Janine Wedel - Shadow Elite - How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market

At twenty-three, I was no stranger to Poland, having first visited the country in 1977. Through circuitous connections I found lodging with Mama—a warm and generous retiree in her midfifties and a veritable force of nature—and her daughter Ela, an attractive, vivacious physician in her late twenties. Mama and Ela echoed the advice of others, to keep my eyes and ears open and my mouth shut.

Although food seemed plentiful, little of it could actually be found on store shelves. In Poland’s centrally planned systems, political authorities made decisions about production and distribution, and demand always outpaced supply. János Kornai, a Hungarian-born Harvard-based economist, calls this an “economy of shortage.” 1How did people manage, I wondered. Some, it was clear, even did relatively well.

Mama is probably the most resourceful person I have ever encountered. Soon after I arrived, I began to watch her shopping in the market across the street. The market was a complex of stalls lodged in a cavernous one-hundred-year-old warehouselike building that had somehow remained standing after the Nazis destroyed the city. Heading each day (except Sundays) for the market at dawn, she often passed to the head of the many different lines for life’s essentials. Mama got this special treatment because of her frequent under-the-table deals with the “gals” behind the counters, whom she always sized up and flattered. Succumbing to her charms, the clerks filled her in on when, say, a delivery of meat or (coarse brown) toilet paper or mineral water might arrive and brought out such scarce items for her when they had.

Mama was what Poles call a Siberian survivor. The Soviets had deported her and her once well-to-do family from the Polish city of Vilnius to a Siberian camp when she was a young teenager. Upon her repatriation in August 1946, Mama began to work in various official institutions of the Polish People’s Republic, married another young volunteer tied to allied Communist institutions, and settled in Szczecin on Poland’s new western border. After the untimely death of her husband, a Party apparatchik, she and Ela moved to Warsaw. While I was studying at Warsaw University, Ela, the fashionable young physician, was pursuing a specialization in dermatology. 2

Through Mama and Ela, I was drawn into a lively, high-stakes drama, where everything seemed possible, though nothing certain. The state and its rules threw up constant obstacles. Everyday life was about wheedling bureaucrats to creatively elude them—and sometimes even enjoying the interplay and scheming necessary to affect the outcome.

One morning around five, there was a knock on the apartment door. “Stay in your room,” Mama whispered, as I emerged from my small sleeping quarters. Four policemen, the only one in uniform a major, had come to search the apartment. Ela was the target of their suspicions. As I would learn later that day—after they had completed a “routine” and, by the standards of the time, “mild” search of the entire apartment—that same morning, Ela’s estranged husband had been arrested for underground activities.

Although this was certainly an unsettling experience, I was not surprised that Mama did not leave the outcome to fate. By this time, I understood that her facility with navigating the challenges of martial law had been honed from the time she was transported to Siberia. Now she played her Communist Party comrades with her characteristic pizzazz. When the major turned away to scrutinize the books on her shelf, Mama quickly concealed underground literature. Speaking a shared Party-tinged vernacular, she skillfully quizzed him and soon established their mutual association with certain people and venues, including the Polish-Soviet Friendship Society.

Meanwhile, the flirtatious Ela worked the three cops searching her room. When it came time to inspect my room (as far as we knew, I wasn’t a suspect, even though I was an American), Ela came to my door, with her arm around one of the plainclothesmen, exposing part of her shapely leg by gathering her bathrobe, and announced, “Janeczko, you have the advantage. The best-looking one of all will search your room.”

During the course of their search, the policemen gave the two women advice on how to protect themselves. The phone would be tapped, they said, and they should stay clear of suspect individuals. When the four left at mid-morning, Ela and Mama, waving heartily, appeared to be saying good-bye to old friends.

As soon as the door was shut, the two women collapsed, indignant and exhausted. For the first time, Mama sent me across the street on the daily detail for milk, eggs, bread, and meat—but only after I had promised not to tell a soul, not anyone, about what had just transpired.

I wondered how these women fared as well as they did in affairs of this sort. Both could have been detained on the spot and imprisoned indefinitely. (The incident was laced with irony. The major was interrogating a fellow communist operative. The operative was subtly defending her son-in-law, although he was out of favor with both Mama and her daughter.) Other, less quick-witted people might have reacted with outrage that could have produced undesirable outcomes. Some Poles might even have seen the two women’s behavior as “compromised.” But Ela and Mama were ingenious and highly adept survivors. Their skillful handling of the policemen typified the only recourse people have when they do not have any recourse.

Mama and Ela’s reaction to the police state’s intrusion into their home stemmed from a long and treacherous history. Poles, after all, had endured repeated travails—concentration camps, deportations to Siberia, shifting borders, martial law, material scarcities—skirting the system for mere survival. War, revolutions, and hardships were a part not only of the fabric of the nation, which had been smashed by so many occupiers, but of immediate experience.

With good reason, people did not trust or depend on the official world that crept into every corner of society, be it the economy, politics, or culture. Over the years, a sharp divide had developed between “state” and “society.” As Václav Havel, the dissident turned president of the Czech Republic, put it, Eastern Europeans learned to “live within a lie.” 3Poles complained under their breath but maintained appearances in public. People could express their opinions only among their most trusted intimates, within their own information universe. Continually presenting different faces, they learned how to say one thing and do another—and to stay sane while living with fundamental ambiguity. They not only tolerated the contradictions of their society, but also stage-managed them creatively.

The qualities and strategies that Mama and Ela employed during the apartment search offer a glimpse into how people cope with rigid structures and repressive regimes. They also gave those who lived in communist states a head start in the reconfiguring world order as communism was drawing down in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Watching how people deal with two extreme environments—first the rigidities of an authoritarian system, and, later, the laxity of one come undone—would help me to recognize other, less obvious contexts for flexian activity and to explore the conditions under which it arises. So, ironically, insight into the communist world of Mama and Ela and so many others is what led me to explore the freewheeling world of today’s flexians and flex nets. One of the major themes that has emerged is how so much information necessary for public decisions today rests in private hands. Private guardians of official information can spin stories and erect façades for an unwitting government and public. Like Mama, they stage-manage effectively, but for much more than survival. Moreover, flexians have taken on multiple roles, playing their various parts in a theater arranged for their sponsors and the public. This state of affairs has implications for transforming societies far and wide—even in the United States.