Soviet bloc had not merely been postponed. It was out of the question. As Amalrik had predicted in
It was not by chance that the East European satellite states were all run by ageing, conservative time- servers. In a new age of realism Edward Gierek in Warsaw (born 1913), Gustav Husak in Prague (born 1913), Erich Honecker in Berlin (born 1912), Janos Kadar in Budapest (born 1912) and Todor Zhivkov in Sofia (born 1911)—not to speak of Enver Hoxha in Tirana (born 1908) and Josip Broz Tito in Belgrade (born 1892)—were the most realistic of all. Like Leonid Brezhnev—born 1906, Seven Orders of Lenin, four-time Hero Of The Soviet Union, winner of the Lenin Peace Prize, General Secretary and, since 1977, Head of State—these men had grown old in the old ways. They had little incentive to pull the rug out from under themselves. They had every intention of dying in their beds.[278]
The fact that ‘real existing Socialism’ was dysfunctional and discredited did not in itself seal its fate. In his 1971 Nobel Prize acceptance speech (delivered in his absence), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had rousingly asserted that ‘once the lie has been dispersed, the nakedness of violence will be revealed in all its repulsiveness, and then violence, become decrepit, will come crashing down.’ But this was not quite true. The nakedness of Soviet violence had long since been revealed—and would be exposedagain in the disastrous 1979 invasion of Afghanistan—and the lie of Communism was progressively dispersed and dispelled in the course of the years after 1968.
But the system had not yet come crashing down. Lenin’s distinctive contribution to European history had been to kidnap the centrifugal political heritage of European radicalism and channel it into power through an innovative system of monopolized control: unhesitatingly gathered and forcefully retained in one place. The Communist system might corrode indefinitely at the periphery; but the initiative for its final collapse could only come from the centre. In the story of Communism’s demise, the remarkable flowering in Prague or Warsaw of a new kind of opposition was only the end of the beginning. The emergence of a new kind of leadership in Moscow itself, however, was to be the beginning of the end.
XIX. The End of the Old Order
‘We cannot go on living like this’.
‘The most dangerous time for a bad government is when it starts to reform itself’.
‘We have no intention of harming or destabilizing the GDR’.
‘Historical experience shows that Communists were sometimes forced by circumstances to behave rationally and agree to compromises’.
‘People, your government has returned to you’.
The conventional narrative of Communism’s final collapse begins with Poland. On October 16th 1978, Karol Wojtyla, Cardinal of Crakow, was elected to the Papacy as John Paul II, the first Pole to hold the office. The expectations aroused by his election were unprecedented in modern times. Some in the Catholic Church regarded him as a likely radical—he was young (just fifty-eight when elected pope in 1978, having been appointed Archbishop of Crakow while still in his thirties) but already a veteran of the Second Vatican Council. Energetic and charismatic, this was the man who would complete the work of Popes John XXIII and Paul VI and who would lead the Church into a new era, a pastor rather than a Curial bureaucrat.
Conservative Catholics, meanwhile, took comfort in Wojtyla’s reputation for unbending theological firmness and the moral and political absolutism born of his experience as a priest and prelate under communism. This was a man who, for all his reputation as a ‘pope of ideas’, open to intellectual exchange and scholarly debate, would not compromise with the Church’s enemies. Like Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the powerful head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (and his successor as Pope), Wojtyla had been startled out of his early reforming enthusiasm by the radical aftershock of John XXIII’s reforms. By the time of his election he was already an administrative as well as a doctrinal conservative.
Karol Wojtyla’s Polish origins and his tragic early life help to explain the unusual strength of his convictions and the distinctive quality of his papacy. He lost his mother when he was eight (he would lose his only sibling, his older brother Edmund, three years later; his last surviving close relative, his father, died during the war when Wojtyla was nineteen). Following his mother’s death he was taken by his father to the Marian sanctuary at Kalwaria Zebrzydowska and made frequent pilgrimages there in following years—Zebrzydowska, like Czestochowa, is an important center of the cult of the Virgin Mary in modern Poland. By the age of fifteen Wojtyla was already the president of the Marian sodality in Wadowice, his home town, an early hint of his inclination to Mariolatry (which in turn contributed to his obsession with marriage and abortion).
The new Pope’s Christian vision was rooted in the peculiarly messianic style of Polish Catholicism. In modern Poland he saw not only the embattled eastern frontier of the True Faith, but also a land and a people chosen to serve as the example and sword of the Church in the struggle against Eastern atheism and Western materialism alike.[279] Together with his long service in Crakow, isolated from Western theological and political currents, this probably explained his tendency to embrace a parochial and sometimes troubling Polish-Christian vision.[280]
But it also explains the unprecedented enthusiasm for him in the country of his birth. From the outset, the pope broke with his predecessors’ cosmopolitan Roman acquiescence in modernity, secularism, and compromise. His campaign of international appearances—complete with carefully staged performances in huge open arenas, accompanied by oversized crucifixes and a paraphernalia of light, sound, and theatrical timing—was not undertaken without design. This was a Big Pope, taking himself and his Faith to the world: to Brazil, Mexico, the US, and the Philippines; to Italy, France, and Spain; but above all to Poland itself.
Abandoning the cautious ‘Ostpolitik’ of his predecessors, John Paul II arrived in Warsaw on June 2nd 1979 for the first of three dramatic ‘pilgrimages’ to Communist Poland. He was met with huge, adoring crowds. His presence affirmed and reinforced the influence of the Catholic Church in Poland; but the Pope was not interested in merely endorsing Christianity’s passive survival under Communism. To the occasional discomfort of his own bishops he began explicitly discouraging Catholics in Poland and everywhere else in Eastern Europe from any compromise with Marxism, and offered his Church not merely as a silent sanctuary but as an alternative pole of moral and social authority.
As Poland’s Communists well understood, such a change in the position of the Catholic Church—from compromise to resistance—could have a destabilizing local impact, posing an open challenge to the Party’s monopoly of authority. In part this was because Poles remained overwhelmingly and enthusiastically Catholic; in large measure it was because of the man himself. But there was very little they could do—to forbid the Pope to visit Poland or to speak there would only have strengthened his appeal and further alienated millions of his admirers. Even after the imposition of martial law, when the Pope returned to Poland in June 1983 and spoke to
