Postwar

his ‘compatriots’ in St John’s Cathedral in Warsaw of their ‘disappointment and humiliation, their suffering and loss of freedom’, the Communist leaders could only stand and listen. ‘Poland’, he told an uncomfortable General Jaruzelski in a televised speech, ‘must take her proper place among the nations of Europe, between East and West.’

The Pope, as Stalin once observed, has no divisions. But God is not always on the side of the big battalions: what John Paul II lacked in soldiers he made up in visibility—and timing. Poland in 1978 was already on the edge of social upheaval. Ever since the workers’ revolts of 1970, and again in 1976, both prompted by sharp increases in the price of food, First Secretary Edvard Gierek had tried hard to avert domestic discontent—mostly, as we have seen, by borrowing heavily abroad and using the loans to supply Poles with subsidized food and other consumer goods. But the strategy was failing.

Thanks to the emergence of Jacek Kuron’s KOR, the intellectual opposition and workers’ leaders now cooperated far more than in the past. In response to the cautious appearance of ‘free’ (i.e. illegal) trade unions in a number of industrial and coastal towns, beginning in Katowice and Gdansk, the leaders of KOR drew up a ‘Charter of Workers’ Rights’ in December 1979: its demands included the right to autonomous, non-Party unions and the right to strike. The predictable response of the authorities was to arrest intellectual activists and sack the offending workers—among them the then-unknown electrician Lech Walesa and fourteen other employees at Elektromontaz in Gdansk.

Whether the semi-clandestine movement for workers’ rights would have continued to grow is not clear. Its spokesmen were certainly emboldened by the Pope’s recent visit and their sense that the regime would be reluctant to strike back violently for fear of international disapproval. But theirs was still a tiny and haphazard network of activists. What triggered mass backing was the Communist Party’s attempt—for the third time in a decade—to resolve its economic difficulties by announcing, on July 1st 1980, an immediate increase in the price of meat.

The day after the announcement, KOR declared itself a ‘strike information agency’. In the next three weeks protest strikes spread from the Ursus tractor plant (scene of the 1976 protests) to every major industrial city in the country, reaching Gdansk and its Lenin Shipyard on August 2nd. There the shipbuilders occupied the yard and formed themselves into an unofficial trade union, Solidarnosc (‘Solidarity’)—led by Walesa, who on August 14th 1980 climbed over the shipyard wall and into the leadership of a national strike movement.

The authorities’ instinctive response—to arrest ‘ringleaders’ and isolate the strikers—having failed, they opted instead to buy time and divide their opponents. In an unprecedented move, representatives of the Politburo were sent to Gdansk to negotiate with ‘reasonable’ workers’ leaders, even as Kuron, Adam Michnik and other KOR leaders were temporarily detained for questioning. But other intellectuals—the historian Bronislaw Geremek, the Catholic lawyer Tadeusz Mazowiecki—arrived in Gdansk to help the strikers negotiate, and the strikers themselves insisted that they be represented by their own choice of spokesmen: notably the increasingly prominent Walesa.

The regime was forced to relent. On September 1st the police released all remaining detainees, and two weeks later the Polish Council of State officially conceded the strikers’ chief demand, the right to form and register free labor unions. Within eight weeks the informal network of strikes and ad hoc unions that now criss-crossed Poland had coalesced into a single organization whose existence the authorities could no longer pretend to deny: on November 10th 1980, Solidarity became the first officially registered independent trade union in a Communist country, with an estimated ten million members. At its founding national Congress the following September Walesa was elected president.

From November 1980 until December 1981 Poland lived in an excited, uneasy limbo. Walesa’s advisers— mindful of past mistakes and wary of provoking a backlash from the humiliated Communist leadership—urged caution. This was to be a ‘self-limiting revolution’. Jacek Kuron, with the memory of 1956 and 1968 firmly in mind, insisted upon his continuing commitment to a ‘socialist system’ and reiterated Solidarity’s acceptance of the ‘Party’s leading role’—no-one wanted to give the authorities in Warsaw or Moscow an excuse to send in the tanks.

The self-imposed restraints paid off, up to a point. Overtly political issues—disarmament, or foreign policy —were kept off Solidarity’s public agenda, which focused instead upon KOR’s established strategy of ‘practicing society’: building links with the Catholic Church (of particular interest to Adam Michnik, who was determined to overcome the traditional anti-clericalism of the Polish Left and forge an alliance with the newly-energized Catholic leadership); forming local unions and factory councils; pressing for workplace self-management and social rights (the latter borrowed verbatim from the Conventions of the Geneva-based International Labour Organization).

But under Communism, even such cautiously ‘non-political’ tactics were bound to run up against the Party’s reluctance to concede any real authority or autonomy. Moreover, the economy continued to implode: industrial productivity collapsed in the course of 1981, as Poland’s newly unionized workers held meetings, protests and strikes to press their demands. Seen from Warsaw, and especially from Moscow, the country was adrift and the regime was losing control. It was also setting a bad example to its neighbors. Despite the best efforts of its cautious leaders, Solidarity was doomed to arouse the ghosts of Budapest and Prague.

General Wojciech Jaruzelski had risen from defense minister to prime minister in February 1981, replacing the now-disgraced Gierek. In October he succeeded Stanislaw Kania as Party Secretary. Ensured of the support of the army, and with the Soviet leadership encouraging firm action to halt Poland’s drift out of control, he moved swiftly to put an end to a situation that both sides knew could not last indefinitely. On December 13th 1981—just as US-Soviet nuclear disarmament talks were getting under way in Geneva—Jaruzelski declared martial law in Poland, ostensibly to forestall a Soviet intervention. Solidarity’s leaders and advisers were swept up into prison (though the union itself was not formally banned until the following year, at which point it went ‘underground ’[281]) .

In post-’89 retrospect the rise of Solidarity appears as the opening fusillade in the final struggle against Communism. But the Polish ‘revolution’ of 1980-81 is better understood as the last in a rising crescendo of workers’ protests that began in 1970 and were directed against the Party’s repressive and incompetent management of the economy. Cynical incompetence, careerism and wasted lives; price increases, protest strikes and repression; the spontaneous emergence of local unions and the active engagement of dissident intellectuals; the sympathy and support of the Catholic Church: these were familiar staging posts in the re-birth of a civil society, movingly portrayed by Andrzej Wajda in Man of Marble (1977) and Man of Iron (1981), his didactic cinematic account of the betrayed illusions and reborn hopes of Communist Poland.

But that is all they were. They were not in themselves a harbinger of the downfall of Communist power. As Michnik, Kuron and others continued to insist, before the imposition of martial law and after, Communism might be progressively eroded from within and from below, but it could not be overthrown. Open confrontation would be catastrophic, as history had convincingly demonstrated. Yes, martial law (which remained in force until July 1983) and the ensuing ‘state of war’ were an admission of a certain kind of failure on the part of the authorities—no other Communist state had ever been driven to such measures and Michnik himself called it ‘a disaster for the totalitarian state’ (while at the same time conceding that it was a serious ‘setback for the independent society’). But Communism was about power, and power lay not in Warsaw but in Moscow. The developments in Poland were a stirring prologue to the narrative of Communism’s collapse, but they remained a sideshow. The real story was elsewhere.

The clamp-down in Poland further contributed to the steady cooling of East-West relations that began in the late 1970s. The ‘second Cold War’, as it became known, should not be exaggerated: although at one point both Leonid Brezhnev and Ronald Reagan accused the other of contemplating and even planning for a nuclear war, neither the Soviet Union nor the US had any such intentions.[282] With the conclusion of the Helsinki Accords it seemed to Washington and Moscow that the Cold War was ending to their own advantage. Indeed, the situation in Europe suited both great powers, with the US now comporting itself rather like czarist Russia in the decades following Napoleon’s defeat in 1815: i.e. as a sort of continental policeman whose presence guaranteed that there would be no further disruption of the status quo by an unruly revolutionary power.

Nevertheless, East-West relations were deteriorating. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, undertaken largely at the instigation of Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in order to