l:href='#n_294' type='note'>[294] In retrospect it has become tempting to conclude that his ascent was uncannily timely—as the Soviet system was tottering, so there emerged a leader who understood what was happening and successfully sought an exit strategy from empire. Cometh the hour, cometh the man? Perhaps. And Mikhail Gorbachev certainly was not just another apparatchik.
But he surely had no idea what he was doing and would have been horrified had he known. His critics were more perspicacious. On the one hand, Party hardliners understandably hated Gorbachev—many of them warmly endorsed the notorious letter published in the newspaper
The trouble was that by relinquishing the Party’s monopoly of power and initiative, Gorbachev commensurately reduced his own influence as well. He was thus obliged to forge tactical alliances and trim between the extreme positions of others. This is a familiar if uncomfortable necessity for democratic politicians; but in the eyes of a nation accustomed to seventy years of dictatorship such maneuverings simply made Gorbachev appear weak. From the early months of 1989 onwards the Soviet President fell steadily in opinion polls. By the autumn of 1990 Gorbachev would have the support of just 21 percent of the public.
Long before his fall from power, then, Gorbachev had decidedly fallen from grace. But only at home: elsewhere, ‘Gorbymania’ flourished. On his increasingly frequent visits abroad Gorbachev was feted by west European politicians and cheered by enthusiastic crowds. Late in 1988, Margaret Thatcher—one of Gorbachev’s most ardent fans—pronounced the Cold War ‘over’, Seen from Eastern Europe this might have been thought a little premature; but there too Mikhail Gorbachev was wildly popular.
In the ‘peoples’ democracies’ the Soviet leader’s domestic travails, though duly noted, counted for less than his foreign pronouncements, notably a widely reported speech to the United Nations on December 7th 1988. After announcing unilateral cuts in Soviet conventional forces in Europe, Gorbachev went on to advise his audience that ‘Freedom of choice is a universal principle. There should be no exceptions.’ This was more than just a renunciation of the ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’, an acknowledgement that Moscow would not use force to impose its version of ‘Socialism’ upon fraternal states. What Gorbachev was conceding—and was immediately understood to have conceded—was that the citizens of the satellite states were now at liberty to go their own way, Socialist or not. Eastern Europe was about to re-enter history.
Under Mikhail Gorbachev’s leadership, the Soviet Union since 1985 had progressively removed itself from direct oversight of its client states. But the implications of this growing detachment remained unclear. The peoples’ democracies were still run by authoritarian party cliques whose power rested upon a massive repressive apparatus. Their police and intelligence services remained closely bound and beholden to the Soviet Union’s own security apparatus and continued to operate semi-independently of local authorities. And while the rulers in Prague or Warsaw or East Berlin were starting to appreciate that they could no longer count on Moscow’s unconditional support, neither they nor their subjects had a clear sense of what this meant.
The situation in Poland encapsulated these uncertainties. On the one hand, the declaration of martial law had re-asserted the authoritarian rule of the Communist Party. On the other hand, the suppression of Solidarity and the silencing of its leaders did nothing to ease the country’s underlying problems. Quite the contrary: Poland was still in debt, but now—thanks to international condemnation of the repression—its rulers could no longer extricate themselves from difficulty by further borrowing abroad. In effect, Poland’s rulers were facing the same dilemma they had tried to address in the 1970s, but with even fewer options.
Meanwhile, the opposition might have been criminalized but it had not evaporated. Clandestine publishing continued, as did lectures, discussions, theatrical performances and much else. Solidarity itself, though banned, maintained a virtual existence, especially after its best-known spokesman, Lech Walesa, was released from internment in November 1982 (and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in absentia, the following year). The regime could not take the risk of forbidding a return visit from the Pope, in June 1983, after which the Church became ever more engaged in underground and semi-official activities
The political police favored repression: in one notorious instance in 1984 they orchestrated the kidnap and murder of a popular radical priest, Father Jerzy Popieluszko—
The natural instinct of the Party leadership (in Warsaw as in Moscow) was to propose ‘reforms’. In 1986 Jaruzelski, now state President, released Adam Michnik and other Solidarity leaders from prison and through a newly installed ‘Ministry of Economic Reform’ offered a modest raft of economic changes designed, among other objectives, to attract renewed foreign funding of Poland’s national debt, now fast approaching $40 billion.[295] In a bizarre nod to democracy, the government actually began asking Poles in 1987 what sort of economic ‘reform’ they would like: ‘Would you prefer’, they were asked, ‘a fifty percent rise in the price of bread and one hundred percent on petrol, or sixty percent for petrol and a hundred percent for bread?’ Unsurprisingly, the public’s response was, in essence, ‘none of the above’.
The question—and the decision to pose it—nicely illustrated the political as well as the economic bankruptcy of Poland’s Communist rulers. Indeed, it says something about the authorities’ crumbling credibility that Poland’s membership of the IMF was made possible in part by the
By 1987 the most arresting aspect of the Polish situation was the sheer helplessness of the Party and its organs. Without actually facing any visible threat to its monopoly of power, the Polish United Workers Party was slipping into irrelevance. The ‘counter-society’ theorized by Michnik and others a decade earlier was emerging as a
A group of young economists at Warsaw’s School of Planning and Statistics, led by Leszek Balcerowicz, was already drawing up plans for an autonomous private business sector freed from central planning—i.e. a market; these and other proposals were intensely debated among ‘unofficial’ Poles and widely discussed abroad. But the guiding tenets of political ‘realism’ and the ‘self-limiting’ objectives of 1980-81 remained in force—confrontation and violence, which could only play into the hands of Party hardliners, were studiously and successfully avoided. Conversations were one thing, ‘adventures’ something else.
The trigger for the Party’s final eclipse, predictably enough, was yet another attempt to ‘reform’ the economy—or, more modestly, to reduce the country’s un-sustainable debt. In 1987 consumer prices were raised by some 25 percent; in 1988 by a further 60 percent. As in 1970, 1976 and again in 1980, so now: the sharp price rises sparked a round of strikes, culminating in a massive movement of stoppages and occupations in the spring and summer of 1988. In the past, lacking any leverage over the workforce, the Communist authorities had either abandoned efforts to raise prices or else resorted to force—or both. On this occasion they had a third option— appealing to the workers’ own leaders for help. In August 1988 General Czeslaw Kiszczak, the Interior Minister, urged Lech Walesa—nominally a private citizen, the unacknowledged leader of an unrecognized organization—to meet him and negotiate an end to the country’s labor protests. Initially reluctant, Walesa at last agreed.
Walesa had little difficulty appealing to the strikers—the moral authority of Solidarity had only grown in the years since 1981—but the underlying issues remained: the country’s inflation rate was now approaching 1000
