Long student march: How the government is crowned

In a letter from Białolenko prison in May 1982, a little more than six months after General Wojciech Jaruzelski and the army took power in Poland, Adam Mihnjik writes about the strategy of the long march to freedom.

"The 'long march' strategy requires consistency, realism and patience. (...) It is a vision of arduous, risky, often ineffective actions, it is a vision of repression and suffering, finally it is a vision of work on economic reform and administration, the legal system, education and finding a place for the vision of 'reform Poland' in the general consciousness."

And in Poland in 1982 it was even worse than it is today in Serbia. After 18 months of fighting against the communist regime, the "Solidarity" movement was apparently broken, and Jaruzelski and the army, under intense pressure from the USSR, did not give any hope that anything could change in Poland.

In such and such a situation, therefore, Adam Mihnjik does not foresee a "sudden change", which he considers unrealistic, but rather persistent non-violent resistance and a "long march".

Sudden change smacks too much of a revolution for Michnik, and revolutions do not bring anything good. Evolutionary change, despite impatience, allows those who will overthrow the dictatorship to prepare to take power. Mihnjik's experience is, to that extent, valuable for what is happening here and now.

It's a wonder how much the world here doesn't listen to what the students are saying - this is a marathon, they repeated countless times, this is a long march, as Mihnjik said, and Nenadležni and his team lash out at the revolution - and one gets the impression that the citizens, attacked by impatience, are more tired than the students who work as hard as bees and sting expertly like hornets.

We are now disappointed that nothing happened after the blockade of RTS. Nothing happened? Where did that come from? What should have happened?

Hence, it is necessary to carefully and patiently read the signs that show how power is crowned. Everyday and very obvious, and certainly much more obvious than in Michnjik's time. "If someone, just a few years earlier, had predicted that the communists would hand over power without a single bullet, without a single drop of blood, without a single broken window, it would have been considered a naive fantasy of an idealist," Mihnjik said at a session of the Polish Parliament in 1991, two years after the fall of the communist regime.

There were signs, they will say in another place, but those signs were difficult to interpret from the inside.

Read the signs

We, however, have much more flexible signs and we have many more of them. Let's say police intervention in Novi Sad at the Novi Sad DIF. A police unit with metal shields that, at the invitation of the dean, appears in front of the faculty after five months of the largest mass movements in the history of this country - without a single incident, except for incidents directed by the authorities.

Was it another provocation? Was it a distraction from the government's consent to announce the new composition of REM? No, neither.

It was an attempt for the police to raid the Faculty separated from the campus, at the invitation of the dean who does not care about the students. According to the witnesses of that event, citizens and students also prevented the police from entering from the other side. So, it was an unsuccessful attempt to conquer the faculty. The sign is huge.

No matter how much the government does not change the way it speaks - Bakarec, Brnabić, Vučić do not stop shouting, threatening and it seems that they are not ready for any compromise, but they still push the not so unfortunate Djura Macut - the newly minted owner of a house with a million euros earned from his doctor's salary - to negotiate.

Therefore, they do not carry out threats of violence (because, in all likelihood, they are not sure that the police would listen to them), but that is why they start conversations with "criminals", "traitors", "Nazis", "colored revolutionaries", "scum" (instead of arresting and prosecuting all of them, which is what any functioning state would do).

Is it a distraction and bait? Not really. Đuro was brought in to negotiate and he is doing that. The university, on the other hand, agreed to the talks because it is necessary.

While, therefore, on the one hand, it does not reduce tensions, the government has agreed to talks, which has not been the case so far. And it doesn't matter that Đuro is an insignificant figure, he speaks on behalf of those who no longer have power, but have power.

Healing of torn tissue

"The condition of communist dictatorship," Mihnjik wrote in 1982 from prison, "has always been the severing of social ties; the only form of organization of society was the government apparatus and its institutions that served to break human solidarity and punish society."

So, the same thing that Vučić's populist dictatorship did: tried to destroy society in order to rule unhindered. (In happier orders, government and society are partners. In Serbia, the populist dictatorship declared the citizens of its country to be its enemies.)

Now, however, students and citizens, in the "long march", are healing the torn social fabric, learning solidarity, politics, joint action...

Maybe Michnyk could not read the signs from the prison, which, due to the thick walls, he could not even see, but he knew very well that the "Solidarity" movement had changed Polish society to such an extent that even Jaruzelski, with the selfless support of Moscow and despite guns and tanks, could not cope with it.

Serbia today is not the same as it was before November 1, 2024, and the regime cannot return it to the old setting. Therefore, we are not talking about two established camps, so the question now is who will give in, just as it is not a question of whether the regime will fall, but when it will fall (before or after the elections) and how (with an attempt to cause bloodshed, as on March 15 of this year, or peacefully, as General Jaruzelski did).

This is, let's listen to what the students say, a "long march" in which there is no room for fatigue and disappointment.