Poland

TWENTY-THREE

Papal Power

To the Poles the election of Pope John Paul II was not only a solace in their misery, as well as a great national honour, it was also the final breach in the wall behind which they had been kept since 1945. The pontiff’s visit to his homeland in June 1979 not only reaffirmed their belief in their spiritual and cultural values, it was a catalyst that set in motion a process that would not cease until 1989.

The Pope travelled around the country holding a number of open-air masses attended by hundreds of thousands, and in one case over a million people. The militia looked on sheepishly as those who had come together realised the strength implicit in their number and spoke to each other with a new-found confidence and sense of solidarity. The Pope’s homilies dwelt on the need to respect and demand respect for the innate dignity of man, and while the message was couched in religious terms, its relevance to the situation in Poland was lost neither on the listening crowds nor on the authorities. In Kraków, he told a vast crowd ‘never to lose hope, give way to discouragement, or give up’.

While those who had pondered his teachings began to think of themselves as a community and to consider how to take responsibility for its future, Gierek was foundering in an economic morass. In July 1980 he again made the mistake of attempting to balance the books by drastic rises in the price of food. A rash of strikes broke out in response, but this time their tenor and their strategy were entirely new.

At dawn on 14 August 1980 a previously dismissed electrical fitter climbed into the Lenin shipyard in Gdańsk to lead a strike over the illegal dismissal of a fellow worker, Anna Walentynowicz. His name was Lech Wałęsa. A participant in the 1970 strikes, he had learned that workers out in the open were no match for tanks, and in years of discussion with KOR and underground workers’ cells he had forged a strategy and defined goals. Instead of marching out onto the streets, he occupied the shipyard and demanded that representatives of the government come to listen to the strikers.

At a meeting of the Politburo on 28 August, Gierek admitted that he did not know what to do and offered his resignation. Representatives were despatched to Gdańsk and to Szczecin, where a similar sit-in was being staged, in the hope of dividing the workers. But the leaders of KOR, KIK and ROPCiO, and dozens of prominent dissidents, such as Michnik, Kuroń, the historian Bronisław Geremek and the journalist Tadeusz Mazowiecki, had homed in on Gdańsk, to advise the inter-factory strike committee which had been formed to coordinate the strikes breaking out in various parts of the country.

The government was left with no option, and on 31 August signed an agreement with the workers. This was no mere settlement of wage claims or disputes over working conditions. It was a whole package involving the establishment of free trade unions, freedom of information, access to the media and civil rights. Historically, it was a seminal event. It was the first authentic workers’ revolution in European history, and it showed up the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ for what it was, puncturing the fiction that had entranced so many and destroyed so many others since 1917.

On 17 September delegates representing some three million members met in Gdańsk to establish the form the new trade unions should take, and, on the advice of the lawyer Jan Olszewski and the historian Karol Modzelewski, who argued that smaller local unions would be easier for the authorities to infiltrate and manipulate, opted for a single nationwide union, to be called NSZZ Solidarność (Independent Self-Governing Trade Union Solidarity). Wałęsa was elected chairman of the national coordinating committee. The aspirations of most of the union’s members and activists were limited to working conditions and a return to a purer and more authentic form of socialism. But that is not how they were viewed in Warsaw or Moscow.

Gierek had suffered a heart attack five days after the signature of the Gdańsk accords, and his place was taken by Stanisław Kania, who promised to combat ‘anti-socialist forces’ and to strengthen ties with the Soviet Union. Two days earlier, the Russian Politburo had instructed its Polish colleagues to prepare a ‘counter-attack’ and created a special group, which included the former Commissar for Foreign Affairs Andrei Gromyko and the KGB chief Yurii Andropov, to monitor the situation in Poland. They urged Kania and his Minister of Defence General Wojciech Jaruzelski to deal with the situation, and on 22 October the latter gave instructions for the preparation of a plan for the imposition of martial law. The Kremlin gave him to understand that he could count on Russian, East German and Czech army units. The United States was distracted by the Iran hostage crisis, and weakened by the fact that Jimmy Carter’s presidency was in its last months. Carter was nevertheless alarmed enough by the situation to send Brezhnev a strongly worded telegram on 3 December.

It is unlikely that this had any effect on Soviet thinking, as the military option remained on the agenda. The German and Czech borders were closed and the Soviet press agency TASS announced that Soviet military manoeuvres would be taking place on Polish territory. On 5 December the Polish Party leadership and the ministers of defence and the interior flew to Moscow for talks.

Solidarność continued to grow as new unions, of journalists, publishers, teachers, students, peasants and other groups, sprang up and affiliated themselves, and by the end of the year it had over nine million members, representing 30 per cent of the adult population. This inevitably altered its profile and its motivation.

The Party’s evident helplessness in the face of genuine people power had encouraged individuals at every level of society and in every walk of life to think and do the hitherto unthinkable. Know-ledge and information on every subject from politics to ecology was disseminated through a rash of independent publications. People openly talked about and debated taboo subjects, and teachers began to tell their pupils the real story of the Second World War and the truth about Katyn and the Warsaw Uprising. Writers pulled out of their bottom drawers things they had never conceived of publishing; film-makers set about making films they had only dreamt of making; émigrés returned, some, like the Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz, in triumph. A mood of deep exhilaration reigned, particularly among the young, even though the political situation remained ominous and the economic conditions catastrophic.

The harvest of Gierek’s economic policy was a bitter one. The foreign debt reached giddy heights while the machinery bought with borrowed currency either fell to pieces or ground to a halt for lack of spare parts. What trimming Gierek had attempted in the late 1970s had resulted in skimping at the last moment, so that many projects suffered in the finishing stages, while a scale of pollution unknown elsewhere in Europe added to the misery of the population. By 1979 over 75 per cent of export revenue went to service the foreign debt. An inflexible freeze on foreign spending ruined what little chance there was of muddling through, and hit the health service severely. By the summer of 1981 there were widespread shortages of drugs, and no syringes with which to administer them. Malnutrition and diseases connected with dirt and deprivation reached epidemic proportions.

The cost of living rose by some 15 per cent in the first six months of 1981, and many everyday products were only available on the black market or in government foreign-currency shops. Even factories resorted to barter in order to obtain essential materials and supplies. Tens of thousands of people emigrated, and while many found work in the West, the helpless were gathered in refugee camps in Austria and West Germany. The situation was developing into a world crisis as the West waited to see whether the Soviet Union, which was chastened by its disastrous invasion of Afghanistan, would dare resort to its usual measure of invading a disobedient ally.

In Poland, the authorities employed delaying tactics with regard to Solidarność, while trying to disrupt its activities. Protest meetings were brutally attacked by ZOMO units, which did everything they could to provoke violence in the hope of being able to turn the issue into one of law and order. The government delayed passing the laws which would permit the trade union to function legally, thereby undermining the Gdańsk accords. As Solidarność staged nationwide strikes on 27 and 30 March to force its hand, Polish television broadcast images of Soviet troops conducting exercises. Tension mounted as President Ronald Reagan, who had assumed office two months earlier, issued a warning to Moscow not to intervene.

The situation in Poland was beginning to polarise along political lines. In February, Solidarność had issued a programme which made it clear that it believed economic improvement could not be achieved without political change and called for ‘a complete renewal of the country’. That same month, General Jaruzelski had taken over as Prime Minister, and in March he authorised procedures for the imposition of martial law.

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union sent its Polish counterpart a letter in which it criticised it for giving in to counterrevolution, and the Kremlin urged it to act. But the PZPR was in no condition to play a leading role. Its Congress, which opened on 14 July 1981, revealed deep divisions between hard-liners and revisionists. The dominant atmosphere was one of fear and hesitancy, and people continued to leave the Party in large numbers.

There could hardly have been a greater contrast between this and the first National Congress held by Solidarność at Oliwa near Gdańsk in September 1981. The Congress constituted the first democratically elected national assembly since the pre-war Sejm, which lent its deliberations gravity. While Wałęsa and the moderates attempted to pin the discussion down to matters concerning the union itself and the Gdańsk accords, many of the delegates, frustrated and incensed by the government’s bad faith, raised issues of principle that went far beyond these confines.

There were calls for the foundation of a political party to represent the workers and for free elections. As the Soviet Baltic fleet held the largest exercise since the Second World War, on 8 September the Congress passed a motion to issue a statement of sympathy and support to all the downtrodden peoples of the Soviet bloc and to encourage them to start free trade unions. TASS called the Congress ‘an anti-socialist and anti-Soviet orgy’, and the Polish Politburo accused Solidarność of violating the Gdańsk accords.

The Soviet leadership was nearing the limits of its tolerance. Yet the Soviet Union was diplomatically isolated as a result of its invasion of Afghanistan, and economically dependent on the West. The scale of the popular movement in Poland, its charismatic leader’s immense popularity throughout the world, the high profile of the Polish Pope on the international scene and the determined attitude of the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan meant that an invasion might end in catastrophe for the Soviet Union.

Conveniently for Moscow, Jaruzelski was prepared to do almost anything to avoid one. After Kania’s resignation in October, he took overall control and began preparations for a clampdown, which began on the night of 12 December 1981. At 11.30 p.m. the telephone network went dead, followed by radio and television transmissions. In a complex operation carried out with remarkable efficiency, almost the entire leadership of Solidarność were arrested. Thousands of people were dragged from their beds and ferried to prisons and concentration camps, while tanks patrolled the snow-covered streets and ZOMO stormtroopers were deployed at potential trouble spots. Factories, mines and the railway network were occupied and placed under military command. A curfew was imposed and travel was forbidden. At six in the morning of 13 December the national anthem was played on television and Jaruzelski declared that he had imposed martial law as the country had been on the edge of a precipice.

The workers were unprepared, and while there was a wave of strikes and sit-ins on 14 December, there was little resistance when the troops moved in. The Wujek mine in Silesia was the scene of an underground sit-in which ended on 16 December with ZOMO firing on and killing nine of the surrendering miners. Their colleagues in the Piast mine held out longer, but the last nine hundred came to the surface on 28 December. Although a few Solidarność leaders remained in hiding and mounted a campaign of underground opposition, the movement was ostensibly crushed. In all, some 5,000 of its members were detained, while another 150,000 were hauled in for ’preventive and cautionary talks’.

On 22 December Jaruzelski told the Politburo that they had won the first battle, but that they still had a campaign to fight and a war to win, which would take ten years. He was right about the battle. There was some low-level protest, with slogans daubed on walls and fliers distributed in the streets. Many writers and actors boycotted the state media. Strikes and demonstrations were staged on the national day of 3 May 1982, but they were put down brutally and effectively. People who did not submit lost their jobs and were subjected to pressures of one sort or another. On the anniversary of the signing of the Gdańsk accords there were demonstrations in over sixty towns, but these were dispersed. Over 5,000 people were arrested, and at least three people killed and hundreds wounded in the process, demonstrating the pointlessness of this kind of action. In December 1982, a year after its imposition, martial law was suspended, and six months later, lifted. By then a number of special powers had been brought in that made it unnecessary.

Jaruzelski’s attempts at normalising the situation were less successful. He tried to garner support for the government by creating a Patriotic Movement for National Regeneration and an official trade union, which people were pressured to join. But neither carried much credibility.

The United States had imposed stringent trade sanctions, and other Western countries followed suit. This hit Jaruzelski’s attempts at reviving the economy. Plans and reform programmes were announced, but nothing came of them. The zloty was devalued twice, in 1983 and 1985, and inflation rose to around 70 per cent.

Those Solidarność leaders who had slipped through the net on 13 December 1981 had organised an underground leadership, and gradually dissident life resumed in time-honoured ways. Radio Solidarność went on the air from clandestine studios, and underground presses went into action all over the country. They would publish at least 1,700 different papers and periodicals and about 1,800 books, often in large print runs, between 1982 and 1985. Literary and artistic activity flourished, often under the umbrella of the Church, which provided venues, facilities, means of communication and even cash. It also provided a vital link with individuals and organisations abroad which were sending aid of every kind and materials such as paper and printers’ ink and machines.

Most of those detained, including Wałęsa, had been released by the beginning of 1983, and in July of that year a general amnesty was announced. Those, like Jacek Kuroń and Adam Michnik, held on charges of attempting to overthrow the state, were not brought to trial. But this did not reflect any change of attitude. Soon after being released, Wałęsa was accused of fraud and tax evasion, and he was harassed by the police. When he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October of that year, he was forbidden to collect it and the Polish government sent a note of protest to the Norwegian government.

The security services had been expanded, and by 1983 employed more people than they had in Stalinist times. In November 1985 up to a hundred senior academics were dismissed in a purge of the educational system. Lesser mortals were bullied, beaten up or murdered. The security services also vastly expanded their pool of collaborators, putting pressure on people who had been caught committing some minor offence, or who simply had a past, to spy and report.

Life under these conditions became unbearable for many, and increasing numbers escaped to the West, in stolen planes, in boats and a multitude of other means. The suicide rate rose by nearly 40 per cent.

In June 1983 the Pope paid a second visit to his homeland. He reproved Jaruzelski, and at an open-air mass outside Katowice he told a crowd more than one million strong that to form a trade union was a fundamental human right. The security services responded with a campaign of low-level harassment of the Church. Crucifixes were removed from public places and priests roughly handled. Several were murdered. Only in one case was the murder pinned on the security services, and on 27 December 1984 three militiamen were tried for killing Father Jerzy Popieluszko.

That it should have come to this was a symptom of changes taking place outside Poland. Jaruzelski had done everything to bring Poland back under the control of Moscow, and to normalise the situation, a process he hoped would be concluded with elections to the Sejm in October 1985 and the release of all political prisoners the following year. But by then things had moved on in Russia, in an unexpected direction.

Leonid Brezhnev, on whose behalf Jaruzelski had conducted his clampdown, had died in November 1982. He had been succeeded by the KGB chief Yurii Andropov and then, briefly, by the hard-line Konstantin Chernenko. But in March 1985 the reins of power in the Kremlin were taken up by Mikhail Gorbachev, who, faced with a collapsing economy, a losing position in the arms race and a vigorous anti-Soviet alliance led by Ronald Reagan, initiated a twin policy of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reorganisation).

In short, Jaruzelski’s boss had gone soft, and this undermined his own position in Poland. He had always justified his actions by presenting them as the lesser of two evils, since they supposedly prevented a Soviet invasion and serious bloodshed. But with reforms being implemented in Russia, the bottom dropped out of this argument and with it the only pillar of his legitimacy.

Jaruzelski, now head of state, controlled not only the army, but also, through his Interior Minister General Czesław Kiszczak, the security apparatus. He had elbowed aside the Party in 1981 in order to carry out his clampdown and ruled through a Military Council of National Defence (WRON) while the Party set about purging unreliable and revisionist elements and reordering its ranks. But the Party had been so thoroughly demoralised that it was in no position to reassume its ’leading role’, even if Jaruzelski had allowed it to.

A new government had been formed in 1985 under the economist Zbigniew Messner, a man with a low Party profile, but his efforts at curing the country’s economic ills got nowhere. By 1987 the foreign debt had gone up to $37.6 billion. A mood of despondency enveloped the country, and a vast economic migration of three-quarters of a million joined the political refugees. The state of health of the nation reached alarming levels, and population growth halved over the period 1980-89. People took to blackmarketeering and petty trading on a gigantic scale for survival. Ironically, the near-collapse of the economy stimulated the growth of small private enterprises, which by the end of the decade accounted for over 20 per cent of GDP.

Although still outlawed, Solidarność continued to exist as a force. Its old leadership had come together and, under the influence of moderates such as Kuroń and Michnik, issued repeated calls for dialogue, calls which were supported by the Church and by foreign governments. But it also occasionally showed its teeth. When price rises were announced in 1986, it threatened a nationwide strike, and the proposals were withdrawn. Jaruzelski’s attempt to ignore the movement’s existence was beginning to look foolish. Every foreign statesman visiting Poland, including US Vice President George Bush, trod the path to Wałęsa’s home and consulted him on whether or not to ease sanctions.

The Pope’s third visit to his native land, in June 1987, was almost as important as his first, and it was by far the most political. The militia were unable to prevent a sea of Solidarność placards waving above the heads of the crowds at his open-air masses, which were televised and watched by the whole nation. The Pope talked to Wałęsa and had several discussions with a more attentive Jaruzelski. But the General still baulked at the idea of talking to Wałęsa. Instead, he attempted to engage Polish society on his own terms, by holding a referendum on proposed economic initiatives, which was a failure, and announcing, in October 1987, the formation of a new Consultative Council.

Wałęsa had pre-empted him by setting up, in September of the same year, an Interim Council, with regional committees, to formulate a new consensus, and Bronisław Geremek suggested dialogue with reform-minded members of the Party.

The volume of public protest was rising steadily, and a new generation of activists within Solidarność pressed for more determined action. Austerity measures introduced in February 1988 provoked widespread strikes, which were put down with the use of force. In response, Solidarność threatened Jaruzelski with a general strike to take place on 1 September.

On 26 August General Kiszczak announced that he had been authorised to hold consultative talks with opposition groups. A meeting with Wałęsa and Bishop Dąbrowski took place five days later, and it was agreed that ’round table’ talks would be held in October. Wałęsa called off the strikes. A new government was formed under Mieczysław Rakowski including a few independent figures, and preparatory talks began.

But while the round table was ready by the prescribed date, the talks did not start. There was disagreement about who should take part and about the scope of the talks. Wałęsa and the Church representatives wanted them to cover not only economic issues, but constitutional ones as well. Fresh dates were set and then cancelled as the two sides argued over procedure and the issues at stake, but the talks did finally begin, on 6 February 1989. Fifty-seven people convened at the round table, presided over by Kiszczak, with many more meeting in subcommittees dealing with subjects such as the economy, agriculture, political reform and so on. At the opening session, Kiszczak announced that the final goal of the talks was to bring about ’non-confrontational elections’, which raised many questions. In private, he was heard to comment that he and his comrades were putting a noose around their own necks.

The Party may have been in disarray, but its two million members included the security services and most of the army, and there were plenty who would be prepared to fight for their positions. And for all his liberal talk, nobody could be sure how Gorbachev would react to fundamental change in Poland, the cornerstone of Soviet Russia’s military system. The opposition negotiators therefore trod warily, allowing generous terms for the capitulation of the nomenklatura.

The talks ended on 5 April, in a spirit of unexpectedly harmonious agreement. Solidarity and the Church recovered their legal status, the right of free association and freedom of speech were guaranteed, as was the independence of the judiciary. Most important were the constitutional changes: the office of president was revived and a bicameral parliament was established. Elections were to be held in June.

As a concession to the PZPR, 65 per cent of the seats in the lower house were to be reserved for its members, with opposition candidates permitted to contest the remaining 35 per cent. The elections to the new Senate were to be unrestricted. The next elections, to be held in 1993, were to be entirely free. General Kiszczak declared that the agreement ’closed a chapter in our history and opened a new one’.

The elections were held in two rounds. The first, on 4 June, proved a fiasco for the Party. Solidarność won ninety-nine out of the one hundred seats in the Senate, with the remaining one going to a non-Party businessman. In the Sejm, its candidates won outright in all but one of the open seats, while thirty-three of the Party’s nominees standing for seats reserved for the Party, including General Kiszczak and Prime Minister Rakowski, failed to get the

minimum number of votes required. A mortified Jaruzelski had to ask Wałęsa whether he would agree to change the rules so that some of these could be rerun at the second round. Wałęsa magnanimously obliged.

The entire communist establishment had been humiliated. The leadership of the PZPR had no idea how to deal with the new situation, and there was no guidance on hand from Moscow. It had been assumed that Jaruzelski would be president, but since he would have to be elected by the two chambers of the Sejm, in which the opposition had a majority, this was open to question.

Despite its resounding victory, the opposition was hesitant. It had conducted a vigorous campaign, with the support of people of all ages and from all walks of life, yet the turnout had been no more than 62 per cent. Such a level of apathy in the electorate was the consequence of ten years of frustration, of a fatalistic conviction that nothing would ever change, and of the psychological exhaustion resulting from years of poor living conditions, stress, food shortages and poor health. It dictated caution and restraint.

In behind-the-scenes discussions Jaruzelski proposed a coalition government under General Kiszczak, and Wałęsa put forward Tadeusz Mazowiecki. Michnik suggested the compromise of ’your president, our prime minister’ as a basis for agreement, and this was taken up by US President George Bush, who was on a longscheduled visit to Poland and addressed both chambers of the Sejm on 10 July. Jacek Kuroń went on television to explain that it was essential to allow the presidency to go to Jaruzelski, in order to reassure Russia about Poland’s position within the Warsaw Pact. On 19 July the General was duly elected, by one vote. On 12 September Mazowiecki named his government, which included five ministers from the PZPR, including Kiszczak as Minister of the Interior and another general as Minister of Defence, to reassure the Kremlin that its security system was safe.