On August 7, 1980, her bosses fired Anna Walentynowicz from her job at the Lenin Shipyard in the Polish city of Gdańsk. Walentynowicz was not a run-of-the-mill shipyard laborer. Popular among her fellow workers, she had once received a decoration as a “hero of socialist labor” for her exemplary work. But in the course of the 1970s she had evolved into a critic of the Communist system, and she eventually found herself drawn to a group of activists who were setting up an independent association they called the “Committee of Free Trade Unions.” The SB, the secret police, had informed Walentynowicz’s bosses of her activities. Hence her dismissal.
Early on the morning of August 14, a few young men sneaked into the Lenin Shipyard with posters calling on the workers to strike for the reinstatement of Walentynowicz and a pay rise of one thousand zlotys. Some of the shipyard workers took up the call—but just as they were about to march out of the yard, others stopped them, reminding them of what had happened ten years earlier. In 1970, workers along the Baltic coast, including those at the Lenin Shipyard, had also announced a strike. In order to elicit public support, they had decided to leave their workplaces and take to the streets to press their demands. By doing that, however, they made themselves easy targets for the government security forces that had been ordered into the affected cities. The strikers had been gunned down by the dozens. Walentynowicz’s supporters vowed not to repeat that mistake. They opted to stay put.
Workers began to congregate in front of the shipyard’s head office. As the swelling crowd discussed how they should go about coordinating their efforts, the shipyard’s director climbed up on an excavator and began haranguing them to go back to work. Some of the men seemed to be thinking it over, and for a moment the fate of the strike hung in the balance. (Indeed, another attempt to start a strike just a few weeks earlier had fizzled.) But then a short, stocky man climbed up behind the director and tapped him on the shoulder: “‘Remember me?’ he said. ‘I worked here for ten years, and I still feel I’m a shipyard worker. I have the confidence of the workers here. It’s four years since I lost my job.’”1
The name of the man, an ex-shipyard electrician who had also lost his job because of his extracurricular activities as a dissident, was Lech Wałęsa. He had sneaked back into his old workplace by climbing over a wall. The workers greeted him with a cheer. Some of them recognized him from an unofficial ceremony that had been held at the shipyard gates the previous December to commemorate the dead of the 1970 protests. At the ceremony, Wałęsa had stepped forward and given a rousing speech, urging the workers to organize themselves independently in order to oppose the might of the state.
Now, back inside the shipyard, he put his own advice to work. He declared an “occupation strike,” reinforcing the workers’ decision to stay where they were. He took charge of the effort to set up a strike committee, and in short order it issued a set of demands that included the reinstatement of Walentynowicz and himself, pay raises, security against reprisals, and a monument to the men who had died in the 1970 crackdown. The committee’s negotiations with management were broadcast over the shipyard’s public address system so that everyone could hear what was happening.2
Even before Wałęsa spoke, Walentynowicz had made it back to the shipyard and joined the strike. The shipyard director, desperate to demonstrate his good intentions and to quell the rising protest, sent his own car to fetch her. As with Wałęsa, her return was greeted with cheers and applause. That the shipyard workers welcomed both Walentynowicz and Wałęsa back with such enthusiasm was noteworthy. Both had been explicitly singled out by management as enemies of the state. Back in an earlier day, the workers might have been inclined to shy away from someone so clearly identified by the party as an “enemy of the people.”
The alliance between the workers and the opposition had evolved significantly over the previous decade. In 1968, caught up in the transformative turmoil of the Czechoslovak anti-Communist movement that came to be known as the Prague Spring, Polish students had taken to the streets, calling on the workers to join them. The workers demurred. Two years later, when workers in the industrial belt of the Baltic went on strike, the students paid them back by standing by as the security forces cracked down with tanks and thousands of troops. Dozens of workers died.
The 1970 crackdown prompted several key members of the dissident movement in Poland to realize that this gap between laborers and intellectuals would have to be closed if there was any serious hope of creating a credible alternative to Communist rule. The crackdown of 1970 was followed by a period of relative liberalization under Communist Party leader Edward Gierek, who was eager to prove his moderate credentials to the Western governments who were giving him loans, and the dissident intellectuals gradually found ways to take advantage of the resulting space for maneuver. They circulated their publications, shared their ideas, and expanded their network of contacts.
Gierek, who had taken power in the wake of the 1970 strikes, had awakened genuine optimism among some sections of the public with his welcoming rhetoric and his new economic policies. But by the mid-1970s, the bloom was off. Prices rose, shortages deepened, and workers were being asked to increase their output. In 1976 another bout of major labor unrest flared at some of Poland’s biggest factories. The Communist Party managed to quell the protests with the usual mix of force and carefully calibrated concessions. Yet something was changing. Workers were exploring possibilities for labor activism. In 1976 a group of dissidents seized the opportunity by forming the Committee to Defend the Workers (known by its Polish acronym as KOR). They worked to encourage and advise a nascent movement for independent unions that was stirring the country. Yet the ingredients for broader grassroots social organization were not yet in place.
But by the time of the strike at the Lenin Shipyard, there was a surprisingly large number of workers who shared the labor activists’ skepticism about the government. The alliance had gained traction after the pope’s 1979 pilgrimage. John Paul II’s visit established a number of important preconditions. It gave Polish society a powerful sense of self-confidence after long years of humiliation and discord. There was also the crucial experience of self-organization on a mass scale. Party institutions had ceded the task of managing the millions of pilgrims and maintaining order to the citizens themselves, an accomplishment that turned out to be hard to forget. The millions who showed up shared in the experience of self-recognition: they realized, to their astonishment, that they had the numbers to convincingly counter the weight of the state. Together they listened to the pope proclaim his insistence on the centrality of Christ and the inviolability of individual human rights. This was a message that unified many Poles across class boundaries: students, peasants, workers, and even quite a few not terribly religious intellectuals.
Yet the message, for all its firmness, was couched in language that avoided the rhetoric of confrontation and insisted on the primacy of reconciliation and restraint. This, too, was important. The pope’s pilgrimage showed Poles that they could “live in the truth,” rejecting the lies of the Communist regime, without resorting to violence. Not only that: nonviolence was a crucial precondition for the sort of cultural resistance that the pope’s visit had helped to make possible. The opposition could hardly claim to present a credible alternative to Communist rule, with its embrace of revolutionary “class warfare” and its daily practice of coercion, unless they convincingly demonstrated their allegiance to nonviolent change. The Communists were not a faceless, stereotypical “enemy.” They were human beings, fellow Poles and Europeans, and they should be addressed as such, in the interest of a common humanity, and according to the values so movingly articulated by the pope.
In the course of his public conversation with Polish society, John Paul had also made a point of addressing the varied concerns of particular groups. He was particularly intent on including the workers. In Jasna Góra he had celebrated mass for a congregation of some 1 million workers and miners from Upper Silesia and Zagrebie, the region from which the party had barred him during his trip. The pope’s remarks outlined an image of work that dispensed with the stale invocations of class struggle: “Work must help man to become better, more mature spiritually, more responsible, in order that he may realize his vocation on earth both as an unrepeatable person and in community with others.”3 He saw workers not as a social force, but as a group of individuals with shared concerns, and urged them to retain awareness of the spiritual and moral dimensions of their lives: “Do not let yourselves be seduced by the temptation to think that man can fully find himself only by denying God, erasing prayer from his life and remaining only a worker, deluding himself that what he produces can on its own fill the needs of the human heart.”4 And he noted approvingly that “the immense development of industry” in postwar Poland had “gone hand in hand with the building of churches, the development of parishes and the deepening and strengthening of faith.”5
His observation was factually correct, but that did not diminish its potential to provoke. If there was one thing that Communist rulers feared more than anything else—even more than religion, in fact—it was labor unrest. The reason for this should be obvious. Communist regimes drew their legitimacy from Marxist ideology, and Marxism had proclaimed that world revolution would be spearheaded by the industrial working class. The working class was the avant-garde of the revolution precisely because, according to Marx, power derives from control of the mode of production. In the modern world, accordingly, industrial technology, controlled by the workers, is the ultimate source of power. Once the proletariat rose up and directed that power to its own ends, there would be no stopping it. How could the bourgeoisie go on calling the shots if the railroads and the steel factories and the coal mines no longer obeyed orders? Marx paid relatively little attention to the role of the peasantry. To be sure, peasants had some degree of revolutionary potential. They could chop the heads off a few landlords. But it was the workers who really mattered.
Yet even the history of Communism has its history of strikes. There were some within the Soviet Union itself. Workers downed tools in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, years after Bolshevik rule was firmly established. At least one strike occurred as late as 1962, in the city of Novocherkassk. They were all brutally suppressed, of course, and the heretical notion of an anti-Soviet labor movement was airbrushed out of the historical record.
The real hotbed of labor activism, however, was in East Central Europe after 1945. This made sense. Many of the workers in East Germany (at least before the ascent of Hitler), Poland, and Czechoslovakia had lived in capitalist societies where there were strong labor movements, and those who had grown up later had inherited the knowledge from their parents. The most persistent strikers were the Poles, whose workers retained a fairly rebellious streak throughout Communist rule. Usually, however, their strikes revolved around economic demands rather than political ones.
What happened in the summer of 1980 at first followed a similar pattern. By the end of the 1970s, the early optimism of Gierek’s program had spent itself. The year 1979, it turned out, was not only a milestone because of the pope’s visit; it was also the first year since the end of the war that Poland’s national income declined, falling by 2 percent.6 The hard-currency bill for Gierek’s international borrowing spree was coming due. Poland’s external debt skyrocketed; by 1980 it reached $18 billion. The borrowing policy’s most tangible effects were higher prices and the continued scarcity of basic goods. The only way the government could pay off its creditors was through exports, mostly agricultural goods that were already scarce at home.
In the summer of 1980, thirteen months after the pope’s visit, the workers once again began to bridle. On July 1 the government announced huge increases—from 60 to 90 percent—in the price of meat. Strikes broke out around the country. The government, which had prepared a strategy of concessions in advance, offered workers large raises and shipped in extra supplies of low-priced meat to areas of particular unrest.7 Yet this policy of carrots was not enough to satisfy the workers. On July 14 they spooked the Polish Politburo by stopping work in Lublin, a strategic city on the rail line that connected East Germany with the Soviet Union. The panicked party immediately threw even more cash at the discontented laborers, which had the effect of encouraging others. Strikes flickered up and down the Baltic Coast like St. Elmo’s Fire.
At the Lenin Shipyard, the director responded to Wałęsa’s arrival with the usual strategy, attempting to divide the workers by proposing especially large pay raises to the older workers. Many of them accepted his offer and left the yard. Once again the strike almost collapsed. But a dedicated core of several hundred strikers remained in the yard, sustained by family members and well-wishers who handed supplies of food and drink through the surrounding fence. Under Wałęsa’s leadership, the workers now expanded their agenda. They made explicitly political demands an integral part of the strike program. They insisted on legal guarantees of their right to strike, a loosening of restrictions on the media, and official recognition of their organization as a genuinely independent trade union movement.
Perhaps the most notable thing about this particular strike was its extraordinary sense of self-discipline. Among the strikers’ first acts was a ban on the consumption of alcohol, which was not only maintained by the strikers themselves but quickly picked up by many organizations in the surrounding city as well. Many contemporaries considered this especially remarkable, given the ubiquity of heavy drinking habits in Communist Poland.8 Mass took place every day at five o’clock. A portrait of John Paul II soon adorned the shipyard’s main gate. These moral and religious undertones suggested that there was a bit more to this particular work stoppage than initially met the eye. That impression was borne out by the establishment of the Interfactory Strike Committee. From early on, emissaries from other workplaces had arrived at the shipyard to offer pledges of support and requests for cooperation. The founding of the Interfactory Strike Committee, which ultimately included dozens of delegates from all over Poland, had the effect of elevating the Lenin Shipyard protest movement from a local cause to a national one.
But what to call it? One of the members of KOR who arrived in Gdańsk to help the shipyard workers was Konrad Bielinski, an alumnus of the Student Solidarity Committee that had defended the cause of the murdered student Stanisław Pyjas three years earlier. Bielinski now began editing a daily newsletter for the strikers and their hangers-on. Calling it the Strike Information Bulletin, he decided to add another word that harked back to his days as a student activist: Solidarity.9 Solidarity—of workers, and of humans in generals—was also a concept frequently invoked by Wałęsa and the other Strike Committee members. So it did not take long for the shipyard Strike Committee to seize upon the word as a fitting name for the larger independent union movement that evolved out of the strike. (Its official name was the “Independent Self-Governing Trade Union ‘Solidarity.’”)
Solidarity is a word that points to the moral underpinnings of the peculiar revolutionary movement that began in Gdańsk in the summer of 1980. It is worth noting that John Paul II used the same word as the title of a section in his central philosophical treatise, Person and Act, and though it is certainly going too far to credit him with masterminding the name of the union, it is no exaggeration at all to say that the specific character of the strike owed a great deal to the concrete experience of religious solidarity that Poles had experienced in those nine days in June the year before. Not only did the strikers in the Lenin Shipyard celebrate the pope’s image and attend regular mass; they also sang hymns and patriotic songs together, just as Poles had done during the 1979 pilgrimage. Sympathizers brought flowers and food to the shipyard fence in voluntary displays of support, just as they had voluntarily organized themselves during John Paul’s visit. And the Lenin Shipyard, now “occupied” by the strikers, became an oasis of free expression and thought within the Communist state, just as the pope’s visit had created its own alternative spaces (such as the mass gatherings where dissident banners could be raised without fear of retribution, or the events organized entirely without the participation of the Communist Party).
To be sure, the church hesitated at first. In the early days of the strike, all too aware of the momentous implications of what the Lenin Shipyard workers were up to, none other than Cardinal Wyszyński gave a sermon in which he counseled the strikers to exercise restraint. Especially in the bowdlerized version issued by the government, his remarks appeared to stop short of guaranteeing the church’s support to the strike movement. The strikers chose to ignore the possibility that a member of the clergy was trying to slow them down. This proved wise. On August 27, the Polish bishops issued a statement that specifically approved the “the right to independence both of organizations representing the workers and of organizations of self-government” and cited Vatican II’s unambiguous commitment to human rights. The bishops’ announcement was a direct result of John Paul II’s personal involvement. He had urged the bishops to support the union and had assured them of his personal support.10 This vote of confidence was crucial. The implicit promise of the church’s institutional and diplomatic backing gave Wałęsa—who had now been chosen to lead the workers’ team of negotiators in their talks with the government—a crucial boost in his subsequent round of negotiations.
What emerged from those talks was a momentous achievement, something that no one could have imagined just months before. The Polish government extended official recognition to the existence of independent, self-governing trade unions. Solidarity was “independent” because, for the first time since 1944, a large number of Poles had come together to create an organization capable of successively asserting itself against the overweening power of the Communist state. And for many, the adjective self-governing—an eloquent reflection of a new faith in the ability of Poles to manage their own affairs—harked back to the moment, a year earlier, when John Paul II’s visit had provided a brief window of opportunity for Poles to organize their own lives.
It was, undoubtedly, the collapse of the Polish economy, and the corresponding loss of confidence in the state’s ability to revive it, that fueled the Solidarity revolution. But an analysis of economic conditions alone fails to account for the timing, the content, or the forms that this revolution took. The state of the economy deteriorated sharply from 1980 to 1981. Yet, as historian Timothy Garton Ash has noted, the suicide rate among Poles dropped by almost one-third in the year after Solidarity’s triumph; the annual per capita consumption of pure alcohol dropped from 8.4 liters in 1980 to 6.4 liters in 1981 (which was equivalent to the level of 1973). The rise of Solidarity clearly gave Poles a renewed sense of purpose. Ash recalls a case in which a mob tried to lynch a policeman in a provincial town. Solidarity representatives intervened. The dissident Adam Michnik, who was present, used his own experience of mistreatment at the hands of the police to persuade the mob to renounce summary justice—and they did. It was, in fact, remarkable how the Solidarity revolution managed to press its aims without recourse to violence.11
For sixteen months, the Communist authorities chose to endure the rise of a grassroots movement that challenged their social hegemony. The Polish Communist leaders were squeezed, on the one hand, by their masters in Moscow, who pressed them to put an end to this disturbing experiment (but who were themselves reluctant to intervene directly, since they were already busy with their deepening military involvement in Afghanistan). At the same time, Stanisław Kania, the new party leader (who had replaced Gierek after he had allowed the recognition of Solidarity), was reluctant to crack down, knowing that this would compel Western governments to turn off the flow of credits, thus aggravating Poland’s economic troubles.
Then, on December 13, 1981, the party finally put an end to this remarkable cohabitation. Tanks and troops moved into position at key locations. The security services fanned out to pick up members of the opposition. General Wojciech Jaruzelski, Kania’s successor, had declared martial law in Poland. The revolution of the spirit inspired by John Paul II two years earlier was over. The attempt to establish an alternate space for a free society had failed—like all those earlier attempts to do something similar in postwar East Central Europe. Or so, at least, it seemed to many at the time.
On October 23, 1989, I noticed a surprising bit of graffiti in the men’s lavatory in the central train station in the East German city of Leipzig: Es lebe Solidarność. Someone with a red felt-tipped pen had carefully rendered the famous Solidarity logo—the one that shows the word as a stylized crowd holding a banner aloft—on the wall of a stall.
As a budding journalist, I had come to Leipzig to report on the demonstrations that were, by then, taking place every Monday night. A few weeks earlier, East Germans had begun taking to the streets to protest the Communist government that had ruled the country since 1945. That evening I joined the demonstrators—around a quarter of a million of them—as they made their way along the ring road around the center of the city.
There were wisecracking high school students, and factory workers in blue denim suits, and necktie-wearing managers carrying briefcases, and blue-haired little old ladies. This was not the usual protest by a few earnest college kids or bookish dissidents. To be sure, there were all the chants and the banners and the interest groups that one might expect from a political event. But what gave this particular demonstration its distinctive character were the candles that many of the demonstrators carried as they marched, casting a calming glow as the immense procession moved through the evening darkness. The most prominent slogan, chanted at regular intervals, was “No Violence.” (The chant became loudest and most insistent when we passed the building that housed the local headquarters of the Stasi, the East German secret police.) Given the tiny figures for church attendance in East Germany, it was extremely unlikely that the people in that massive crowd regularly participated in formal services of worship. Yet there was something in the atmosphere that could only be described as religious.
The remarkable air of festive calm had much to do with the fact that the core demonstrators had begun by meeting in churches around the city, where pastors admonished them to respect the humanity of their opponents and to exercise restraint in the face of government threats. This spirit of conciliation was extraordinary, given the messages coming out of the Communist Party. Until just a few weeks earlier, the East German state media had been calling for a “Chinese solution” to the problem of public discontent. The bloody crackdown of Tiananmen Square, when the Chinese Communist Party had dispersed thousands of student protesters by force in the center of Beijing, had taken place just five months earlier. The participants in the Monday demonstrations in Leipzig had heard the rumors that their own Communist leaders were planning to follow suit. The authorities had issued live ammunition to the troops and had ordered the hospitals to stock extra blood and plasma supplies. But on October 9, just before that night’s demonstration was about to begin, the director of the Leipzig Orchestra and several other local notables persuaded three local party leaders to come out publicly against a crackdown. Together they issued a call committing the party to “peaceful dialogue.” The security forces never went into action. After that the number of demonstrators swelled with each successive Monday evening.
In fact, the Leipzig tradition of regular Monday-evening “Prayers for Peace” dated back to 1982, three years after John Paul II’s first pilgrimage and three years before Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to the top of the Soviet leadership. Protestant clergy at Leipzig’s Church of St. Nicholas organized the prayers as a forum for the non-state-approved airing of controversial social topics, ranging from military conscription to industrial pollution. Although the human rights movement in the German Democratic Republic never assumed the same prodigious scale as its Polish counterpart, it is striking how much East German dissident activity—much of it avowedly secular and left-wing—took place under the aegis of local churches. The Prayers for Peace—which were emulated by other churches around East Germany—continued throughout the 1980s, opening up an important grassroots space for discussion of human rights issues. Among their many other activities, the pastors at the Church of St. Nicholas cultivated close ecumenical contact with their Catholic counterparts in Poland.
To anyone who experienced them, the peaceful revolutions of 1989 in East Germany and Czechoslovakia owed an obvious debt—freely acknowledged by those who engineered them—to the pioneers of the peaceful Solidarity revolution in Poland. The declaration of martial law in December 1981 seemed at first to represent the end of a chapter, another failed interlude of freedom in East Central Europe’s long postwar twilight. It took time to realize that the Solidarity experiment had actually changed the balance of forces in fundamental ways. It was not merely that the State of Workers and Peasants had morphed, under General Jaruzelski’s rule, into something more akin to a South American military junta; nor was it just that unleashing martial law had revealed the yawning gap between the government’s claims of popular legitimacy and the demoralizing reality of its estrangement from the population. The ideological facade of Polish Communism, which had suppressed a genuine working-class movement by brute force of arms, had collapsed. All that remained was coercion.
In this light, Solidarity’s apparent “failure” to take over the state presents itself in a rather different light. As some sympathetic historians have argued, the point of the trade union’s existence was not to seize power, but to promote an “evolutionary revolution.”12 Polish dissident Adam Michnik noted that the form of social change embodied by Solidarity was, in fact, “self-limiting”: while it aimed for the radical (and perhaps unattainable) end of self-government at all levels of society, its method for pursuing this goal was always avowedly incremental and nonconfrontational. In a revealing contrast, Michnik wrote, “The Communist authorities—admittedly, under constant and brutal pressure from Moscow—were unable to offer any sensible model of coexistence.”13
Under martial law, Poles conspicuously refused to live in fear. They joined social resistance circles that spread information and helped the families of those who were imprisoned. Clandestine factory commissions from Solidarity continued to collect union dues and paid assistance to workers who lost their jobs or fell ill. Workers signed petitions for arrested union officials. Farmers sent food to the families of people who had been arrested, and workers reciprocated by supplying them with underground literature. Taken together, these gestures attested to the remarkable resilience of the diverse new civil society that Solidarity had helped to engender.14
Poles did all of this themselves. But the pope’s intervention—if we can so describe his 1979 pilgrimage—provided a vital catalyst. His trip did not merely boost Polish morale. By his very presence John Paul II posed a practical political challenge to party rule, one to which the Communist system had no ready response. The pope could not be thrown in jail or overwhelmed by Red Army tanks; he could not be silenced or cajoled into a corrupting moral compromise. To Poles, he became the living exemplar of an alternate morality and the protector of the national idea. His global stature offered a promise of redress. And, of course, the millions who had welcomed John Paul in those nine days had permanently confounded the party’s fundamental claim: that it represented the people. The people had seized the chance to demonstrate their true will, and they had chanted, “We want God.”
Throughout Solidarity’s bloodless revolution, the church was a major source of “nonconfrontational solutions,” and this was not just a matter of the Vatican extending the hand of protection from Rome. Priests played an important role in calming potentially destructive emotions even as they created space for the legitimate expression of protest. The most famous example of this dynamic was Father Jerzy Popiełuszko, an activist priest who had started his pastoral mission by ministering to steelworkers and later became closely allied with Solidarity. During the early years of martial law, he went right on assailing the party’s abuses of power in his enormously popular sermons in his church in the working-class Warsaw district of Żoliborz—a phenomenon that, at the time, was entirely unique within the countries of the East bloc (combined population: 400 million). “Nowhere else from East Berlin to Vladivostok could anyone stand before ten or fifteen thousand people and use a microphone to condemn the errors of state and party,” as New York Times reporter Michael Kaufman perceptively observed in one of his reports about Popiełuszko.15 When Popiełuszko was murdered by the secret police in 1984, it was other priests who neutralized and salved popular anger. A quarter of a million people, including Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa, attended Popiełuszko’s funeral.
It has always been tempting to see John Paul II’s first pilgrimage to Poland as a uniquely Polish event. That is understandable but somewhat inaccurate. This was a pope of a distinctly European avocation—more so, indeed, than many of the Italians in the job who had preceded him. His gift for languages had a great deal to do with it. And so, perhaps, did his intense appreciation of the artificiality of the Cold War divisions of Europe. From the first moment of his papacy, he unnerved the Soviets by identifying himself as a “Slav pope” with a particular sensitivity to his fellow believers to the East.16 (It was, indeed, a good measure of the artificiality of the Yalta order that anyone should have regarded this as a provocation.)
He made a point of offering tangible support to the beleaguered Catholic churches inside the Soviet Union itself. Upon his election as pope, he sent his cardinal’s zucchetto to a leading priest in Lithuania. He openly supported Cardinal Slipyj, the head of the Greek Catholic Church in the Ukraine, who had suffered considerable persecution at Soviet hands since his appointment to the post in 1944.
Crucially, John Paul II also gave his backing to Cardinal František Tomášek, archbishop of Prague from 1977 to 1991. Tomášek, who had spent three years in a labor camp in the early 1950s, had actively supported the Prague Spring reformist movement. Then, after the Soviet invasion that put an end to it in 1968, he fell silent. But John Paul II’s pilgrimage in 1979 gave the archbishop new heart, and with the Vatican’s help Tomášek became an eloquent defender of the Czechoslovak human rights organizations that began to play an increasingly influential role in the 1980s—above all Charter 77, the group whose founders included leading dissident Václav Havel. In January 1988, Tomášek publicly came out in favor of a petition calling for religious freedom that drew six hundred thousand signers (both Christians and non-).17 The petition was an important act of resistance that set a precedent for the tumultuous events of the following year, when the Czechs (inspired by the examples of their neighbors in Poland and East Germany) succeeded in launching their own nonviolent uprising against Communist rule that came to be known as the “Velvet Revolution.” Here, too, Tomášek also played a vital part, pledging the support of the church to the peaceful demonstrators who clashed with the security forces.
To be sure, John Paul II cannot be credited with masterminding everything that happened in Central Europe in 1989. The ascent to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 was, of course, a factor of enormous consequence; so, too, was the deepening economic malaise within the USSR, which weakened its ability to retain its hold over its satellites. Yet neither of these conditions determined the form that change, when it came, would take. In this respect, the nine days of John Paul II’s June 1979 pilgrimage had a profound impact. We have fallen into the habit of regarding the collapse of Soviet-style Communism as inevitable: the direct consequence of a dysfunctional economic model of central planning, of the rigidity and institutionalized lies of command politics, and of the vast gap between the sublime designs of Marxist-Leninism and a reality that proved infinitely more vicious and mundane. This is simplistic. That Communism’s disintegration in East Central Europe could have taken a starkly different course was demonstrated by the brief but bloody civil war in Romania during its own revolution in 1989 and the long savagery that followed in Yugoslavia during the 1990s. One of the most remarkable aspects of the 1989 revolutions in Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia was how peaceful they remained—and here the pope’s eloquent embodiment of the principle of non-confrontational resistance, during his 1979 pilgrimage to Poland and subsequent visits, served as a far-reaching example. All this makes it hard to disagree with the assessment of Timothy Garton Ash: “Without the pope, there would have been no Solidarity movement; without Solidarity, there would have been no Gorbachev; without Gorbachev, there would have been no 1989.”18
There is a great deal else to be said about the significance of John Paul II’s papacy, but much of that lies outside the purview of this work. His supporters will long continue to revere him for his prodigious energy, his intense and mystical faith, his devotion to young people, and his bold acknowledgment of the church’s historical responsibility for anti-Semitic teachings and the attendant revitalization of ties with the Jewish world. No other pope has pursued his pastoral mission so expansively. During his papacy, John Paul II visited 129 countries, laying the foundations for an extraordinary reglobalization of the church’s mission.
His critics, of course, will denounce John Paul II precisely for his defense of church traditions and his insistence on received dogma, including his rejection of birth control, homosexuality, and women in the priesthood. The harshest verdict is likely to involve his handling of the scandal involving the widespread sexual abuse of children by priests, which has devastated the standing of the church in many of the countries where it long enjoyed privileged status. The pope’s failure to ensure a full and transparent reckoning of the crimes committed by members of the priesthood must also now be reckoned as a part of his legacy.
Yet history is never one-dimensional. And if we are to arrive at a full understanding of the end phase of the Communist system in Europe, we cannot neglect the extraordinary homecoming of the newly elected Polish pope in that sweltering summer of 1979.