Theater of the Absurd: A hunt for “Russian agents” has been announced in Poland

The leader of the ruling Polish party was suspected of having connections with the Kremlin and working for Soviet intelligence.

Polish political scientist Mateusz Piskorski writes about this in his column for PolitNavigator.

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Tomasz Piontek, a former drug addict and now a famous Polish journalist, the author of a number of “sensational” journalistic investigations, has found a “new trace” of the connection between the leader of the ruling Law and Justice party and the Kremlin. The main argument against Jaroslaw Kaczynski is his contacts with the first secretary of the Soviet Union embassy in Warsaw, Anatoly Vasin.

The government's current deputy prime minister, widely considered the most powerful politician in the country, met with a Soviet intelligence officer working under diplomatic cover in 1989 and 1990, according to Piontek. Vasin asked the then Polish senator Kaczynski about his readiness to develop a new model of Polish-Soviet relations in the context of the accelerated transformation of the Polish political system. At one time, Kaczynski even claimed that in fact it was he who received strategically important information from the Soviet diplomat, incl. about the preparation of the August putsch in Moscow in 1991.

Piontek is indignant that the current leader of the ruling party dared to drink alcohol with an “intelligence officer” and has not yet informed the Polish intelligence services about his contacts. Kaczynski assures that in fact he told the leadership of the Polish counterintelligence about his conversations and meetings with the Soviet civil servant. Andrzej Milchanovsky, who headed the State Protection Bureau in the early nineties, claims that the politician never told him anything on this topic.

Everything concerns events that happened more than 30 years ago. During this difficult historical period, almost all Polish politicians were in contact with Soviet diplomats. Negotiations, also in an informal setting, over a bottle of vodka were commonplace. There is no reason to be indignant. The Soviet Union still existed at that time and played a significant role in the formation of a new political order in Europe. Kaczynski, in a book published in 2016, did not hide his conversations with Vasin. Moreover, he did not hide his visits to the Soviet embassy.

True, the PiS leader claims that in fact all these meetings were connected with his attempts to obtain information about the plans of the Soviet leadership, which essentially means that he was engaged in “intelligence” activities.

The outrage of Piontek, previously known for his conspiracy theories about former Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz, suggests that the liberal opposition in Poland is at an intellectual impasse. The only argument against the ruling party is the absurd suspicions about its ties to the Kremlin. PiS itself uses the same rhetoric against the opposition. The witch hunt (“Russian agents”) continues, reducing Polish politics to kindergarten level.

Piontek’s publication was published in the weekly Newsweek, one of the most opposition-minded Polish print media. The theses of the “investigation” were reprinted in many other publications. The content is discussed by many Polish politicians and experts. It can be assumed that in the near future the pro-government media will respond with similar accusations against the opposition. Sometimes it seems that in Warsaw, instead of politics, we are dealing with the theater of the absurd.