The Sword and the Shield

^TWENTY-NINE THE POLISH POPE AND THE RISE OF SOLIDARITY

For forty years all challenges to the Communist one-party states established in eastern Europe in the wake of the Second World War were successfully contained. Opponents of the regimes usually felt too powerless to organize any visible opposition to them. On the rare occasions when the survival of the one-party state seemed in question—in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968—it was swiftly and brutally shored up with an overwhelming show of force. The Polish challenge to the Soviet system, however, eventually succeeded where the Hungarian Uprising and the Prague Spring failed. Though contained for a decade, it was never mastered and eventually began the disintegration of the Soviet Bloc.

The Polish crisis began in a wholly novel and unforeseen way—not, as in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, with the emergence of revisionist governments, but with the election of October 16, 1978 of Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, Archbishop of Kraków, as Pope John Paul II. No Soviet leader was tempted any longer to repeat Stalin’s scornful question at the end of the Second World War, “How many divisions has the Pope?” The undermining of the empire built by Stalin after Yalta was begun not by the military might of the West but by the moral authority of the first Polish Pope, which rapidly eclipsed that of the PUWP (the Polish Communist Party).

Boris Aristov, the Soviet ambassador in Warsaw, reported to the Politburo that the Polish authorities regarded the new Pope as “a virulent anti-Communist.”¹ The Centre agreed. Since 1971 Wojtyła had been the target of PROGRESS operations designed to monitor his allegedly subversive role in undermining the authority of the Polish one-party state.² The day after Wojtyła’s election, the head of the KGB mission in Warsaw, Vadim Pavlov, sent Moscow an assessment of him by the SB, the KGB’s Polish equivalent:

In Wojtyła’s view, the concept of the one-party state “meant depriving the people of its sovereignty.” “Collectivization,” he believed, “led to the destruction of the individual and of his personality.” The fact that he dared to say what most Polish Catholics thought seemed to both the KGB and the SB evidence of his commitment to ideological subversion.

The SB report forwarded to the Centre reveals that as early as 1973-4 the Polish Procurator-general had considered prosecuting Wojtyła for his sermons. Three of his homilies—in Warsaw on May 5, 1973, in the Kraków steelmaking suburb of Nowa Huta on May 12, 1973 and in Kraków on November 24, 1974—were judged in breach of article 194 of the Criminal Code, which provided for terms of imprisonment of from one to ten years for seditious statements during religious services. According to an SB informant, Wojtyła had declared during one of his sermons, “The Church has the right to criticize all manifestations and aspects of the activity of the authorities if they are unacceptable to the people.”³ Wojtyła, however, was protected by his eminence. Though the UB (predecessor of the SB) had interned the Polish primate, Cardinal Stefan Wyszýnski, for three years in the 1950s, by the 1970s the Gierek regime no longer dared to arrest a cardinal.The SB thus lapsed into a tone of largely impotent outrage as it denounced Wojtyła’s “moral support to the initiatives of anti-socialist elements.”

In June 1976 Gierek repeated the mistake which had led to Gomułka’s downfall six years earlier and ordered a sudden increase in food prices. After a wave of protest strikes and riots, the price rises were withdrawn. On September 30 Wojtyła set up a fund to assist the families of those in the Kraków archdiocese who had been imprisoned for taking part in the protests or injured in clashes with the riot police.⁴ He also took an active interest in the formation after the strike wave of KOR, the Workers Defence Committee, which sought to create an alliance of workers and dissident intellectuals. According to SB surveillance reports, during the autumn of 1976 Wojtyła had a series of meetings with KOR’s founders in the apartment of the writer Bohdan Cywiński, later a prominent Solidarity activist.⁵ The SB also reported that he met individually KOR militants from a great variety of backgrounds: among them the dissident Communist Jacek Kurón, the wartime resistance fighter Jan Józef Lipski, the ex-Maoist Antoni Macierewicz and the writer Jerzy Andrzejewski.⁶

Wojtyła rarely read newspapers, listened to the news on the radio or watched it on television. Every fortnight, however, Father Andrzej Bardecki, the Church’s liaison officer with the Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny (to which Wojtyła was a regular contributor), came to his study in the archbishop’s palace at Kraków and gave him a news briefing.⁷ Bardecki had been a target of PROGRESS operations by KGB illegals ever since BOGUN, posing as a West German press photographer, had first made contact with him in 1971.⁸ In 1977 another illegal, Ivan Ivanovich Bunyk, codenamed FILOSOV (“Philosopher”), who had been instructed by the Centre to develop sources inside the Polish Church, had a series of meetings with Bardecki. Bunyk had been born in France but had emigrated as a teenager with his Ukrainian family to the Soviet Union in 1947. In 1970 he had returned to France as a KGB illegal, trained as a journalist and set himself up as a freelance writer and poet. On his first meeting with Bardecki in 1977, FILOSOV probably presented him with one or more of the books he had published in France with the aid of KGB subsidies. Though the files noted by Mitrokhin do not include FILOSOV’s reports from Poland, there is little doubt that his main priority in cultivating Bardecki was to seek out information on Wojtyła.⁹

SB surveillance reports during 1977 showed Wojtyła aligning himself with a variety of protest movements. On March 23 he received the student organizers of a petition of protest to the authorities and gave them his support.¹⁰ Increasingly he invoked the example of St. Stanisław, the martyred bishop of ancient Kraków whose silver sarcophagus formed part of the high altar in the cathedral, as a symbol of resistance to an unjust state:

It is easy to imagine the rage in the Centre as Wojtyła continued with impunity to defend the rights of the individual against violation by the Polish state.

Among the greatest triumphs of Wojtyła’s years at Kraków was the consecration on May 15, 1977 of the great new church at Nowa Huta, constructed after many years of opposition from a regime which had sought to exclude a visible Catholic presence from what it intended as a model “Socialist city.”¹² In his sermon to a congregation of over 20,000, Wojtyła gave his blessing to those protesting against the death of a KOR activist, Stanisław Pyjas, who was widely believed—despite official denials—to have been murdered by the SB.¹³ That evening a long procession of mourners wound its way through the streets of Kraków to Wawel Castle, where a Committee of Student Solidarity was formed. Similar committees followed in other cities, all independent of the officially sponsored Socialist Union of Polish Students.¹⁴

As church bells rang out across Poland on October 16, 1978 and the streets filled with excited crowds to celebrate Wojtyła’s election as pope, the PUWP Politburo reacted with private shock and alarm. Publicly, the Politburo reluctantly felt compelled to associate itself with the mood of popular rejoicing and sent a lengthy telegram of congratulations to the Vatican, expressing hypocritical joy that for the first time “a son of the Polish nation… sits on the papal throne.” What particularly disturbed the KGB, however, was the evidence that among many PUWP members, even some senior officials, the joy was genuine.¹⁵ As well as sending official reports on Polish popular rejoicing, KGB officers in Warsaw also unofficially relayed to their colleagues at the Centre some of the political jokes circulating immediately after John Paul II’s election. The white smoke from the Vatican chimney, traditionally used to signal the election of a pope, was said to have been followed on this occasion by red smoke; Wojtyła had burned his Party card. According to another satirical account, the new pope had secretly visited the Polish interior minister, who was responsible for the SB, and announced after the election, “Comrade minister! Your important instructions have been carried out!”¹⁶

Two days after the election, Aristov, the Soviet ambassador, reported to Moscow in more serious vein:

Aristov criticized the Polish Politburo for compromising its ability to resist the Church’s future demands by its past weakness in permitting the construction of new churches, the ordination of more priests and larger print-runs for Catholic publications.¹⁷

At the time of Wojtyła’s election, Poland was probably the world’s most Catholic country. The KGB estimated that 90 percent of the population were Catholic.¹⁸ With 569 ordinations in 1978, Poland had the highest ratio of priestly vocations to population anywhere on earth. In total, there were 19,193 Polish priests and 5,325 students in seminaries.¹⁹ Somewhat alarmist KGB assessments put the figures higher still.²⁰ A steady rise in religious practice continued over the next few years. According to a secret study circulated to the PUWP central committee, “This phenomenon emerged particularly acutely among the intelligentsia, especially among persons with higher education.” In 1978 25 percent of those with higher education were reported to engage in private prayer at home; by 1983 the figure had risen to over 50 percent. The central committee study plausibly attributed the increase to the “social-political crisis” and the influence of the Polish Pope.²¹ Even many Polish Party officials felt in awe of Wojtyła’s intense, mystical spirituality. They reported to Moscow that he often spent six to eight hours a day in prayer. On entering his private chapel, aides would sometimes find him lying motionless on the marble floor, his arms outstretched in the shape of a cross.²²

The KGB privately denounced some of John Paul II’s first acts in the Vatican as “anti-Soviet gestures.” Among them was his order on the day after his election that the red zuchetto—cardinal’s skullcap—which he had worn at the papal conclave should be taken to Lithuania by two priests from the Kraków archdiocese and placed on the altar of the church of the Virgin of Mercy in Vilnius.²³ What most concerned the Centre during the early weeks of the new pontificate, however, was the Pope’s evident determination to give the Vatican a major voice in world affairs. Though John Paul II’s concerns ranged widely over the problems of peacekeeping and human rights around the globe, his first priority was the situation in Poland and eastern Europe.²⁴ The Centre was particularly suspicious of the Pope’s appointment of the Lithuanianborn Andris Backis as one of his chief advisers on the Vatican’s relations with the Soviet Bloc. Backis’s father had served as pre-war ambassador of independent Lithuania in Paris, and Backis himself was believed to follow in the same “bourgeois” tradition. His appointment was, in the Centre’s view, another “anti-Soviet gesture.”²⁵ On November 5 the Pope made his first official visit outside the Vatican to Assisi, the city of St. Francis, patron saint of Italy. A voice from the crowd urged him to remember eastern Europe: “Don’t forget the Church of Silence!” “It’s not a Church of Silence any more,” replied John Paul II, “because it speaks with my voice.”²⁶

Among the illegals sent on PROGRESS operations to Poland after Wojtyła’s election was Oleg Petrovich Buryen (codenamed DEREVLYOV), who posed as the representative of a firm of Canadian publishers. DEREVLYOV claimed to be collecting material about Polish missionaries in the Far East and used this as a pretext for contacting a number of prominent Church figures, most of whom recommended him to others. If arrested by the police or SB, he was told to stick firmly to his cover story and insist that he was a Canadian citizen. In case of real emergency, however, he was instructed to ask to see Colonel Jan Slovikowski of the SB, who appears to have acted as a point of contact for KGB agents who found themselves in difficulty with the Polish authorities. Among DEREVLYOV’s most prized contacts was one of the Pope’s closest friends, Father Józef Tischner, a fellow philosopher who had helped him found the Papal Theological Academy in Kraków.²⁷ Tischner was a frequent visitor to Rome and one of those chosen by John Paul II to revive his spirits when he felt trapped in the Vatican.²⁸

One of John Paul II’s chief ambitions during the first year of his pontificate was to return to Poland. Early in 1979, horrified that the PUWP Politburo was prepared to contemplate a papal visit, Brezhnev rang Gierek to try to dissuade him. “How could I not receive a Polish pope,” Gierek replied, “when the majority of my countrymen are Catholics?” Absurdly, Brezhnev urged him to persuade the Pope to have a diplomatic illness: “Tell the Pope—he is a wise man—that he could announce publicly that he cannot come because he has been taken ill.” When Gierek failed to see the merit of this odd suggestion, Brezhnev told him angrily, “Gomułka was a better Communist [than you] because he wouldn’t receive [Pope] Paul VI in Poland, and nothing awful happened!” The conversation ended with Brezhnev saying, “Well, do what you want, so long as you and your Party don’t regret it later”—at which point Brezhnev put the phone down.²⁹

On June 2, 1979 more than a million Poles converged on the airport road, on Warsaw’s Victory Square and in the Old City, rebuilt from the rubble after the Second World War, to welcome John Paul II on his emotional return to his homeland. Over the next nine days at least ten million people came to see and hear him; most of the remaining twenty-five million witnessed his triumphal progress through Poland on television. At the end of his visit, as the Pope bade farewell to his home city of Kraków, where, he said, “every stone and brick is dear to me,” men and women wept uncontrollably in the streets. The contrast between the political bankruptcy of the Communist regime and the moral authority of the Catholic Church was plain for all to see.

The papal visit, the Centre reported to the Politburo, had lived up to its worst expectations.³⁰ Many Polish Party members, faced with the Pope’s “ideological subversion” of the Communist regime, felt that the ideological battle had been lost. During the visit the KGB mission in Warsaw had even thought it possible that KOR militants and anti-Communist workers in Kraków might try to seize power from the Party. Emergency preparations were also made to evacuate the Soviet trade mission in Katowice, which was headed by a KGB officer, to Czechoslovakia.³¹ The Centre believed that John Paul II had set out to challenge the foundations of the whole Soviet Bloc. One KGB report emphasized that he had repeatedly called himself not just the “Polish Pope” but, even more frequently, the “Slav Pope.”³² In his homilies he had recalled one by one the baptism of the peoples of eastern Europe: Poles, Croats, Slovenes, Bulgarians, Moravians, Slovaks, Czechs, Serbs, Russians and Lithuanians:

A Politburo document concluded that the Vatican had embarked on an “ideological struggle against Socialist countries.” Since the election of John Paul II, papal policy towards Catholic regions of the Soviet Union—especially in Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Byelorussia—had become “more aggressive,” aiding and abetting “disloyal priests.” On November 13 the Central Committee secretariat approved a six-point “Decision to Work Against the Policies of the Vatican in Relation with Socialist States,” prepared by a subcommittee which included Andropov and the deputy chairman of the KGB, Viktor Chebrikov. The KGB was instructed to organize propaganda campaigns in the Soviet Bloc “to show that Vatican policies go against the life of the Catholic Church” and to embark on active measures in the West “to demonstrate that the leadership of the new Pope, John Paul II, is dangerous to the Catholic Church.”³⁴

One of the chief priorities of SB foreign operations was to build up an agent network among the Poles in Rome and the Vatican. On June 16, 1980 the KGB mission in Warsaw reported to the Centre:

The Centre responded by proposing a series of KGB/SB “joint long-term operations” with the following aims:

Because of the Polish Politburo’s anxiety to avoid confrontation with the Catholic Church, however, the Centre had low expectations of what joint KGB/SB operations were likely to achieve:

Moscow’s fears that the Polish Politburo lacked the nerve to confront the challenge to its authority were heightened by its apparent capitulation to working-class discontent. Sudden rises in food prices in the summer of 1980 sparked off a strike wave which gave birth to the Solidarity trade union movement under the charismatic leadership of a hitherto unknown 37-year-old electrician from Gdańsk, Lech Wałęsa. The interior ministry informed the KGB mission in Warsaw that it had established an operations center, headed by Stachura, the deputy minister, to direct police and SB operations against the strikers, monitor the situation and produce daily reports. To judge from a report forwarded to Moscow, the Center was remarkably pleased with its own performance: “The operational staff displayed a high degree of conscientiousness and discipline, and an understanding of their duties; combat-readiness was introduced; leave was canceled; and round-the-clock work was introduced.” While not claiming “complete success,” the operations center claimed to have limited the scale of the strike movement by “eliminating” their printing presses and breaking links between protesters in different parts of the country. In addition, “Attempts by anti-Socialist forces to establish contacts with the artistic, scientific and cultural intelligentsia, in order to enlist their support for the demands of the strikers, were cut short.”³⁶

The reality, however, was somewhat different. The strikers succeeded in creating inter-factory strike committees to coordinate the protest and dissident intellectuals played an important part in advising them. The final judgment of the KGB mission in Warsaw was in stark contrast to the efforts by the Interior Ministry to defend its performance. The SB, it reported, “did not recognize the extent of the danger in time or the hidden discontent of the working class.” And when the strike movement began, both the SB and the police were unable to control it:

On August 24 Aristov sent Moscow the alarming news that the deputy prime minister, Mieczysław Jagielski, was negotiating with Wałęsa and the strike leaders.³⁸ Next day, the Soviet Politburo set up a commission headed by Suslov, its chief ideologist, to monitor the Polish crisis and propose remedies.³⁹ On August 27, at the Pope’s instigation, the Polish bishops approved a document that explicitly claimed “the right to independence both of organizations representing the workers and of organizations of self-government.” Confident of the Pope’s backing, Wałęsa was now convinced that the government had little choice but to give in.⁴⁰

The Polish government privately agreed. On August 27 the leading members of the Polish Politburo met Aristov to try to persuade him that the partial disintegration of the PUWP and the hostility to it of much of the Polish people had created “a new situation:”

The Poles went through the motions of seeking “the opinion of Comrade Brezhnev,” recognizing that trade unions free from Party control were “not simply a Polish issue but an issue which affects the interests of the entire Socialist community.”⁴¹ In reality, however, all alternatives to the legalization of Solidarity had already been ruled out. The Gdańsk Agreement of August 31, which accepted “the formation of free trade unions as a genuine representation of the working class,” made a series of unprecedented political concessions, ranging from the right to strike to an agreement to broadcast Mass every Sunday over the state radio. Wałęsa signed the agreement in front of the television cameras with an outsize, garishly colored pen, which he drew with a flourish from his top pocket. Produced as a souvenir of the papal visit, it had on it a portrait of John Paul II.⁴²