or modified by the courts. Regardless of its legality, he said, the measure reflects a broader social divide over the 1989 revolution.

"You have a coalition of people who disliked the new division of authority and power that evolved in Poland," he said. "There are people who genuinely think it was a moral scandal and that it should be rectified in some way. But there are also those who see this as a convenient way to remove the older generation and to take their place."

Millions of pages of security archives have been placed in the custody of the Institute of National Remembrance, an agency with authority to prosecute crimes committed against Poles during the years of Nazi and communist rule.

Under the new anti-communist vetting law, the institute will be required to publish a comprehensive list of collaborators this year. Some researchers at the institute questioned how reliable it would be.

"A lot of people just consider it as black or white -- either you were a collaborator or you were not," said Antoni Dudek, a historian at the institute. "But a lot of times, when you look at the files, it's much more complicated."