Politics & Power Quote by Andrzej Wajda

The line lands like a quiet autopsy of 1989-era optimism: the belief that once the Soviet thumb lifted, societies in its shadow would spring instantly into creative, civic, and economic self-authorship. Wajda isn’t celebrating liberation so much as diagnosing a fantasy Western commentators and local elites alike projected onto “the people” - as if history were a door and freedom a room everyone naturally knew how to furnish.

As a Polish director who chronicled national myth, trauma, and moral compromise, Wajda is attuned to the difference between political rupture and social rehearsal. The subtext is that initiative is not an instinct released by collapse; it’s a muscle trained under conditions that often didn’t exist in command systems: trust, independent institutions, habits of association, tolerance for risk, and the boring competencies of self-governance. His phrasing (“we expected”) implicates his own camp - artists, dissidents, intellectuals - in a kind of romantic overreach. The pronoun matters: it’s a confession of misread audience, misread citizen, misread nation.

Contextually, Poland’s transition delivered freedom and a shock-therapy scramble, along with disorientation and new hierarchies. Wajda’s point is less “people failed” than “expectations were naive”: decades of surveillance, scarcity, and enforced conformity don’t just vanish; they leave behind reflexes. The quote works because it punctures the triumphant narrative without lapsing into nostalgia for the old regime. It’s a filmmaker’s realism applied to politics: the cut from oppression to agency isn’t seamless; it’s a hard edit, and the scene after is messy.