21

The Challenge from Poland: John Paul II, Lech Wałesa, and the Rise of Solidarity

At the beginning of the 1970s, it was often argued that pressure from intellectuals was not a significant threat to a Communist regime. It was only a revolt by workers that could really alter anything substantial. That was plain wrong. The dramatic changes under way in Czechoslovakia in 1968 were intelligentsia-led (by the party intellectuals, in the first instance) and it took half a million foreign troops to put a stop to the process. The generalization that only worker protest really mattered gained plausibility, however, from a comparison of what happened in Poland in 1968 and in the same country in 1970. Moreover, it is beyond doubt that worker unrest did, indeed, pose special problems for a Communist system. These were, after all, states in which the working class allegedly played the ‘leading role’, even if they no longer constituted a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. In either case, the workers had supposedly ‘delegated’ the implementation of that role essentially to the Communist party.

Polish workers, more than those in any other European Communist state, challenged that orthodoxy. They had done so in 1956, and were to do so again at the beginning, middle and end of the 1970s. In the early 1970s it looked as if, in Poland at least, manual workers were the people who possessed real political muscle. In 1968 the Polish intelligentsia and the regime had been at odds, and workers had remained on the sidelines, showing no desire to get involved. The intellectuals lost that battle with the authorities. Some prominent academics left the country for good. Others were either sufficiently isolated or intimidated that they kept a low profile over the next several years. In December 1970, in contrast, a workers’ revolt panicked and divided the Communist leadership, brought down Gomuka, and produced some changes in economic policy.

During 1968, intellectuals in Poland, stirred by the developments in Czechoslovakia, had became increasingly outspoken. Students in particular demonstrated in large numbers in March. In the same month some of Poland’s most distinguished scholars were dismissed from their professorial posts at the University of Warsaw. They included the philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, the economist Włodzimierz Brus, and the sociologists Zygmunt Bauman and Maria Hirszowicz. By the end of March, the rector of the university had announced the temporary dissolution of the faculties of economics, philosophy, sociology and psychology, thus denying 1,616 students the right to continue their studies. For good measure, students in the third year of mathematics and physics found their course had also been disbanded.¹

The Polish leadership’s way of combating the intellectual ferment had a strong element of anti-semitism. Many of those targeted by the regime were of Jewish origin. Although Gomuka launched this campaign, it derived its strength from a party faction known as the ‘Partisans’ (or ‘the Patriots’), headed by the minister of the interior, General Mieczysaw Moczar. Manoeuvring between them was the party boss of the Silesian industrial region of Katowice, Edward Gierek, although he was identified with a party grouping known as the ‘Pragmatists’. The thrust of the campaign was to remove ‘Zionists’ (meaning Jews) from high political and academic posts and to oust ‘revisionists’ and liberals more generally. In fact, only a comparatively small number of people of Jewish origin were left in Poland. Ninety per cent of Poland’s Jews had been killed during the Second World War. Subsequently, survivors who wished to leave the country, as many did, were allowed to emigrate. Those who remained were people who felt much more Polish than Jewish. They tended also to be lifelong Communists. The campaign against them was part of a struggle for power at the top of the party, aimed at undermining and replacing Gomuka. Had it not been for the ‘crisis’ (in the eyes of Europe’s Communist leaders) in Czechoslovakia, and Gomuka’s close liaison with the Soviet leadership throughout 1968, it is likely that the Polish party leader would have been ousted in that same year.²

The workers’ demonstrations that did trigger leadership change took place in December 1970. Following a decade in which there had been very little increase in the real incomes of workers, price increases were announced just a fortnight before Christmas, thus adding insult to injury in this overwhelmingly Catholic country. Workers demonstrated in the capital, Warsaw, and several factories there were occupied. The largest-scale workers’ protests, however, were in the Baltic ports of Gdask and Szczecin. Gomuka ordered the army and police to use force, and sixteen workers were shot dead in front of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdask.³ This intensified the outrage already felt in the shipyards. Gomuka, who had come to power on a wave of popular support, left office unmourned by all. On 20 December 1970 he was replaced as party leader by Gierek.⁴ While this clash between workers and the state authorities was going on, the Polish intelligentsia had stood aside.

But quite apart from the evidence from Czechoslovakia, the idea that workers as a social group were necessarily the most important instigators of radical reform was not really borne out. At the end of 1970 and over the next few years, Polish workers were, to an extent, bought off by short-term improvements in their material conditions that were not accompanied by fundamental political change. Gierek initially won their support. He visited shipyards and factories and appeared to be a good listener – even the future leader of Solidarity, Lech Walesa, was impressed at the time.⁵ That support was consolidated and lasted for several years as the revamped Communist leadership significantly raised Polish living standards. They did so thanks to reckless borrowing abroad, but in the first half of the 1970s it appeared to many Poles that Gierek’s strategy was working. Sociological survey research – which had made progress in Poland earlier than in any other East European Communist state – showed that in 1975, three out of four Poles believed their material conditions had improved in recent years.⁶ However, by counting on improved economic well-being to accord his leadership legitimacy, Gierek had embarked on a dangerous course. Since the boom had been financed by foreign credits, with Poland ultimately defaulting on many of the loans it had received, the marked improvement in living standards could not last. Economic problems that were tolerated when there was little hope of things getting better were not greeted with equanimity when they came during a period of rising expectations.

Gierek displayed an ability to manoeuvre politically which stood him in good stead for some years. Upon succeeding Gomuka as party first secretary, he lost little time in removing from the leadership the ambitious Moczar, who had played the national card so vigorously in 1968. Gierek himself, however, responded to national sentiments as well as to economic grievances. Under his leadership, the government launched the reconstruction of the Warsaw Royal Castle, which had been destroyed during World War Two and only partially restored subsequently. Overtures were also made to the Catholic Church, whose significance in Poland was closely linked with Poles’ strong sense of nationhood. These included permission to build churches in newly developed housing areas, as well as the symbolic gesture of Gierek’s well-publicized meeting with Pope Paul VI in the Vatican in 1977.

None of that could for long disguise the fact that the economic upturn was illusory. What has been termed Poland’s ‘premature consumerism’ was bound to be relatively short-lived, for it was not in the least underpinned by the fundamentals of the Polish economy.⁷ Gierek was buying time as well as meat from Western Europe. The December 1970 price increases had been completely reversed in response to worker unrest. This meant that food prices in 1976 were very much the same as they had been a decade earlier, although incomes had increased substantially in the first half of the 1970s.⁸ And a third of the revenue from Polish exports was spent paying the interest on the foreign loans the government had received – loans which had been used to finance an import-led boom. Poland, having been an exporter of food in the 1950s, was a major importer in the 1970s. Afraid to introduce higher food prices gradually and earlier, the Gierek leadership got the worst of all possible worlds when, quite suddenly, they increased them by an average of 60 per cent (with meat going up by 69 per cent) in June 1976.⁹

The reaction was one which was already becoming a tradition in Poland under Communist rule. There were strikes and sit-ins across the country, with the Baltic shipyards again in the vanguard of resistance to the authorities. In Radom, a town to the south of Warsaw, workers reverted to a form of drastic action which had last been taken at Pozna in 1956, setting fire to the local Communist party headquarters. In a more novel development, several thousand workers from a tractor factory near Warsaw made their way to the transcontinental railway line and stopped the Paris – Moscow express, thus adding to the international impact of the protests. The government retreated much more quickly than they had done in 1970. Within twenty-four hours of the price hikes being made public, they were rescinded. Repressive measures, though, were applied to the workers who had forced this embarrassment on the authorities. These included beatings, arrests and the dismissal from their place of employment of several thousand workers.¹⁰

The next few years were to demonstrate that the problems for Communist rulers were liable to be especially severe if workers and intellectuals co-operated, rather than taking it in turns to be a thorn in the flesh of the authorities (as had happened, in an entirely unplanned way, hitherto). Already in December 1975 a large group of intellectuals had protested about the planned changes to the Polish constitution which were to enshrine in the country’s fundamental law the ‘leading role’ of the party and Poland’s membership of the Communist bloc. This followed a period of passivity after 1968 of that social group. However, the fact that civic protest had already been revived meant that there were intellectuals ready to rally to the defence of the workers who had been ill-treated following the June 1976 protests.¹¹ In September of that year, an organization was set up which was to become one of the most important examples of a developing civil society in Poland – the Workers’ Defence Committee, known by the acronym KOR.¹² Those who formed it included writers, historians, lawyers, scientists, actors and a priest. Among the most active members of KOR were Jacek Kuro, who had already by this time twice been expelled from the Communist party (PUWP) and had served almost six years in prison for his oppositional activities, and Adam Michnik, among whose many contributions was the encouragement of greater dialogue between the Polish left and the Catholic Church.¹³ KOR developed into a serious opposition movement, fostering links with workers and producing a large number of uncensored publications whose circulation far exceeded those of Soviet samizdat.

The publications produced by KOR and by other oppositional groupings that sprang up were quite widely read in workplaces. Ironically, Lenin’s idea that a newspaper (Iskra, in his case) could be important in raising the consciousness of workers was demonstrated in Poland, though it was used against the Communist authorities. Of the various unofficial publications, the most important was Robotnik (The Worker), produced as a collaborative effort by workers and intellectuals. It was concerned with workplace issues but also provided a broader critique of the Communist system. The Polish state still had a lot of coercive power at its disposal – as it was to demonstrate in December 1981–and it caused some surprise in the outside world that the authorities did not crack down harder on the growth of independent political movements and unofficial publications between 1976 and the birth of Solidarity in 1980. KOR activists were harassed by the security police and some of them were dismissed from their jobs, but they were not imprisoned.¹⁴

A number of reasons for the relative restraint may be adduced. Within the political elite there were hard-liners who were urging stronger action, but Gierek knew that if he gave in to their demands he would be weakening his own position. That had rested on an element of dialogue with the society, rather than on coercion alone. At least as significantly, there was the problem of Western reaction. This was partly but not simply a matter of Poland having been a party to the Helsinki accords of 1975 (discussed in Chapter 23), by which it was pledged to observe human rights. That did not prevent other European Communist states, including the Soviet Union, from taking more resolute action against the purveyors of samizdat. The Polish leadership were, however, aware that a sharp response, involving further financial pressure, could be expected from the Carter administration in Washington to any internal crackdown. Carter’s National Security Adviser was Zbigniew Brzezinski, who took a close interest in Eastern Europe as a whole and the land of his birth in particular. Poland had become more dependent on Western reaction than other East European Communist states because of its indebtedness to Western financial institutions.

Moreover, in the second half of the 1970s, the economy was in dire straits. With prices still on hold, shortages were increasing and inflation was rising rapidly. The imprisonment of well-known people would have had an adverse effect on the Polish government’s standing in the West at a time when it could ill afford the economic repercussions.¹⁵ Within Poland, the Catholic Church – a stronger institution enjoying independence from the state than was to be found elsewhere in Communist Europe – had since 1968 increasingly spoken up in defence of civil rights. (Earlier, more inward-looking, their emphasis had been especially on what they saw as the Church’s historic rights.) In September 1976 the Polish primate, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyski, said that it was ‘painful that workers should have to struggle for their rights against a workers’ government’.¹⁶ And he doubtless, in his own mind, put inverted commas round the last two words. Given the increasingly active role the Church was playing, and the proven readiness of Polish workers to take to the streets, the party leadership had reason to be concerned that a crackdown on the growing unofficial movements might provoke even more widespread domestic resistance than had greeted the price increases.

The Election of a Polish Pope

To add to the Gierek leadership’s troubles, a dramatic election in Rome transformed the psychological atmosphere in Poland to the disadvantage of the Communist authorities. On 16 October 1978, Politburo member Stanisław Kania telephoned Gierek to give him the bad news that the Archbishop of Kraków (and former professor at the Catholic University of Lublin), Karol Wojtyła, had been elected pope. ‘Holy Mother of God!’ was the response of the first secretary of Poland’s Communist party.¹⁷ For a Pole to become the first non-Italian pope in four and a half centuries was a matter of enormous national pride and widespread rejoicing. Not, however, within the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party. Although the party leadership had to put a brave public face on this remarkable outcome of the Vatican conclave, it was a blow from which they were ill equipped to recover.

The overwhelmingly non-Communist and Catholic majority of the population of Poland, including the opposition activists, were given a strong sense that God was on their side. This was magnified by the nine-day triumphal visit that Pope John Paul II (as he had become) paid to his native country in June 1979. Millions turned out to hear him speak at open-air services – almost two million in Kraków alone. As Timothy Garton Ash observed: ‘For nine days the state virtually ceased to exist, except as a censor doctoring the television coverage. Everyone saw that Poland is not a communist country – just a communist state.’¹⁸ The Pope’s reception in Poland was viewed with some alarm not only by the Polish Communist party leadership but also in the Soviet Union. Its positive impact was felt most strongly in the Baltic republics of the USSR, especially Lithuania. Many Lithuanians travelled close enough to the Polish border to be able to watch the Pope’s triumphal return to his homeland on Polish television.¹⁹ While that did not give a complete picture of the extent of his rapturous reception, it was much fuller than anything available in the Soviet mass media.

The campaign against revisionism as well as ‘Zionism’ in Poland in 1968 and the crushing of the Prague Spring had, between them, reduced faith in reform coming from within the Communist party. What hope remained of that was further reduced when promises made by Gierek were not kept. These included the pledge to allow the building of a monument to the workers who were killed on the Baltic coast in December 1970 and the promise to make the official trade unions more responsive to workers’ interests and demands. A coalition of social groups and institutions – workers, intellectuals, and the Catholic Church, who had never before come together in a common cause in a Communist state, even in Poland – co-operated increasingly effectively. Their efforts, initially, were focused not so much on changing the system as on bypassing it. They set up alternative organizations which, they hoped, would attract increasing support and turn their official Communist counterparts into empty shells.²⁰

One key element of this was the idea of creating free trade unions. In sharp contrast with the official trade unions, they would be entirely independent of the state. They began to be set up in the late 1970s. The most important of these precursors of what was to become a mass movement in 1980-81 was the ‘Founding Committee of Free Trade Unions on the Coast’, established on May Day 1978 in the Baltic port of Gdask.²¹ Lech Walesa, an electrician who had been a strike leader in Gdansk in 1970 and was dismissed from the shipyard for his part in the protests of 1976, was one of its earliest members. Four years after that, sharp price rises once again provided the trigger for mass resistance to the Communist authorities. On 1 July 1980, the Polish government increased prices of consumer goods and deregulated a number of meat prices. They rose between 60 and 90 per cent. This followed several years of growing inequalities of income and increasing popular resentment of the privileges of the Communist party and government elite. All that added to the sense of injustice which the price rises provoked, even though from a strictly economic standpoint a reduction in the enormous subsidies was overdue.²²

A series of strikes began in July and were settled locally with the award of wage increases. Yet the strikes spread. A key moment came on 14 August, when the workers in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk downed tools. They demanded not only a substantial wage increase but the reinstatement of two fellow workers who had been dismissed for political reasons, Lech Walesa and Anna Walentynowicz. They also – once again – called for the erection of a monument to those who had been killed during the December 1970 strikes. The resistance almost collapsed when a majority of older workers on the strike committee decided on 16 August to settle for a wage increase amounting to 75 per cent of what they had demanded. The condition was that the workers must leave the shipyard by six o’clock that evening. A majority did go home, in spite of the efforts of Wałesa, who had emerged as the strike leader, to dissuade them. A determined minority, however, remained and the strike committee no longer included members who would be readily appeased by purely material concessions.

Other factories in the region, moreover, had come out on strike, most notably in Szczecin, and the last thing they wanted was capitulation by the largest shipyard, that in Gdansk. An Inter-Factory Strike Committee (MKS) of thirteen people was formed, with Wałesa as leader. Over the weekend they worked out demands which they presented in a communiqué on 18 August. They were, in the first instance, political.²³ Top of the list was an insistence on free trade unions, independent of the ruling party and of employers. The document cited Convention 87 of the International Labour Organization (ILO), to which the Polish government had signed up. Other demands included the release of all political prisoners and respect for freedom of speech and print, with no repression of independent publications. The influence of worker – intellectual co-operation and of articles which had appeared in Robotnik was evident. Specific material and local grievances were also raised in the document, but these came only after the political demands. Radical though the political issues voiced were, they did not, following debate in the MKS, include demands for the complete abolition of censorship or for free elections. The workers on the committee remained well enough aware of Poland’s position within the Soviet bloc not to wish to test to the limits the tolerance of the Soviet leadership.²⁴

The first number of a strike bulletin, Solidarno (Solidarity), was issued in the Lenin Shipyard on 22 August. That same day and the next, the Polish government, in the persons of two deputy prime ministers who had travelled to Szczecin and Gdansk, began negotiations with the MKS. On 24 August the Communist party leadership responded to what was clearly a major crisis – unrest having spread to many industrial regions, with 253 factories on strike – in a manner which had become as traditional to them as had political protest strikes by Polish workers. They made personnel changes. The prime minister Edward Babiuch was dismissed, as were a deputy prime minister and the head of the official trade unions. The same day Józef Pikowski was appointed prime minister.²⁵ He promptly promised to implement the agreements that had been reached between the government representatives and the striking workers on the Baltic coast. Already on 17 August the Pope had sent a message to Cardinal Wyszyski in which he made clear his support for the striking workers. The Polish primate’s response, however, was much more restrained. He was afraid that developments would get out of hand and that violent repression would be authorized by the party-state authorities.²⁶

Solidarity as Mass Movement

Before the end of August, more than 700,000 workers were on strike, and the Polish party leadership at a Central Committee meeting on 30 August accepted in principle the demand for free trade unions. On 5 September it was Gierek’s turn to pay the price for leading the Communist party and the country into crisis. He was removed as first secretary of the PUWP and replaced – with Soviet approval – by Stanisław Kania, who had been the Central Committee secretary supervising the security organs.²⁷ On 17 September, over thirty inter-factory strike committees from all over the country met in Gdansk. There the historic decision was taken to establish the independent trade union with the name of Solidarnoś. The growth of the movement was startling. By October 1980, Solidarity could claim three million members. By December it was over eight million. The sheer numbers presented the Polish party-state leadership with a problem on an entirely new scale. The tacit support of the Catholic Church, even though its leadership favoured caution, was also important for Solidarity. Such was the wave of enthusiasm for the new movement, led by the thirty-seven-year-old electrician from Gdansk, Wałesa, that even a third of the members of the Polish United Workers’ Party decided to be united with the workers in an entirely new way and joined Solidarity.²⁸ This was, to say the least, a flagrant breach of democratic centralism.

For a period of at least sixteen months – until December 1981–there was something close to dual power in Poland. This was reminiscent of the stand-off in Russia of 1917 between the soviets, dominated by the Bolsheviks, and the Provisional Government. But the roles were reversed. The challenge in Poland was to a Communist state and it was coming from anti-Communist workers. Moreover, the participation of the working class in what became known as the Polish Revolution of 1980–81 was vastly greater even in absolute numbers, and certainly as a proportion of the population, than the part played by workers in bringing the Bolsheviks to power. The developments in Poland in 1980–81 presented an ideological challenge, as well as a threat to the power of the party, and one which was felt acutely in Moscow. For all the talk of the ‘leading role of the working class’, whose absence in Czechoslovakia in 1968 the Kremlin could deplore, it was hard even for the most cynical propagandist to argue that workers were being bypassed in the politics of Poland. The argument became, rather, that they were being misled by counterrevolutionaries.

As early as 25 August 1980, the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union set up a commission to examine the situation in Poland. How seriously the CPSU leadership regarded the Polish events was shown by the seniority of the people who made up this body. The commission was chaired by Mikhail Suslov, the second secretary of the party, and included KGB chairman Yury Andropov, Minister of Defence Dmitry Ustinov and Foreign Minister Andrey Gromyko, as well as the head of the General Department of the Central Committee and Brezhnev’s closest associate, Konstantin Chernenko.²⁹ By 28 August, they were not only considering the possibility of military intervention in Poland but also proposing concrete measures. Troops and tank divisions were to be moved from their present locations in different parts of the Soviet Union to be in full combat readiness by the evening of the following day. Subsequently, ‘up to 100,000 reservists and 15,000 vehicles’ would be required. Later the Soviet leadership came round to the view that they should not send troops into Poland, and that it was essential that the Polish authorities themselves use whatever degree of force was required to restore the hegemony of the Communist party. There is no doubt, however, that at an early stage of the Polish crisis, a group of the most senior members of the Soviet Politburo had put the invasion option firmly on the table.³⁰

The Soviet leadership were acutely concerned not only about what was happening in Poland itself but about its possible effect in other Communist countries. A secret report in late October for the Secretariat of the CPSU Central Committee noted that even in the Soviet Union, ‘work stoppages and other negative incidents’ had ‘substantially increased’ since August.³¹ These were, however, isolated incidents and the Soviet authorities did not experience difficulties remotely comparable to that of the Polish party in dealing with them. In fact, in no other Communist country was a serious independent union, with a mass following, created. Since other European Communist states were being asked to help Poland economically – and thus prop up the party leadership – there was even some popular resentment in those countries of the work stoppages in Poland.³²

The Soviet leadership were already in the autumn of 1980 discussing the likely need for martial law in Poland. In the Polish Politburo, Kania mooted it as a last resort and said it was something they had to prepare for, should the need arise. Yet while this was going on, Solidarity’s political position was being strengthened. On 10 November 1980, the Polish Supreme Court registered it as a legally independent organization and confirmed that it did not need to include an acceptance of the leading role of the PUWP in its charter. As a result of this major concession, Solidarity withdrew its latest strike threat.³³ In late November, Erich Honecker, who had succeeded Ulbricht as the Communist leader of East Germany, made clear his determination to play the same role in relation to Poland as Ulbricht had played regarding Czechoslovakia twelve years earlier. In a letter to Brezhnev dated 26 November 1980, Honecker called for a meeting of the leaders of the European Communist states to consider what action they should take collectively against this latest threat of counterrevolution. Every delay, he said, was ‘equivalent to death – the death of socialist Poland’. He said that ‘Comrades Husák and Zhivkov have also expressed the desire that we urgently meet to discuss this issue’ in the belief that ‘collective advice and possible assistance from Comrade Kania’s allies can only help’.³⁴

Brezhnev acceded to the request, and when the leaders met in Moscow on 5 December, not only those mentioned by Honecker were present, but also Kania himself, the Hungarian party leader János Kádár, and the Romanian leader Nicolae Ceauescu. Honecker was especially alarmist, saying that ‘the survival of socialism in Poland is in acute danger’ and that the Polish Supreme Court decision had ‘resulted in a rapid escalation of counterrevolutionary activities and a massive deterioration of the situation’.³⁵ Ceauescu chided Kania for having shown insufficient determination in combating ‘anti-socialist, counterrevolutionary elements’, and added: ‘We also do not understand how it was possible for so-called independent free unions to be established.’ They were, however, now a reality which had to be taken into consideration. He emphasized non-intervention, saying that ‘the Polish comrades’ must secure ‘the socialist construction of Poland on their own and in their own ways’.³⁶ Brezhnev was cautious enough to say that a confrontation with the Polish Church ‘would only worsen the situation’ and that an attempt should be made to influence ‘moderate circles within the Catholic Church in our direction’. Nevertheless, he added: ‘A terrible danger hovers over socialism in Poland. The enemy has managed to open a rift between the party and a major segment of the workers.’ He paraphrased an interview given by Lech Walesa as saying: ‘I brought Gierek to power and I deposed him, and I can also bring the new leadership down, if I want to.’ Brezhnev did not advocate intervention by other Warsaw Pact countries in Poland, warning rather of Western ‘interference in internal Polish affairs’. Stressing, however, the Soviet commitment to Poland remaining a Communist state, he added: ‘We have made it clear to them that neither Poland’s communists nor the friends and allies of Poland would allow them to tear Poland out of the socialist community. It has been and will be an inseparable member of the political, economic and military system of socialism.’³⁷

Less than two weeks later, on the tenth anniversary of the December 1970 strike, the memorial which workers on the Baltic coast had long demanded, in honour of those who were killed, was finally dedicated in front of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk. Notwithstanding the pressure from Moscow calling for no more concessions to Solidarity, the event was attended by government and PUWP officials. Warnings from the Soviet Union and from leaders of other Warsaw Pact countries continued unremittingly for the next year, but during that time Solidarity continued to defy the efforts of the Polish party leadership to curtail its progress by all means short of the declaration of martial law. At its height, Solidarity had a membership of ten million in a country whose total population was under forty million. (This, nevertheless, made Poland by a large margin the most populous country in Eastern Europe.) The counter pressures to those of the Soviet Union – from Washington – continued uninterrupted in spite of a change of government. The Carter presidency – with its stress on human rights and its Polish-American National Security Adviser, Brzezinski – was succeeded in January 1981 by the Reagan administration, which, across the board, took a harder anti-Communist line than its predecessor.

After the experience of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, there could be no illusions that the United States – still less any other Western country – would intervene militarily on behalf of the Poles, should there be a Soviet invasion. The ‘Brezhnev doctrine’, enunciated in 1968, which held that other ‘socialist’ states had the right and duty to defend socialism in any part of the ‘Socialist Commonwealth’ where it might be threatened, was, however, still operative. Neither the Polish leadership nor the population as a whole could assume that there would not be a Soviet military intervention in the last resort. As we have seen, preparatory measures for an invasion had been put in place as early as August 1980. For the Soviet leaders, however, Poland was a special case. The size of the country, the fact that a vast oppositional organization was already mobilized, the tense relations with the Reagan administration, the consideration that the Soviet Union was engaged in a ‘peace offensive’ in Western Europe, and the fact that Soviet troops were already having a hard time in Afghanistan were among the major reasons why the Commission on Poland of the Soviet Politburo turned almost as strongly against Soviet invasion as they were for the imposition of martial law by the Polish authorities themselves.³⁸ There remained, nevertheless, certain circumstances in which a Soviet military intervention might have taken place. When the Polish Ministry of Internal Affairs and the general staff of the Polish army deliberated on preparations for martial law in March 1981, one scenario they considered was that workers might occupy their factories in a general strike and that there might be ‘attacks on party and administration buildings’. Should that be the case, ‘assistance from the Warsaw Pact is not ruled out’. Those conclusions were endorsed by their Soviet counterparts.³⁹

In February 1981 General Wojciech Jaruzelski, who had been minister of defence since 1968, became prime minister. At the same time, Mieczysaw Rakowski, the editor of the journal Polityka, and a reformer within limits, became a deputy prime minister. The appointment of Jaruzelski was reassuring for the Soviet leadership, for he had trained in a Soviet officers’ school during the Second World War (having earlier, at the age of sixteen, been one of the Poles deported to the Soviet Union for forced labour). He took part in the Soviet-sponsored Polish First Army’s liberation of his native country from Nazi occupation. A fluent Russian-speaker, he was initially trusted by the Soviet leadership.⁴⁰ With his dark glasses and ramrod-stiff back (the former the result of an eye ailment and the latter from constantly wearing a brace on account of a serious back injury), he was a somewhat enigmatic figure. On the other side of the coin from his Soviet connections, he was from a Polish gentry family, with a tradition of army service, and had attended a prominent Jesuit school. He had a deserved reputation for fighting corruption in the army and for being free of any greed or corruption himself. Most Poles – like the Soviet leadership – initially welcomed his appointment.⁴¹

At different times, however, Jaruzelski was to disappoint both the Soviet Politburo and the Polish citizenry as he tried to walk a tightrope between their conflicting demands. From early in his prime ministership he was preparing for the eventuality of martial law. Indeed, he and Kania in March 1981 presented plans for its imposition to the Soviet leadership. Nevertheless, this was to be a last resort. Jaruzelski’s strong preference was to reach a modus vivendi with Solidarity. Jaruzelski and Lech Walesa had several meetings in the course of 1981. While the Soviet leadership, for their part, did not wish to assume the military burden and economic costs of invading Poland, they took pains to remind Poles of what had happened in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Warsaw Pact manoeuvres began in Poland on 17 March 1981 and, as had occurred in Czechoslovakia, were extended beyond the date at which they were due to end. At a meeting of the Soviet Politburo on 2 April, Brezhnev reported on his latest telephone conversation with Kania, who was still First Secretary of the Polish Communist party. Kania had complained that at a recent Central Committee plenum he had been criticized by hard-liners. Brezhnev told his Politburo colleagues: ‘I immediately said to him, “They acted correctly. They should not just have critized you but taken a cudgel to you. Then perhaps you would understand.” These were literally my words.’⁴²

Deadlock continued, however, for many more months. There was debate within Solidarity on whether their revolution should continue to be self-limiting.⁴³ The desire, ultimately, among the overwhelming majority of their members was that they should come to power, replacing the Communist regime. However, they had to keep in mind what post-war history had suggested was a real possibility, namely the Soviet army crossing the border into Poland. Thus, they stopped short of demanding fully fledged political democracy, but insisted on maintaining their freedom as a mass movement. Solidarity held a national congress at Gdansk in September 1981, while nearby Soviet naval manoeuvres took place in the Gulf of Gdansk.⁴⁴ In some of the documents they approved, Solidarity delegates threw caution to the winds. One such was a ‘Message to the Working People of Eastern Europe’, which stated: ‘We support those among you who have decided on the difficult road of struggle for free trade unions. We believe that it will not be long before your and our representatives can meet to exchange our trades union experiences.’⁴⁵ At a meeting of the Soviet Politburo less than a week later, Brezhnev was the first to refer to that appeal to East European workers adopted by the Solidarity congress. He said: ‘It is a dangerous and provocative document. It does not contain many words but they all strike at one point. Its authors want to stir up sedition in the socialist countries and rouse up groups of various kinds of apostates.’⁴⁶

Martial Law

Transcripts of meetings of the Soviet and East European leaders, especially those of the Soviet Politburo, show a growing impatience with Kania, in particular, but also with Jaruzelski, who in their view were vacillating in the face of the growing boldness of Solidarity. One response came when Kania, who had been much criticized by Polish as well as Soviet hard-liners, was dismissed as first secretary of the party by the Central Committee of the PUWP in mid-October 1981. He was replaced by Jaruzelski, who continued to be prime minister, minister of defence and chairman of the National Defence Committee. Before that month was out, Brezhnev and Andropov were complaining in the Soviet Politburo that Jaruzelski had done nothing ‘constructive’ or new. Making it clear that there were those in the Polish leadership who would welcome ‘military aid from the fraternal countries’, Andropov, however, said to Brezhnev: ‘we must firmly stick to your line–not to introduce our troops into Poland’. Even more significantly, the minister of defence, Dmitry Ustinov, was firmly against military intervention. With some understatement he said: ‘They, the Poles, are not ready to receive our troops.’⁴⁷

Martial law in Poland was finally imposed in the early hours of the morning of 13 December 1981. At 3 a.m., Wałesa was awoken and taken into custody, and several thousand Solidarity activists were arrested the same day. Some of the leaders of Solidarity who escaped arrest helped to organize strikes which took place in more than 250 factories and in other institutions, including universities. Nine workers, resisting martial law at a Silesian coal mine, were shot. The official death toll as a result of the imposition of martial law reached seventeen. The whole operation was conducted by the Polish army and Ministry of the Interior troops, although the Russian commander-in-chief of the Warsaw Pact forces, Marshal Viktor Kulikov, was in Poland during the days of the crackdown. Some 80,000 Polish soldiers, 1,600 tanks and 1,800 armoured vehicles took part in the operation, which was conducted so effectively that, as a mass movement, Solidarity did not emerge again until the late 1980s, when fundamental change was already under way in Moscow.

Yet three days before Jaruzelski introduced martial law, the Soviet Politburo were quite uncertain whether he would do it. Andropov said that even though the Polish Politburo had made a unanimous decision on the introduction of martial law, Jaruzelski appeared to be still vacillating. There was some discussion about Jaruzelski’s claim that Marshal Kulikov had spoken about involving Warsaw Pact forces. Andropov said: ‘If Comrade Kulikov actually spoke about the introduction of troops then I consider that he did so incorrectly. We cannot risk that.’ Andropov, remarkably, went significantly further and said that ‘even if Poland comes under the authority of Solidarity’, there should be no military intervention. Strengthening the Soviet Union, and avoiding ‘economic and political sanctions’ by ‘the capitalist countries’, was more important. Suslov, who had chaired the Politburo’s Commission on Poland for the past sixteen months, spoke equally adamantly against Soviet military intervention, saying: ‘If troops are introduced, that will mean a catastrophe. I think that we all share a unanimous opinion here that there can be no discussion of any introduction of troops.’⁴⁸ The Soviet leadership had shied away from action which a little over a year earlier they had come close to taking. Ultimately, therefore, the decision to introduce martial law was one which the Polish Communist party leadership took themselves. They had, of course, been under colossal pressure from the Soviet Union and from other East European Communist leaders to do this. Although martial law was described by the new Polish primate, Cardinal Glemp (who had succeeded Cardinal Wyszyski in the summer of 1981, following the latter’s death), as a ‘lesser evil’,⁴⁹ the unspoken greater evil of Soviet occupation had ceased to be an imminent danger. Glemp, of course, was not to know that.

Martial law was suspended on 31 December 1982 and officially terminated on 21 July 1983. Those who had been imprisoned on the night of its imposition, including Wałesa, were at various times released. To the embarrassment of the PUWP leadership, Wałesa in 1983 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. A gradual relaxation in Polish society recommenced. Pope John Paul II was, for example, allowed to make a pilgrimage to Poland in June 1983 and was able to insist, in the face of official resistance, on meeting with Lech Walesa He did so again in 1987.⁵⁰ Cardinal Glemp, in contrast with the Pope, was publicly critical of Solidarity. The Church itself was divided between those who were prepared to strike a bargain with the state – political acquiescence in return for the building of new churches – and those who wished to keep alive the spirit of Solidarity. Prominent among the latter was the Warsaw priest Father Jerzy Popieuszko, who was, as a consequence, murdered by state security officers in 1984. This, however, had been done without the knowledge of Jaruzelski, and the four security policemen who had committed the outrage were tried and imprisoned in 1985. The fact that the trial was held in public, and widely reported on national television, was part of a significant process of liberalization which Jaruzelski had initiated.⁵¹ Nevertheless, until well into the perestroika period in the Soviet Union, Solidarity was no longer a mass movement, but had to live a subdued, underground existence, holding meetings in church halls. It was not until August 1988, with a wave of strikes taking place, that the Polish government offered to open talks with Wałesa on the legalization of Solidarity if he would get the strikers back to work!⁵².

That remarkable turnaround in Solidarity’s fortunes was a result, partly, of Poland’s grim economic circumstances. It depended even more, however, on the fundamental change which was by then under way in Moscow. For a period of a year and a half in 1980–81, Solidarity had transformed social and political life in Poland and alarmed Communist rulers throughout Europe. Yet even in Poland, the forces of coercion at the disposal of the state authorities had turned out to be enough to crush Solidarity as a mass movement once the leadership of the country had decided that this was a ‘lesser evil’. For them, unlike the Catholic Church, the greater evil was Poland ceasing to be in any sense a Communist state. And for all they knew, that might lead to the additional evil of a Soviet invasion. By 1989, Solidarity was once again at the centre of Polish national life. For Poland itself, the significance of Solidarity can hardly be overstated. There was, however, no causal link between the political achievements of Solidarity at the beginning of the 1980s and the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe at the end of that decade. The example of Solidarity, which began as an independent trade union and then became a mass political movement, was not followed in any other country in the world.