The command economy of a centrally planned socialist system imposed on Poland from Moscow after the Second World War was in free fall long before 1980; yet the price increases for meat and basic foods on 1 July 1980 had immense significance for Poland. Meat prices had long ceased to be a mere matter of supply and demand. The price stability of meat and other foodstuffs had become the guarantee of socio-economic stability. It was the bottom line in a compact with the working class, an implicit promise that meat prices would be held at 1970 levels, but the compact went back earlier than that.
In Poznan in June 1956, the workers at the Stalin Engineering Works (invariably referred to by non-Communists as the Cegielski Works) took to the streets to protest at an economic situation that had been deteriorating for years and had now become unbearable. The ever-growing crowd held up rough home-made banners and placards that proclaimed ‘Bread and Freedom’.
Tanks were brought out against the crowd. Machine guns began to spray the streets. It was two days before the city was calm again. At least fifty-four people had been killed and hundreds injured.
At the time, Poznan was the biggest confrontation that Communism had faced since the end of the Second World War and to Poland it was a defining moment in the country’s history. Apart from the deaths and the injuries there were the inevitable arrests and imprisonments; but the Communists learnt a basic truth: you can imprison a man but not the idea he has expressed.
On 12 December 1970, in the run-up to Christmas, First Secretary Gomulka went on television and radio to broadcast news of price increases. He blandly reassured the nation that the average increase would ‘only be eight per cent’ but as always with a politician, particularly a Communist politician, the devil was in the detail. The price of flour was to be increased by sixteen per cent, sugar by fourteen per cent and meat by seventeen per cent. On the following Monday 3,000 workers from the Lenin shipyards at Gdansk marched on the Communist Party Committee building in the city demanding the increases be withdrawn. Their demands were dismissed and they were ordered back to work. They were not in the mood to go quietly either to the docks or anywhere else. Furious crowds of workers began to roam the streets of Gdansk; the city militia could not control the situation and the general tumult grew.
The following day the protests spread to Gdynia, Szczecin and Elblag. The army and the police, acting under specific orders from Central Government, began machine-gunning the protestors, killing forty-three shipyard workers, and over 1,000 were injured, 200 of them seriously. Polish soldiers and armed police had yet again killed Polish workers although many, such as those murdered in Gdynia, had been attempting to obey the TV appeal of Deputy Prime Minister Stanislaw Kociolek to return to work. The army had been standing on the bridge near Gdynia Stocznia railway where the workers had to pass on their way to the Paris Commune Shipyard and they were prevented by the army from going to work. More workers arrived by the minute from the railway station; those at the back unaware of the violence began impatiently to shuffle forward. At five minutes past six in the morning the army opened up with machine gun fire. Eighteen were killed in Gdynia that day, thirteen near the shipyard and five more in the streets. The youngest was fifteen, the eldest thirty-four.
Confronted with a country on the brink of national insurrection Gomulka was rushed to hospital on December 20 ‘suffering from a slight stroke’ and Edward Gierek replaced him as First Secretary of the regime. While visiting a sick priest in a Cracow hospital, Karol Wojtyla heard of Gomulka’s removal. Father Jan Jakubczyk recounted the statement he had heard from a radio bulletin. When he had finished, Wojtyla remained silent for a long time before observing, ‘Indeed God acts in mysterious ways.’
God’s Church had been absent in Gdansk, Gdynia, Szczecin and Elblag. Also missing from the barricades were the intellectuals. They stayed firmly behind doors in their polytechnics and universities. This was from first to last a protest by the workers. The Christmas holidays inevitably resulted in a temporary halt in the protests. Among those who had been given an opportunity to reflect was Primate Cardinal Wyszynski. Subsequently he spoke to Karol Wojtyla to ensure they were both going to preach the same sermon from the pulpit. For Wojtyla it would be something of a maiden political speech, the first time in public that he had uttered from a pulpit criticism of the Communist regime. Wyszynski appealed for extensive reforms and listed six basic rights that every Polish citizen deserved, including ‘The right to truthful information. To free expression of views and demands. The right to food. To a decent living wage’. He made the various fundamental requests calmly and at the same time urged restraint on the workers. He was acutely aware that Poland’s fate was on a knife-edge.
Wojtyla in Cracow also talked of the events on the Gdansk coast. ‘These were tragic events. The measure of the tragedy which played itself out in these days is that Polish blood was shed by Poles!’ He too listed the six demands: ‘the right to food, the right to freedom . . . an atmosphere of genuine freedom, untrammelled and not questioned or threatened in any practical sense; an atmosphere of inner freedom, the freedom from the fear of what may befall me, if I act this way or go to that place or appear somewhere.’
The torch of protest in 1956 had been wrongly thought by both regime and Catholic Church to have been extinguished. Now it had reignited spontaneously in the shipyards and factories in 1970. The consciousness of the workers had risen and this time the events would not be airbrushed out of the nation’s history. One young electrician in particular, a member of the Lenin Shipyard strike committee, was deeply committed to the cause of ensuring that the dead would be remembered; his name was Lech Walesa.
In June 1976 the Communist regime in Poland demonstrated that like Gomulka before them they had forgotten what happened when central government increased food prices. As a result, across the country workers went on immediate strike, the Baltic shipyards were once again occupied. Strike committees were formed.
From the Ursus tractor factory close to Warsaw several thousand workers gave the industrial action an international flavour. They marched to the transcontinental railway lines and stood in front of the Paris to Moscow express.
In Radom, to the southwest of the capital, the workers elected to stage a more traditional form of protest. In an action reminiscent of the initial protests in Poznan during 1956 strikers marched to the Communist party headquarters and set light to it. The same evening an apprehensive Prime Minister Jaroszewicz announced that the price increases had been withdrawn. But with police and security forces there is usually a payment to be exacted, particularly when a protest is successful.
This time in Radom and Ursus the workers were forced to run the gauntlets through two lines of truncheon-wielding ‘comrades’. The police with the gallows humour beloved of police officers everywhere had called the gauntlet ‘the path of health’. Severe fines and prison sentences were imposed by the courts and many thousands were fired but the prices stayed down. The Alice in Wonderland economics of Poland were allowed to stagger on. Prices remained frozen at the levels of 1967. The government continued to buy off workers with wage increases paid for with huge foreign loans. It had no hope of paying back these loans from export earnings since almost no one overseas wanted Polish cars or machine tools.
Unlike the protests of 1970, the June 1976 clashes between the workers of Radom and Ursus inspired a number of Poland’s intellectuals to get involved. In November a Committee for the Defence of the Workers (Komitet Obrony Robotnikow) – KOR – was formed. The Catholic counterpart – KIK – which had Wojtyla as its chaplain began to get actively involved in helping individuals who were being exploited by the state. Rapid-response teach-in groups whose agenda was to counter Communist propaganda with factual information began to hold seminars in some of Cracow’s churches and monasteries.
Ever the pragmatic man, at the end of the year that had yet again seen wide civil unrest, Wojtyla in his New Year’s Eve sermon reminded his listeners of their close proximity to Russia.
‘One may not be a thoughtless Pole: our geographical position is too difficult. Thus every Pole has the obligation to act responsibly, especially at the present time. But we have to fight for the fundamental right of defining “Who is the nation? What is the State?” as we did during the first months of this year.’
Now, in 1980, the Communist regime demonstrated yet again their collective inability to learn from their own errors.
Secretary Gierek calculated that any hostile reaction to the increases could be bought off by wage increases to selected industries such as the miners, the shipyard workers and other key sections – the old successful Communist technique of divide and rule. He was wrong.
Three institutions in particular made sure that the protests of 1980 were different from the ones that came before it: the KOR, which played a crucial role during the second half of 1980; secondly, Lech Walesa – the young electrician who had been a member of the Lenin shipyard strike committee in 1970; the third human element in the extraordinary unfolding drama was the Polish Catholic Church in the shape of Primate Stefan Wyszynski and his bishops. In previous confrontations with the regime, the workers and the intellectuals had failed to unite but after the vicious clashes between the workers and the regime at Radom and Ursus in June 1976, a number of leading intellectuals had felt impelled to get involved in the struggle.
The founding members of KOR included former Communist party member Jacek Kuron, the Jewish historian Adam Michnik, and a long-time non-communist dissident, Jan Jozef Lipski. KOR began to establish direct contact with the workers and collect money to aid families where the breadwinner had been dismissed, arrested, injured or killed. KOR also raised funds to pay for defence lawyers. Money was collected not only within Poland but also in the United States and throughout Western Europe. Overseas bank accounts were established and funds were subsequently sent to KOR by a variety of means. After June 1980 other contributors to KOR, the various workers’ committees and the Polish Catholic Church included the Carter administration through CIA channels and the Vatican via Roberto Calvi’s access to a wide variety of money-laundering channels.
The Vatican involvement in this illicit and illegal transfer of money was not without benefit for the President of the Vatican Bank, Bishop Marcinkus. The emergence of Solidarity and its need for foreign support, legal and illegal, occurred at the same time that Cardinal Casaroli heard from his contact in SISMI, the Italian Intelligence Service for Information and Military Security, General Pietro Musumeci, head of the internal section, who revealed a great deal about Calvi, Sindona and inevitably Bishop Marcinkus. However, Musumeci had a particular problem when it came to enlightening the Vatican Secretary of State on the criminal activities of P2 members and the Head of the Vatican Bank. The General was also a member of P2.
Musumeci was far too bright to give Marcinkus a totally clean bill of health; consequently while holding back the full horror story he gave Casaroli more than enough facts and details to ensure what should have been an instant vacancy for the post of President of the Vatican Bank. Cardinal Casaroli already had the very detailed dossier prepared by Cardinal Vagnozzi, but that had not been enough for the Pope to remove Marcinkus. Now armed with additional information, Casaroli tried again. To his astonishment the Pope still refused to dismiss Paul Marcinkus. ‘At this particular time, Eminence . . . With uncertainties in Poland . . . the bishop’s invaluable contribution . . .’ The Polish connection had served Marcinkus well in the past with Wojtyla. Yet again now it saved his neck. The Pope once more protected a man guilty on all the available evidence of a vast array of serious financial crimes. The Pope could not justify his decision on the grounds that Marcinkus was uniquely placed to funnel aid to Poland. Apart from the sources already referred to above there were plenty of alternatives. Other organisations began to emerge in the years 1976 to 1980; sometimes their agendas converged, sometimes the various groups bitterly opposed each other. KOR and ‘Young Poland’ shared common aspirations and by 1978 were secretly funding the underground Free Baltic Trade Union whose members included future leaders of Solidarity such as Lech Walesa and Anna Walentynowicz. The open activism of KOR was particularly effective, and the organisation attempted as far as possible to base its actions on existing rights that the regime had chosen historically to disregard. These rights were guaranteed by the Polish Constitution and by the Helsinki Agreement which all the Soviet bloc countries had signed in August 1975. KOR also relied on the fundamental labour rights again recognised by the bloc through various international agreements registered with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in Geneva. The ILO would provide another invaluable conduit for funds and equipment to help the emergent Solidarity. These very astute tactics by KOR, to act within a range of legally recognised rights, would form the model for the Czech dissident movement, Charter 77.
Joe Hill, a legendary trade union activist, memorably proclaimed to his followers as he prepared to face a firing squad in Salt Lake City in 1915, ‘Don’t mourn. Organise.’ KOR and the other organisations took his appeal to heart in the years leading to July 1980. Many of their members were frequently beaten up, arrested and imprisoned and denied a range of fundamental rights. Their persistence against formidable odds is testimony to their courage, commitment and sheer Polish bloody-mindedness.
Lech Walesa did not create Solidarity single-handedly, any more than he single-handedly rallied and organised workers or was sole leader of the strikers. Indeed some of his closest allies would come to regard Walesa as a Communist infiltrator. But Walesa gave the struggle at a crucial period a human face, a personality. The workers in the Gdansk shipyards could relate to and identify with him but so too could the Western media and the watching world. Today, more than a quarter of a century later, few outside Poland can recall other names, such as Anna Walentynowicz, Joanna and Andrzej Gwiazda, Alina Pienkowska, Bogdan Borusewicz, Bogdan Lis, Ewa Ossowska. There were many others who also made a valuable contribution to the ultimate victory.
When the price increases were announced on 1 July there were immediate work stoppages in protest. The protests rapidly spread; on 11 July the senior managers of various plants such as steelworks and tractor factories were flown to Warsaw. Gierek and fellow members of the government informed the managers that the tried and trusted tactics were again to be used: key industries would be given wage increases of ten per cent or more. Containers crammed with meat were to be rapidly sent to the major hot spots. It would be the old Communist divide-and-rule formula – literally beefed up.
What made these protests different was that the information network ensured the news flew across the country. The time-honoured strategy of the Communist regime – a total news blackout – was defeated by a single telephone in a Warsaw flat where KOR member Jacek Kuron, helped by a student of English from the Cracow Student Solidarity group, kept a round-the-clock strike watch and acted as a clearing house for accurate news. As the news spread, so did the work stoppages and strikes. From Kuron’s apartment the information went out not only to colleagues manning other phones all over Poland but to Western correspondents and Western radio stations. Stations such as the BBC World Service and Radio Free Europe in Munich had the information on the airways in Polish within hours. By the end of the first week in August there had been 150 strikes.
Nonetheless, Edward Gierek flew off for his annual holiday in the Crimea. Confident that his philosophy of divide-and-rule would win the day, he was able to reassure one of his holiday companions, Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev, that the Polish Politburo had the situation well in hand. A week later, 14 August, workers at the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk began a sit-in strike within the yards. Their initial demands were modest: they wanted the reinstatement of one popular woman worker, Anna Walenty-nowicz, and a thousand-zloty compensatory pay rise to offset the price increases. These limited ambitions were to escalate to twenty-one demands that included the right to form free trade unions, the right to strike, respect for the freedom of speech, print and publication and a range of freedoms that would extinguish the Polish Communist Central Committee’s control of the country.
On 15 August Primate Wyszynski had made no reference in his sermon to the events unfolding in Gdansk and other cities but chose instead to celebrate the anniversary of Marshal Pilsudski’s victory over the Russians in 1920. Two days later on 17 August, aware that the Polish government was still refusing to conduct open negotiations with the strikers’ committee headed by Lech Walesa, the Primate addressed the industrial reality. During a sermon at the Marian shrine in Lower Silesia he talked of the ‘nation’s torment and unrest’ and paid tribute to ‘those workers who are striving for social, moral, economic and cultural rights’. The Communist-controlled television network edited out those parts of his sermon but gratefully ran on the news another part that called for the workers to show ‘calm and reason’.
On 20 August during a general audience of predominantly Polish visitors at the Vatican, the Pope spoke in his native Polish as he recited two sacred prayers entreating God to protect the motherland. He concluded:
‘These prayers say how much we here in Rome are united with our fellow Poles and with the Church in particular, whose problems are close to the heart and for which we seek the Lord’s aid.’
The same day he sent messages to Cardinal Wyszynski in Warsaw, Cardinal Macharski in Cracow and Bishop Stefan Barela in Czestochowa. In all three letters the Pope cautiously aligned the Catholic Church with the strikers.
‘I pray that, once again, the Episcopate with the Primate at its head may be able to aid the nation in its struggle for daily bread, social justice, and the safeguarding of its inviolable right to its own way of life and achievement.’
There was a great deal more at stake by 20 August than the generalities outlined in the Pope’s letters to his bishops in Poland. Though a large photograph of the Pope was tied to the gates of the Gdansk shipyard, he was, in reality, an onlooker viewing a revolution unfolding in his homeland from a distance. Three days before his message, the Strike Committee had presented the historic twenty-one demands that would change the course of Poland’s history. The bishops in Poland were equally hesitant to confront the realities of what was at stake. The day that the Pope had sent his carefully worded letters, fourteen of the dissident leaders, including KOR leaders Kuron and Michnik, were arrested. By now the KOR information service had gathered a life force of its own and the arrests had little effect.
On 22 August Deputy Prime Minister Jagielski finally agreed to open negotiations. Three days earlier, the strike had been near total collapse but now the workers had achieved a significant breakthrough. Their position had gained strength when it became clear that the Warski shipyard in Szczecin rejected the Gierek gambit of a ten per cent pay rise and embraced the same demands as Gdansk. A third inter-factory strike committee had been formed in the important northern industrial city of Elblag. It represented over 10,000 workers and sent a delegation to Gdansk to declare they would be guided by decisions made within the Lenin shipyard by Walesa and his fellow negotiators. Other strikes were occurring in Warsaw, Ursus, Nowa Huta, Bydgoszcz and Torun. It was beginning to take on the appearance of a national unified movement. On 22 August, the same day that the regime had finally opened negotiations with the strike committee, a group of intellectuals arrived in Gdansk to assist and advise the workers. Among their number were Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the editor of the Catholic monthly Wiez-Link, and Bronislaw Geremek, an outstanding medievalist. It speaks eloquently of the shrewdness of the poorly educated Walesa that he knew the value of such men. ‘We are only workers,’ Walesa told them. ‘These government negotiators are educated men. We need someone to help us.’ It was the birth of what would become known as the ‘Commission of Experts’.
The following day Bishop Kaczmarek, who had negotiated the right for a daily Mass to be performed within the Lenin shipyard, issued a public statement of support for the workers as the discussions got under way, with the strike committee on one side of the table and, sitting opposite, a government commission led by Deputy Prime Minister Jagielski. Meanwhile, First Secretary Edward Gierek, seeking to neutralise the Catholic Church, had a four-hour meeting with Cardinal Wyszynski. He asked the Primate to help to defuse a potentially explosive situation. Everyone was acutely aware of the possibility of Soviet intervention. Gierek reassured the Primate that while he remained First Secretary there would not be any force used against the ‘workers on the coast’ and even though ‘heavy pressure is being placed on us and on me personally I have no intention of capitulating’.
On 26 August with the negotiations delicately poised the Primate gave a sermon at Jasna Gora on the first day of Our Lady of Czestochowa. He appealed for ‘calm, balance, prudence, wisdom and responsibility for the whole Polish nation’. Observing that no one involved in the dispute was without fault the Cardinal urged the strikers to return to work, warning that protracted strikes posed a profound threat to the future of the nation.
Gierek subsequently observed that the Primate ‘took our side’. Much of the nation agreed. Wyszynski would later protest that his words had been twisted to convey a meaning far removed from his intention. In fact, the full speech showed a man deeply concerned that his country should learn at least some of the lessons of their own history. Referring to the heady days after the First World War, Cardinal Wyszynski had said, ‘Let us remember how difficult it was to regain independence after 125 years of subjugation. And as we devoted much time to domestic arguments and disputes, so a great danger threatened us and our independence.’ His explanation that his sermon was distorted by the regime was brushed to one side and the man who had done so much not just for his Church but also for his country was left damaged in the eyes of many, including at least one man who should have known better, John Paul II.
The Pope verbally flailed the Polish Primate. Relying on a garbled report of the sermon, the following day Wojtyla erupted. From the safety and comfort of his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo he dismissed Cardinal Wyszynski as an ‘old man’ who no longer had ‘a sense of orientation’ about events. The Pope did not have the faintest idea of Soviet intentions as he played the role of the brave patriot far removed from the reality of an occupied homeland complete with two resident Soviet army divisions. Instead on 27 August, he entrusted ‘the great and important problems of our country’ to Our Lady of Czestochowa.
Without any first-hand knowledge, he had railed against Poland’s Primate. An array of newly published top secret documents from the archives of the former Soviet Union and former Warsaw Pact countries confirm the wisdom and prudence of Cardinal Wyszynski, and his acute ‘sense of orientation’ about events. In contrast it was the Pope who seemed to have lost touch with the reality of life in an occupied country. The same documents also confirm that Edward Gierek had been less than truthful to Wyszynski about avoiding force. Gierek had, in fact, masterminded the creation of a task force, codename Lato-80 – summer 80. Under deputy Prime Minister, General Boguslaw Stachura, a plan was created to deploy commandos in military helicopters to storm the Lenin shipyard. This would be followed by mass arrests and undoubtedly the deaths of all the ringleaders.
Stanislaw Kania and more rational government members dismissed this bloody solution as a fantasy and asked was the General ‘also proposing to send his machine-gunning paratroopers into all of the areas of industrial unrest where the strikers were still holding out?’ Kania and the moderates were undoubtedly influenced by the Polish Catholic Church’s latest significant contribution to the crisis. A communiqué from the main Council of the Polish Episcopate headed by Wyszynski was published on 27 August. It
‘forcefully points out and reminds everyone that respect for the inalienable rights of the Nation is the condition of internal peace. Among these rights are: the right to God, to full civic freedom, including religious freedom and the free activity of the Church, to actual, and not only declared, tolerations of opinions.’
This late-20th-century equivalent of a Polish Declaration of Independence in a country occupied and assailed on all sides by the power of the Soviet Union identified a long list of fundamental rights. They included
‘. . . the right to truth . . . to daily bread . . . to individual property and to management of the land in farms including private farms . . . to a just remuneration for work . . . the right of association, to the independence of the workers’ representative organisms and self management . . .’
The powerful document created by the Primate and his bishops gave the lie to the regime’s claims that Wyszynski and the Church supported the Communist Government. It told the Primate’s critics not only in Poland but within the Vatican that the Polish Politburo and the rest of the Communist world were now confronting not a minority of Poland but the vast majority.
The Agreement, as it was always described, when it was signed and counter-signed by Lech Walesa and his team and Deputy Prime Minister Jagielski and his negotiating colleagues on the last day of August, contained phrases and demands that would have been unimaginable at the beginning of the month. ‘Independent self-governing trade unions . . . Guarantee of right to strike . . . Respect for the freedom of speech . . . Release of all political prisoners . . .’ It was an agreement widely recognised as the most significant development in Eastern Europe since the end of the Second World War.
Many could rightfully claim some of the credit for what had been achieved but the idea that John Paul II was largely responsible is a fantasy perpetrated after the event by the Vatican and a number of papal biographers – a fantasy that the Pope himself dismissed. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who, unlike the Pope or his biographers, was there at the very heart of the struggle as one of the team of key advisors to Lech Walesa and the other workers observed,
‘. . . we meant to make sure that it did not end in bloodshed. The determination of the workers to continue their peaceful attitude to any violent provocation was decisive. The role of Cardinal Wyszynski was very significant. And a part of the KOR’s role, the method that the working class used to fight, the peaceful method, was very important for avoiding bloodshed.’
As this account has demonstrated, the Pope said little publicly and not much more privately on the historic struggle throughout the entire month. Karol Wojtyla’s contribution at this time was, in fact, largely symbolic. The much-abused Cardinal Wyszynski and his bishops, however, had eventually played a key part in the drama. During the night of 17 August the Soviet press agency Tass published allegations of subversive anti-socialist elements operating on the Polish Eastern coastal region, a propaganda ploy that might well have heralded the appearance of tanks on the streets of Gdansk. Cardinal Wyszynski sent Professor Romuald Kukolwicz to the Polish Communist Party’s Politburo as his personal representative. The Professor brought with him an offer to mediate between the Government Commission and Walesa’s inter-factory strike committee. The offer was accepted and, on the morning of the 28th Kukolwicz, together with another of the Cardinal’s representatives, Professor Andrzej Swiecicki, flew to Gdansk. Professor Kukolwicz had been one of Wyszynski’s private advisors since 1972. He had been sent by the Primate to the Lenin shipyard as early as 21 August and from then on seldom left Walesa’s side. Within three days both the Szczecin and Gdansk agreements had been signed.
If Lech Walesa and his committee had been able to hear the Polish Politburo discussion shortly before the Agreement was signed they would have realised its fragility. After rejecting the suggestion to send in commandos with orders to kill all of the strike leaders the Politburo agreed in Gierek’s words to ‘choose the lesser evil, sign the agreement, then find a way to get out of it’. Such duplicity met with warm approval from their Soviet masters.
A week before the Gdansk and Szczecin Agreements were made, the Soviet Politburo set up a special commission on Poland. Its first ‘top secret’ report illustrates the deep anxiety of the Soviet Union leadership. By the time that Brezhnev, Andropov and the other senior members of the Central Committee met in early September 1980 a third agreement had been concluded between the Polish government and the inter-factory strike committee (invariably referred to by its Polish abbreviation MKS), this time on behalf of the coal miners of the Silesian town of Jastrzebie. The secret report contained the essence of the Soviets’ planned counter-attack: ‘Reclaim the positions that have been lost among the working class and the people.’ It also included more sinister strategies, wrapped up inside Politburo euphemisms: ‘If circumstances warrant, it would be advisable to use the contemplated administrative means.’
The Soviets had already pressurised the Poles to remove Prime Minister Edward Babiuch; in September Edward Gierek was also removed from office. The new Prime Minister was Jozef Pinkowski; the new First Secretary was Stanislaw Kania. He believed it necessary to plan a large-scale nationwide counter-attack on the Solidarity movement that had quickly spread so far and wide. Within sixteen days of the Gdansk Agreement, Solidarity had acquired a membership of over three million people. By 24 September the drafting of the Statutes to enact the Agreement had been completed and they were duly submitted to the Warsaw Provincial Court for ratification. Revolutionary change was not confined to the members of Solidarity: the farmers of Poland announced that they too wanted an independent self-governing trade union; so did the students and the universities and colleges and the writers, the journalists, the doctors, the architects and the economists. Solidarity was more than a new trade union: it was now a national state of mind.
It was obvious by the end of September that the old Communist techniques of procrastination, obfuscation and obstructionism were doing all they could to neuter the Agreement. While Holy Mass had been broadcast over state radio, Solidarity were still being denied access to the media. Wage increases were either slow in happening or not occurring at all and many of the other agreed points were not being implemented. As a result Solidarity called a national strike that was uniquely Polish: just one hour for Friday 3 October between noon and one o’clock in selected factories’ works departments. In certain places just one man was called out to strike for one hour, holding the national flag at the factory gate. The industrial action demonstrated that the regime and the Church had been joined by Solidarity as an organisation that commanded unswerving and national support.
In the Vatican, a hesitant Pope still needed some convincing. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, one of the council of wise men who had guided Walesa and his fellow workers through the crucial August negotiations, went to Rome in early October. It was the Pope’s first conversation with someone who had actually been in the Lenin shipyard nearly three months previously and he had urgent questions concerning Solidarity. ‘Will it last? Does this movement have a future?’ Mazowiecki reassured the Pope. ‘Yes, it will last. It has a real future.’
The Warsaw Court was still considering the ratification of the Statutes that Lech Walesa had presented when the Polish Bishops’ Conference weighed in with yet another gesture of national support: on 16 October they issued a statement calling for full implementation of what had been jointly agreed at Gdansk. Primate Wyszynski followed this up a few days later by meeting with one of the other Warsaw Solidarity leaders, Zbigniew Bujak. Giving him and the union the Church’s unconditional support the Primate declared, ‘I am with you.’ Two days later Cardinal Wyszynski flew to Rome to attend the closing sessions of the Synod on the Family and to brief the Pope.
Back in Poland, the Solidarity leaders upped the ante. Kania knew that he had the support of the Soviet leadership only to discover that, through Walesa and his committee, the private farmers were now demanding an independent trade union. Also added to the Solidarity list of demands were four other points from the summer agreements: access to the mass media, pay rises, supplies to the shops and an end to ‘repressions’ against union and opposition activists.
On the underlying issue that the agreement should not be altered and the Statutes should be legalised unchanged, both sides agreed to abide by the Supreme Court ruling on Solidarity’s appeal. When the government negotiators reneged on some of the other points which they had agreed only an hour before, a wave of fury swept through the country. Serious fissures began to appear in the previously united front that Solidarity had presented. Western observers began for the first time to write of ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’ or ‘radicals’ and ‘moderates’. With a membership of many millions, the fledgling movement contained all these categories and many more. Walesa and his Think Tank were opposed to any strike action until after the Supreme Court handed down its decision on 10 November. They did not prevail and preparations were put in hand for a national strike regardless of the decision on 12 November.
Denunciations of Solidarity by other Eastern bloc countries grew in volume and intensity. In East Germany and Czechoslovakia the media orchestrated by Honecker and Husak were particularly virulent. The words ‘violence’, ‘disruption’, ‘provocation’, ‘vandalism’ and ‘hooliganism’ were used regularly in the Czech Communist Daily Rudé Právo to describe Solidarity. Other Communist headlines suggested a giant conspiracy to get Karol Wojtyla elected Pope before orchestrating this counterrevolution in Poland. ‘Whom does Wall Street applaud? Whom does the White House applaud? With the blessing of the Vatican. Together with the BND [West German Intelligence Service] against Poland. The CIA pays for Walesa’s union.’ In the United States the CIA was giving daily reports to the President on increased Soviet military activity. Since mid-October they had noted that the Soviets appeared to be gearing a number of selected divisions in the western USSR to a state of readiness. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski (the man suspected within the Communist world to have personally orchestrated the Pope’s election) was certain that the Soviets were either going to invade Poland or orchestrate an internal coup and put a hard-line regime in control.
On 10 November the Polish Supreme Court handed down its decision. The additional clauses that had so offended Walesa and his committee were removed from the Statutes but placed instead along with the first seven points of the Gdansk Agreement as an appendix. Cardinal Wyszynski threw a celebratory party for the delighted Walesa and the other Solidarity leaders at which he talked of his experiences before the Second World War when he had been a trade union chaplain. Commenting on his trip to Rome, he told them that the Pope was now the owner of a large photo album covering key moments in the Gdansk strike. Wyszynski also offered some wise advice; referring to the regime he remarked, ‘Do not ask for too much too soon.’ He felt that the Soviets as well as the Polish Politburo might well be provoked by this particular victory; he was right. Not only Leonid Brezhnev and his Politburo but the Communist leadership throughout Eastern Europe were infuriated that the Communist Party had been relegated to being an appendix to the Statute. Brezhnev was further enraged when he learned from his ambassador in Poland, Boris Aristov, that it had been a done deal before the Supreme Court had gone through the charade of handing down its ‘independent’ decision. Aristov had personally intervened in a vain attempt to get the deal thrown out before it became public, but without success.
Solidarity promptly called off its national strike and the Western media’s response was summed up by the New York Times, which described Solidarity as ‘a powerful labor movement that had forced the government to back down’. On 12 November while addressing Polish pilgrims at the end of his weekly General Audience, the Pope said he wished ‘to express my joy over what had been accomplished in our motherland in recent days’. He sent ‘blessings from all my heart’ to the new unions. In conclusion he expressed the hope ‘that the maturity that over the past months has characterised the behaviour of our compatriots, the society, as well as the authorities will continue to prevail’.
On 15 November, the Pope and his retinue left the Vatican for his next foreign trip, a four-day visit to West Germany. The visit drew a mixed response; the official line was expressed by Karol Wojtyla’s old friend and editor Jerzy Turowicz reporting for Cracow’s Tygodnik Powszecbny who recorded that ‘the Pope’s presence wiped out worn stereotypes and changed the image of the Papacy and the Catholic Church’. His comment was true from one perspective. Ute Ranke-Heinemann, the Lutheran theologian and daughter of the former German President Gustav Heinemann, however, was one of a large number of West Germans who condemned the spending of $10 million ‘for a pious spectacle’ when the lives of so many starving human beings could be saved with that much money. She said, ‘The rights of the poor take priority over the pious curiosity of the consumer society. The new floodlights in front of the Cologne cathedral alone cost $75,000.’ Cardinal Höffner who had indeed been one of the German influences during the campaign to get Wojtyla elected, was outraged at the protests. ‘How can we speak of such a mundane thing as money in connection with the spiritual pilgrimage of the Vicar of Christ to this country?’ His intervention merely stoked the fires of complaint even higher. Both Catholic and Protestant critics cited the profligate costs of the outside altars in Cologne and Fulda at a combined cost of a further $500,000.
Against the background of these complaints, the Pope’s comments during his sermons on unemployment and the need to share the finite resources of the world in an equitable manner were received with less than whole-hearted enthusiasm. He was on stronger ground when he vowed that war would ‘never again’ tear Europe apart. Such sentiments uttered by a Pole on German soil carried a special poignancy, ‘The frightful destruction, the indescribable sufferings of so many, the contempt for man, must never be repeated again in this generation, never again either on this continent or elsewhere.’ For these observations the Pope received great applause.
A few miles away in East Germany however the leader of the Communist State and his Politburo were at that precise time urging not only their Soviet masters but also fellow Warsaw Pact members to inflict further suffering on the Polish nation.
At the beginning of November, Leonid Brezhnev had written to the First Secretaries of Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Bulgaria and Hungary, demanding that they give up a percentage of the volume of oil shipments that they were expecting to receive next year from the Soviet Union. It would instead be sold on the world market to raise hard currency for Poland and keep its economy alive. Honecker of East Germany urged Brezhnev to adopt ‘collective measures to assist our Polish friends in overcoming the crisis’. Observing that Brezhnev’s ‘timely advice’ to the Polish leadership had not had the ‘decisive influence which we had all been hoping for’, Honecker urged an immediate Soviet invasion. He had concluded several months earlier that Poland 1980 was an identical rerun of Czechoslovakia 1968. It was a conclusion shared by the leaders of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Communism had responded to the Prague Spring with a savage brutal repression. In the collective opinion of the four heads of government, Poland demanded the same response.
As new confrontations between the Polish government authorities and the unions continued to erupt with frequent sit-in strikes the temperature was raised yet again. A two-hour strike by the railway workers on 24 November particularly exercised the minds of President Brezhnev and his Politburo. As the Soviet Union had nearly half a million soldiers stationed in East Germany, without a functioning railway system through Poland they would be cut off from the motherland.
In the United States, the following day’s Alert Memorandum, the top-secret intelligence briefing for the President and approximately 150 individuals with the appropriate security clearance, made grim reading for Jimmy Carter:
‘The Polish regime faces the gravest challenge to its authority since the strikes on the Baltic coast ended in August . . . The demands of the Warsaw Solidarity chapter go far beyond what our intelligence analysts believe the regime can accept.’
It was precisely the situation that the wise Cardinal Wyszynski had warned Walesa and his committee to avoid. The intelligence briefing also reminded the President that although there was as yet no evidence of large-scale Soviet mobilisation, the military exercise of the previous month had left the Soviets well positioned to activate a rapid invasion force. All the relevant documents confirm that if indeed the Soviet army had entered Poland, the United States’ response would have been very limited. State Department documents tell of ‘the rupture of political détente . . . a reduction of East–West cooperation in Europe’.
US intelligence continued to take comfort from the lack of significant troop movements as November drew to a close. That comfort was somewhat jolted on 29 November when the commanding general of the group of Soviet Forces for East Germany announced the closure until 9 December of virtually the entire East German border with Poland. Simultaneously all East German personnel working in air defence had their leave cancelled for the same period. While the Carter administration wavered about what was the appropriate response, National Security Advisor Brzezinski was less inhibited and openly warned the media of the ‘calamitous consequences of a Soviet military intervention’.
During the first days of December President Carter wrote to British Prime Minister Thatcher, West German Chancellor Schmidt and French President Giscard D’Estaing sharing his concerns over the various activities of the Soviet and East European military forces. ‘. . . the Polish situation has entered its most critical stage . . . preparations for possible intervention have progressed further than at any previous time.’ His letter advised that the US government ‘will take every opportunity to express to the Soviet leaders our deepest concern about any possible military intervention by them into Poland’ and asked the Allied leaders to ‘consult very closely with us on your actions to prevent Soviet intervention’. The following day CIA chief Turner wrote to Carter, ‘I believe the Soviets are readying their forces for military intervention in Poland. We do not know, however, whether they have made a decision to intervene or are still attempting a political solution.’ The President, despite Brzezinski’s urgings, continued to approach the Polish crisis calmly. He was not assisted by leaks to the news media of ‘unofficial’ intelligence details on the Soviet preparations for intervention.
The pace had quickened again by 3 December with US Intelligence reporting to Carter that the Soviet forces had been alerted to a possible move within the next five days. President Carter responded with a public statement expressing ‘concern at the developments in Poland’ and a private letter to Brezhnev warning that relations with the US ‘would be adversely affected’ if force was used in Poland. But Brezhnev was not listening.
Two days later a meeting of the Warsaw Pact countries was taking place in Moscow to rubber-stamp the imminent invasion of Poland. Only two of the heads of state were opposed to Soviet intervention, the maverick Romanian leader Nicolae Ceaucescu and the Polish First Secretary Stanislaw Kania who within the forum was surrounded on all sides by seething animosity. As Honecker of East Germany, Zhivkov of Bulgaria, Husak of Czechoslovakia and Kadar of Hungary listened to Kania attempting the impossible, they saw the perfect scapegoat for all that ailed their own countries. Kania reminded his listeners of a little of the recent history of Poland, of Poznan in 1956, through to Gdansk in December 1970 and beyond to Radom and Ursus in 1976. None of those events, of course, could be laid at his door and they served to illustrate that the birth of Solidarity had followed a long period of gestation and all of it under not a Polish pope but a succession of Italians. Seeking to spike the guns of his enemies in the room, he talked of the measures currently being considered by the Polish regime, including the introduction of martial law. He revealed the operation currently being planned and implemented of arming trusted party members who would be able to function as a militia independent of the army.
‘Preparations are under way to arrest the most active counter-revolutionaries . . . The situation in “Solidarnosc” is very complicated. Its leader Walesa is really only a figurehead, although many people are working at increasing his popularity. You could say he is a cunning half-stupid person who is directed by others. People who are working together with KOR are exercising influence on Solidarnosc. We want to separate Solidarnosc from KOR. We are setting ourselves this task . . . Young people have a great deal of influence on the activity of Solidarnosc. It is no longer a “Committee for the Defence of the Workers’ Rights”; it is anarchy.’
Kania cleverly undermined the argument in favour of a Soviet invasion in a variety of ways and attempted to persude his peers that the Polish regime knew what needed to be done:
‘It would be best for Poland and best for the future of all of our socialist countries if these problems are tackled internally without “assistance” from its freedom-loving neighbours.’
Many of the speakers, not least President Brezhnev, identified the role of the Polish Catholic Church as a key player. During his concluding remarks Brezhnev observed:
‘It is clear to us that a confrontation with the Church would only worsen the situation. But with this in mind we should influence as far as possible the moderate circles within the Catholic Church in our direction and keep them from closely allying themselves with the extreme anti-socialist forces and those who desire the fall of socialism in Poland and to take over power.’
In the end Brezhnev pulled back from rolling out an invasion. Kania’s commitment to introduce martial law, and the concerns of a potential massive Polish uprising, had further stayed the Soviet hand. Nonetheless, the mobilisation of Soviet troops continued to ensure that the Polish leaders were exposed to the maximum pressure.
Carter continued to misread his own intelligence and was briefing Western leaders as late as 8 December that there was a ‘sufficiently high probability of Soviet armed intervention that in my view Western nations should take whatever steps they can to affect Soviet decision-making and thus try to prevent the entry of Soviet forces into Poland’. On 7 December National Security Advisor Brzezinski had telephoned the Pope and informed him that a Soviet invasion of Poland was imminent. More than a decade later, observers were still insisting that Carter’s actions had stopped an invasion that had already been aborted a week earlier. It is equally claimed that the Pope’s intervention was crucial. As this record of events has demonstrated, Wojtyla had made no intervention whatsoever in the run up to the 5 December meeting in Moscow. It has even been alleged that he threatened to abandon the Vatican and stand at the front of the Polish Army to confront the invading Soviet hordes. This Vatican-inspired piece of disinformation is without any foundation.
The one action John Paul II did accomplish was to write a letter to Brezhnev on December 16, more than two weeks after the Soviet Politburo had cancelled the intended invasion. He reminded the Soviet leader of the losses sustained by Poland during the Second World War and that Poland like the Soviet Union was a signatory to the Helsinki Final Act, an agreement that contained provisions on sovereignty and non-intervention. The Pope’s letter, written in a combination of diplomatic language and Vaticanese, was a convoluted request that the Soviet Union abide by the principle of non-intervention. As with President Carter’s letter, Brezhnev ignored it and again failed even to acknowledge receipt.
The effect on the Polish nation, once news of the 5 December summit was leaked, was instantly sobering. The same day Solidarity issued a statement to the effect that there were no strikes in Poland and that none were planned; Walesa and his committees were drawing back from the very edge of the abyss. On 10 December while discussing behind closed doors what their course of action should be in the event of an invasion – everyone to go to their workplace and practise ‘passive resistance’ – they issued a calm communiqué calling for a ‘social alliance representing wisdom, common sense and responsibility’. It was sufficiently anodyne to soothe the most rabid Politburo mind. This was followed by a very conciliatory statement from Cardinal Wyszynski, which the grateful state-controlled media broadcast repeatedly nationwide. It applauded the ‘process of renewal’ but warned that the nation ‘first and foremost, needs internal peace in order to stabilise social life in an atmosphere of rebuilding mutual trust’.
Restraint was also very evident at the last significant event of a year that had been so full of such events. On 16 December the dreadful conclusions of the revolts of 1956, 1970 and 1976 were fittingly remembered along with the Polish August of 1980. The guilt that had been gnawing away within Lech Walesa since his comrades had died in the Lenin shipyard in 1970 was finally still. At last those who had fallen had a proper permanent monument. For hours the crowd had continued to grow. Miners from Silesia wearing their traditional long black coats and plumed czapka, railway workers from Lublin, bus drivers from Pulawy formed part of a crowd of 150,000 crammed as close as they could get to the area outside the main gate of the Lenin shipyard. Towering above the crowd, three slender trunks of steel crowned by crosses that bore dark anchors rose 138 feet into the dark winter sky. The three main players in the Polish drama were there; the state was represented by President Henryk Jablonski, the church by Cardinal Franciszek Macharski of Cracow and the workers by union leader Lech Walesa.
After a minute of silence the city’s church bells began to peal and in the port the ship sirens wailed. The names of those who had died at Gdansk and Gdynia in 1970 were read aloud. After every name the crowd called aloud, ‘Yes, he is still among us!’ Walesa lit a memorial flame, which despite the drizzling rain burned brightly. ‘This monument was erected for those who were killed, as an admonition to those in power. It embodies the right of human beings to their dignity, to order and to justice.’ After the Cardinal had celebrated Mass, Lech Walesa’s speech was calmness personified. He knew how close they had come to a Soviet intervention. ‘Our country needs internal peace,’ said Walesa. ‘I call on you to be prudent and reasonable.’
The next month, January 1981, Walesa, accompanied not only by an eighteen-strong Solidarity delegation but also by his wife and stepfather, made his first foreign trip to the Vatican. Although he had played no direct part in the Polish August, the Pope by the very fact of his nationality was a powerful external symbol. Any Pole as spiritual leader of one billion Roman Catholics could not fail to increase the world’s awareness of Poland. That would have applied no matter who the man was but with Wojtyla’s unsurpassable charisma that factor was increased.
It should have been a defining moment on Karol Wojtyla’s journey through life. He had committed himself to the struggle of his people in their pursuit of their basic human rights and social justice. He had done so irrespective of their religious beliefs. Many of those involved at Gdansk and the surrounding regions were not Catholics. Indeed many of them were still committed Communists. Hundreds of thousands who subsequently joined Solidarity were Communists. Wojtyla as Pope was declaring that the Church in this particular struggle at least was no longer exclusive, no longer confining its support to Catholics but extending it to all engaged in this crucial battle.
The Papal enlightenment with regard to the struggle for basic human rights and social justice was still confined to Eastern Europe. Simultaneously, people were still dying by their thousands in Central and South America. Some, like the Poles, were Communists. Many, also like the Poles, were not. The fundamental difference between the struggle that Wojtyla embraced and the struggle he rejected was the ‘enemy’ in Poland. It was a Communist regime. In much of Central and South America it was right-wing dictatorships who were frequently supported by the US administration. Even the outgoing President Carter, the defender of human rights, had not been averse to sending military aid to prop up the juntas. Jimmy Carter and the incoming Reagan administration saw nothing paradoxical within these foreign policies, but they certainly saw a great many Communists, both real and imaginary.
For Lech Walesa and his delegations, these were stirring times. Apart from a number of public meetings with the Pope, there were also private discussions, not only with the Pope but also Secretary of State Casaroli and other Vatican officials. Among the subjects discussed were the needs of Solidarity. A massive national organisation which had sprung up overnight and acquired a membership in many millions needed not only finance but also the basic nuts and bolts to run the machine: communications equipment, computers, telephones, photocopying machines, fax machines, printing presses. Solidarity was already beginning to get some help through a broad spectrum of international union and labour organisations, including the TUC in Great Britain and the AFL-CIO, the American labour movement. Money was also beginning to flow via the Brussels offices of the World Confederation of Labour and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.
At that stage Solidarity needed the ability to communicate, to inform, to organise. Moral support was fine, whether it was religious or secular, but what Solidarity desperately needed was logistical support. None of these practical needs were directly provided for by the Pope, who only offered moral support. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a member of the Solidarity delegation, recalled:
‘The Pope was speaking about Solidarity directly to some of its founding fathers but I felt he was also speaking beyond us to the wider world. He said “Solidarity is a movement that is not only fighting against something but is also fighting for something.” He made it clear that he saw Solidarity as a movement for peaceful change.’
The issue of the Pope’s alleged intervention to avert a Soviet invasion surfaced again during the Solidarity visit. An unidentified French diplomat was widely quoted when he claimed that the Pope had told him, ‘If the Russians invaded Poland, I would immediately go there myself.’ Vatican watchers including the usually well-informed Peter Hebblethwaite speculated on a Wojtyla–Brezhnev secret pact, basing this on the far more moderate language used by Lech Walesa from mid-December onwards. As for the Papal threat: ‘The Pope would never say anything like that, even if it were his intention,’ said Father Pierfranco Pastore, deputy director of the Vatican press office, ‘and there are no indications that he has any such intention.’ But the story came from somewhere and had the knack of being repeated.
Even before Lech Walesa’s party got back home from Rome, the situation in Poland had deteriorated. Strikes were breaking out for a variety of reasons ranging from an immediate demand for work-free Saturdays to a demand for an Independent Student Union. On 26 January a strike began in the province of Bielsko Biala close to the Czechoslovak border, rapidly spreading to over 120 plants. The implications of this particular action were explosive: the strikers were demanding the resignation of the provincial governor and his two deputies, accusing them of corruption, illicit financial dealings and administrative mismanagement. It was a direct challenge to the regime’s chain of command. The strikes were equally damaging for Solidarity’s strike committee. They had been called on local issues and without reference to or the approval of the National Co-ordinating Commission in Gdansk who were attempting to discourage local branches from taking unilateral action. As one Solidarity official observed, ‘We want to stop this anti-corruption strike, otherwise the whole country would have to go on strike.’
All efforts to find a way out failed, and, again, both sides appealed to the Primate. Cardinal Wyszynski, terminally ill with stomach cancer, once more found his way through the morass and aided by several of his bishops produced a solution that was acceptable to both sides. As long as the Primate was alive there would always be, it seemed, an acceptable solution but the time left to the 79-year-old Cardinal was desperately short. Recognising this, Solidarity worked sixteen hours a day or more, desperately trying to ensure that the Polish regime was not pushed into declaring martial law.
The Polish Church became fully involved in the various negotiations; the Primate’s trusted representative, Kukolwicz, led the discussions with Solidarity in Bydgoszcz while the Primate, despite his condition, took part in crisis talks with government leaders in Warsaw. It proved a formidable task, however, to bridge the demands of Solidarity and the concessions Prime Minister General Jaruzelski and Kania felt they could make without bringing down the entire edifice of government. On the eve of a four-hour strike, the Cardinal wrote in his notebook: ‘The situation in the country is dangerous. There is a desperate atmosphere building up.’
On the same day, 26 March, Wyszynski and the Prime Minister had a three-and-a-half-hour meeting in which Jaruzelski laid out his bottom line. A way would be found to give official recognition to the peasant union if, in return, Solidarity ceased their demands for an investigation against those responsible for a violent attack on Solidarity members in Bydgoszcz. Jaruzelski was just as much appalled by what had occurred as Walesa and his committee, perhaps more so. The attack on the Solidarity members had been aimed to undermine the authority of the Prime Minister and First Secretary, Kania. Full investigation would almost certainly implicate the top people among the Ministry of the Interior hardliners and would ensure Soviet tanks in Warsaw before any of the ringleaders could be charged. Equally, the General advised the Primate: ‘If the open-ended general strike occurs at the least it will result in martial law being declared and the Soviet tanks will be here anyway.’
During the previous December when his country was in great peril, the Pope, though fully briefed by both the Primate and US National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, had remained silent. His only contribution, the letter to Brezhnev, had not been written or sent until weeks after Brezhnev and the other Soviet Politburo members had ruled out a military intervention. At the time John Paul II seemed far more preoccupied with composing a different letter, an apostolic epistle naming two ninth-century saints, Cyril and Methodius, as co-patrons of Europe. Apparently the idea had been gestating within him for over a year. As the Polish crisis yet again bubbled up to near boiling point during the first three months of 1981 Wojtyla had not exerted himself beyond the expressions of support uttered during the Walesa visit in January. It was not until the day after Solidarity had brought the entire country to a virtual standstill for four hours on 27 March that the Pope felt motivated to write to Cardinal Wyszynski.
His letter talked of his ‘deep concern for the events within my beloved country’, which had become ‘the centre of attention of the whole world’. Wojtyla wrote of the voices that reached him from various parts of Poland that ‘emphasise the desire to work and not to go on strike’, even though the approaching national strike had overwhelming support throughout the country. The Pope pleaded for ‘mutual understanding, dialogue, patience and perseverance’ and added with an eye on the military manoeuvres taking place on the country’s border, ‘Poles have the undeniable right to solve their problems by themselves, with their own efforts . . .’ He finished his letter to Cardinal Wyszynski by telling him that he would be with him in spirit kneeling before the Image of Our Lady of Jasna as ‘once more I entrust to her this difficult and important moment in the life of our common country’.
Cardinal Wyszynski, in the thick of the crisis, took more practical steps. He intensified his pressure on Walesa and his committee. With the country paralysed by the four-hour strike, the next round of talks between the government and Solidarity went on well into the night, only to end yet again in a deadlock.
The next round of negotiations on 28 March also ended ‘without the expected settlement’. Deeply alarmed, the Primate brushed aside protests from his doctors and summoned Lech Walesa and the entire National Co-ordinating Commission of Solidarity to his Warsaw residence. Wyszynski left his audience in no doubt of the gravity of the crisis:
‘The situation is becoming increasingly complicated not only internally but also externally. We talk among ourselves as Poles, citizens of this land, responsible for it not only jointly but also individually . . . If it were through negligence on my part, for whatever reason or as a result of irresponsible moves, that even one Pole should die, I would never forgive myself . . . Is it right to fulfil today’s demands, however just, at the cost of endangering our freedom, our territorial integrity? Is it not better to achieve some today and for the rest say: “Gentlemen, we will return to this matter later.” ’
The 79-year-old Cardinal drew upon every ounce of his diminishing strength to protect his country. Having been hunted by the Nazis, imprisoned by the Communists, and frequently left isolated by various papacies, he was well qualified to give his listeners the formula for survival in a totalitarian state. He emphasised to the next generation that they should give priority to demands that would strengthen the activities and organisation of Solidarity rather than to ask for specifics such as pay rises and work-free Saturdays. ‘Economic demands,’ the Primate reasoned,
‘should be given low priority, and administrative demands a very high one. I am not a melodramatic person but I insist the situation is dangerous. Therefore I think if we stretch our demands beyond a certain point, we could later regret the consequences that we bring on Poland.’
The Primate’s words left a deep impression on Walesa. While Wyszynski and other senior members of the Polish Church were straining every nerve to defuse the situation, the hardliners in both the Polish and Soviet Politburos were throwing more fuel on the fire. The Soviet news agency Tass reported on Sunday 29 March from Poland in an entirely fictional story that ‘subversive elements operating in the Kielce Province have set up road blocks on Motorway E-7 between Suchedniow and Laczna; all road signs in that region have been destroyed. In Warsaw and other cities anti-socialist forces tried to seize post offices. In the Polish capital, they managed to seize a television transmitter for some time.’ It was fantasy but, with the Soyuz 81 manoeuvres still continuing on Polish borders, a very dangerous fantasy. Similar disinformation followed, fed to Tass by Vitali Paulou, the KGB station chief in Warsaw.
During the early hours of Monday 30th the mortally ill Wyszynski was aroused by a member of the Polish government. His message was succinct. ‘If the general strike is not called off by midnight tonight the Council of State will proclaim martial law.’ To underline the point he handed the Cardinal a copy of a poster with the proclamation printed on it.
While the entire working force of the nation made its final preparations for the general strike, Lech Walesa was planning to put the hard-won democracy of the past eight months to one side. Ensuring that a number of his more militant colleagues remained in Gdansk ‘to oversee the strike preparations’ he single-handedly negotiated a compromise. The general strike was ‘suspended’; there would be an investigation into the Bydgoszcz beatings and those found responsible would be punished. Rural Solidarity would not be recognised immediately but the Government agreed to act as if it had been, until the formal registration process was completed. There was no mention of the other demands that Solidarity had made. Walesa declared that they had achieved ‘a seventy per cent victory’. Many, including key members of his committee, bitterly disagreed. Some resigned; others were convinced that Walesa was nothing more than a KGB agent. More than twenty-five years later they remain convinced.
It is supremely ironic that after virtually excluding his entire committee from what became one-on-one negotiations with Deputy Prime Minister Mieczyslaw Rakowski, Walesa persuaded Andrzej Gwiazda to announce on television the terms of the settlement to an astonished nation. Whatever Walesa’s motives, it is unquestionable that the last-minute deal saved Polish blood and lives. Only a handful of people knew how high the stakes had been.
On 2 April a delighted and greatly relieved Cardinal Wyszynski received the triumphant leaders of the now officially recognised Rural Solidarity at his Warsaw residence. He spoke at considerable length to the gathering. In less than two months he would be dead, and these were precious moments not only for the Primate but for those privileged to hear him distilling the wisdom, the values, and experiences gained over a lifetime. His comments that day offer a unique insight into the Polish Church’s philosophy.
‘A human being is a social person – persona socialis. This means that he possesses a social nature, social disposition, social competence, social expectations and social needs. This is the basis of Catholic social philosophy and social teaching. Everything arises from this. All authority must state and accept this. It is not authority’s duty to confirm this since the attributes of a human being need no confirmation.’
Then in a clear allusion to the Communist regime he observed,
‘There are doctrines and social systems which do not take this into account and maintain that all rights are granted by the State. This is not the case! A human being does not require the grant of rights which are his fundamental rights as a person; these rights cannot be questioned, he simply possesses them.’
That night the Cardinal was anxious that the farmers be fully aware of the significance of what they had achieved. He was also at pains to underline the vital role that the farmers played in Poland, that the soil that these men owned and worked was the true treasure of the nation.
‘The Germans had only wanted our land, not us. If the soil is covered by grass even the strongest storms won’t move it. When it is bare it is easy to conquer it.’
He deplored the move away from the rural areas into the cities.
‘This policy is a crime. There is an urgent need to halt the process and populate the countryside. I have an instruction for you, beloved: do not allow the land to be snatched away from you.’
He talked of the importance of the entire Solidarity movement and its extraordinary achievements in so little time. ‘It has authority, so we can say that besides the authority of the Party there is also social authority in Poland.’ He refrained from mentioning the third power in the land, the one he represented. He was determined that his listeners should learn the lesson he had urged upon Solidarity.
‘I continuously explain to Lech Walesa: “in a few months you have achieved so much more than even the most efficient political machine could have achieved . . . you must now tighten your organisation, strengthen yourself, create union administration, train people to achieve these goals, give them education in politics, social ethics, agricultural policies.” ’
It was a template that if adhered to could lead to ultimate victory against the Communist regime. Cardinal Wyszynski alluded to the prize.
‘The time will come sooner or later when socio-economic demands will not be the only ones achieved by this massive movement of industrial Solidarity and the Solidarity of the Trade Union of Individual Farmers. These other aspirations you will certainly achieve!’
Before that golden hour there would be some very dark times.