The liberation of one.

The Liberation of One, by Romuald Spasowki (Harcourt Brace, 687 pp., $24.95)

In 1772, Catherine the Great signed a secret agreement with Prussia and Austria to partition Poland "in order to re-establish order inside this country and to give it a political existence more in conformity with the interests of its neighbors." Those preambular words of the treaty signed in St. Petersburg more than two centuries ago have the ring of modernity about them, except that now the code word would be "socialism."

During the first partition, France and England stood by, ignoring the destruction of Poland. Catherine's "fellow-travelers"--the philosophes Helvetius, Diderot, d'Alembert, and Voltaire--cheered her actions. In fact, Voltaire, yes, the great Voltaire, wrote Catherine in praise of the 1772 partition that "I am not a murderer, but I think I could become one to serve you." Somehow Russia, whether Czarist or Soviet, brings out the worst in otherwise respectable Western intellectuals. No other imperialist dictatorship has ever received such fulsome praise from them. And now we have the story of an "independent" Poland, once more the victim of an imperial Russia, but this time a Russia far cleverer than in its pre-Bolshevik days.

It started at Yalta, when all boundary questions were settled by a triumphant, esurient Stalin. After Stalin's death in 1953, his successors, by manifesting a will to use military power if necessary, and then, later, by exploiting a detente that never was, managed to take the U.S. and the Western European democracies for the Western European democracies for the ominous ride to the Finland Station at Helsinki. There, the West legitimized once and forever Stalin's Pax Sovietica. In return, the West received the USSR's usual broken promises. As Romuald Spasowski writes: "Detente, I was learning, was to be binding only on the West."

What this tragedy meant to Poland is the appaling story told as a confessional autobiography by Spasowski, aged 66, a Communist diplomat for almost all his adult life; it took him forty years before he finally decided to defect on December 19, 1981, six days after martial law was declared in Poland. It is an appaling story on two counts.

First, how could an obviously intelligent man, not a thug and a timeserver like so many Polish Communists, have waited so long to come to his decision, while his devoted and devoutly religious wife, with none of the political sophistication of her husband, knew from the beginning that a free and democratic Poland was impossible with the Red Army on Poland's borders? Why did Mrs. Spasowski know the truth, which her husband would not accept? Because of his prewar Communist father, who later committed suicide over Soviet treatment of Poland? Intellectual arrogance? Atheism? (In the spring of 1985, Spasowski was received into the Catholic Church). Was he following the imperatives summed up by Bertolt Brecht, who in The Measures Taken declaimed: "Sink into the mud, embrace the butcher, but change the world, it needs it"?

Second, Spasowski paints in the most telling detail what it means when a country becomes a Soviet colony and what it means when a non-Russian comes under Soviet rule. He takes us behind the facade. That alone makes his autobiography an important historical document. As far as Poland's Communist Party leaders were concerned, the USSR "treated them the way it treats all Poles--as potential enemies." Examples abound:

--When Spasowski, as Poland's ambassador to Washington in 1955, negotiated a successful lend-lease debt agreement with the United States, the Soviet ambassador in Washington was sharply critical of Spasowski for not having informed him of the negotiations. Spasowski replied he had acted on instructions from Warsaw. "Warsaw, Warsaw," the Soviet ambassador epostulated. "But we didn't know about it. That's simply no allowed."

--Poland became a useful Soviet diplomatic tool because "we were the largest, most prestigious, of the satellites." The Cominform took shape in Poland in 1947; the World Peace Movement was begun in Wroclaw in 1948; the Warsaw Pact was created in Poland's capital in 1955.

--The meaning of Poland's trade with the Soviet Union--"to understand the accounting alone was a challenge," he writes--was best summed up in a Polish saying, "The Russians get our coal and in exchange we give them our sugar."

--On a visit to Warsaw in 1980, Spasowski saw sotres with empty shelves, endless lines for meat. He asked where were the enormous grain imports, the hug sums of money loaned Poland by the West? He was told they had all quietly vanished east. In Lubin, striking workers broke open freight cars headed for the USSR and found thousands of cans marked "paint." They opened the paint cans; inside they found Polish hams.

--The Helsinki Final Act was published in Poland as an edition of a mere five hundred copies with the title, The Great Charter of Peace. When Spasowski sought a copy, it took several weeks before one could be located. He then discovered that the edition was kept in a file marked SECRET. No copies were to be found in bookstores. Why? "Our comrades in Moscow," a Polish Party official told him, "sent the orders [to direct distribution] directly to our Central Committee."

--In mid September 1974, there was a wave of arson in Warsaw. One night the city's central department store was razed. Other big fires destroyed the Rosa Luxemburg factory and new steel bridge over the Vistula. Investigation showed that napalm and phosphorus had been used to melt the steel. There were seven mysterious fires in all. Everyone knew it was the Kremlin showing displeasure with the Pole's occasional refusal to grant the USSR everything its proconsuls had demanded.

Spasowski writes that a war between a nation of nearly forty million people and "a handful of reprobate Communists whose power is based solely in the police" would, in normal circumstances, be won by the people hands down. But with Moscow behind the Polish Communists, little can be done. The country is now a fascist state as well as a Soviet colony. The war in Poland, he says, "has no equal in history."

"an entire nation is held hostage," Spasowski writes, "and life in Europe goes on as if nothing had happened. Poles are alone." And life goes on, Spasowski is too polite to suggest, in the White House, in Congress, and in the big lending banks that finance Jaruzelski's dictatorship.

What message does he have for those still free of Communist imperialist domination? Spasowski writes: "Soviet tyranny is long-lived and thriving, not because it is strong, but because the free world has no solidarity of its own to combat it."

It is sad to contemplate that with the departure of President Reagan on January 20, 1989, there will be even less solidarity in the free world to combat the organized thuggery that is called Communism.