poisonous one, of bullying and self-pity, a sort of permanent vierge folle and epoux infernal. Rousseau had told the Poles: you cannot stop them from swallowing you; make sure they cannot digest you. Balzac had offered different advice: get on with practical life and make yourselves indispensable to the Russians. The Poles in a sense did both, because they did develop a first-rate intelligentsia, but instead of being loyal Communists, or even, like Czechs or Slovenes, just progressives of the sort that Communists could use, they marched off in a different direction altogether and produced the most vibrant political Catholicism in the world. Frenchmen, trained from earliest infancy in anti-clericalism, could not believe the crowds they saw in Poland welcoming the Pope. ‘Like the Ayatollah,’ sniffed one of those Frenchmen.
There were great differences between Poland and the other ‘bloc’ countries. In the first place she had a ‘mass of manoeuvre’, a population coming on for 40 million, and still, in the 1960s, expanding, and that because of a second considerable difference: a large peasant population, still set in the old days, with hay-carts trundling along on the roads. That in turn reflected another great difference, that the Western Allies had had some sort of formal rights as regards Poland, and even Stalin shrank from applying the full-scale Soviet formula there. Some version of due process had to be gone through, and collectivization of agriculture, the expropriation of private peasant plots, would have excited resistance. A consequence of all this was that the Catholic Church remained powerful — much more so than in Hungary, where there was a strong Protestant tradition, or Czechoslovakia, where anti-clericalism was also strong. Poland was different.
The Communists after the war had attempted ‘modernization’, the development of big industry, and, in the areas taken from Germany, that was not unpromising. There already was substantial enough mining, and a steel industry was built up. The old Kattowitz — Katowice — was a grim nineteenth-century barracks of a town, and it now acquired a Communist overlay. An enormous stadium was put up in the centre, as an open challenge to the Church that would otherwise have dominated the area. In Cracow, which was very Catholic and proper, a gigantic steelworks, Nowa Huta, went up, and the general idea was that with sport, women’s emancipation and a healthy proletarian work-day rather than mindless peasant agriculture, a new Polish version of ‘Soviet man’ would emerge. But the early, Stalinist, programme was carried through by a small group of mainly Jewish Communists, and they were broken when Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956.
A ‘native Communism’ took their place, under Wladyslaw Gomulka, himself to a limited extent their victim, and he was prepared to co-operate with the Church and the peasants, and the intelligentsia as well, on the understanding that, with ‘modernization’, matters would go his way. This did not happen: on the contrary, the intelligentsia resented the censorship, and encouraged student revolts. The regime fought back, identifying the Jewish origins of many of the people involved, and drove some of them out. A characteristic victim of that moment (1968) was Leszek Kolakowski. Interwar Poland had crashed, especially with the failure of the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis in 1944, and a good part of the intelligentsia, seeing the Red Army coming in, became, if not Communist, then at least sympathizers. It was a version of a fairly old Warsaw problem: Russia, whatever her appalling features, worked, and Poland, whatever her admirable ones, did not. Kolakowski, philosopher and historian of ideas, went along, and even helped falsify electoral returns in 1946: why bother accurately recording the votes of the Polish peasantry, obstinate clowns (the original of ‘clown’ is a Dutch word meaning ‘peasant’) and boors (ditto). A sojourn in Moscow caused some shock; but he was an enthusiastic supporter of Gomulka and the promise of a new Poland. Then the 1960s brought disillusion. He wanted to answer the central question of why reform Communism was not working. This was not a subject that he could openly address. He therefore addressed it in ingenious disguise: in Religious Inspiration and Church Link he wrote what purported to be a work of history, about the Dutch Calvinist Church of the early seventeenth century, when the (Arminian) effort to humanize it had failed, against the Counter-Remonstrants, who were enthusiastic about damning people. He had learned Dutch more or less on the train in order to write this book, a long one, hardly penetrable by the censors or for that matter anyone else. But it was enough to predestine him to exile, the more so as his wife was Jewish, and there followed the sort of distinguished career that put Poland back on the world’s intellectual map for the first time, in effect, since Copernicus in the sixteenth century. The three-volume Main Currents in Marxism is a classic. But in his disillusionment Kolakowski was in good company. Student revolts saw Gomulka off.
In the seventies the opposition gradually built up. As elsewhere in the ‘bloc’, intellectuals were a main element, and in ordinary circumstances this could be a ticket to nowhere: ‘daring arguments, tame conclusions’, as A. J. P. Taylor had said of Vienna in 1900. Beards talked ‘civil society’, and Thomas Aquinas was much brandished in the wind. Among the intelligentsia of western Europe, and especially in Italy, there was a desperate desire for some connection with the real proletariat. This was generally a hopeless cause, and so it also proved in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Marx had said that ‘the conjunction of the proletariat and the intelligentsia’ would bring Communism; he had gone on, to the effect that ‘philosophy cannot become reality without the abolition of the proletariat and the proletariat cannot abolish itself unless philosophy becomes reality’. In Poland these words came to mean something; and of all revenges on Marx, through the medium of the Catholic Church. The French observer who dismissed the masses’ religious enthusiasms as Ayatollah-like had it entirely wrong: the Church, historically, had been adept at raising the cause of the poor, and besides, in Poland, it was the national institution. Workers could be mobilized by priests, and this was to happen again and again as the seventies went ahead. The intellectuals went along, and found themselves having to talk common language with priests in a way that had no counterpart elsewhere. But it mattered also that the workers were galvanized by other factors: an industrialization that worked out very badly. In that decade the Communist Party (it had a different name in Poland) had also embarked on a supposedly unifying and national strategy, economic growth.
Gomulka’s successor, Edward Gierek, was a miner (he had quite good French, having worked in Belgium) and he wanted to profit from German Ostpolitik. He would make Poland ‘a new Japan’. His relations with Valery Giscard d’Estaing and Helmut Schmidt were good; there was money to be had from the banks, stuffed with Arab dollars; Poland could export, as did the Far Eastern miracle-countries. Investment came in, and the skies above Upper Silesia — the Katowice region — turned a vague green, as factories pumped out their chemical smoke. For a time, this succeeded. Output rose by 11 per cent per annum and real wages by 7 per cent (1971-5). But consumption also shot up, as food to the value of $3bn was imported every year (in a country that, before the war, had exported it). However, Polish goods suffered for lack of quality, and when the second oil shock occurred, in 1978-9, the market for them went down. The external debt, at $20bn, could not be easily serviced, and investments, often pointless, were already taking 40 per cent of the national income. The ‘new Japan’ was looking instead at North Korea. Prices, preached the regime’s own economists (there had been quite a vogue for the sending of bright and orthodox Poles to business schools such as INSEAD), would have to go up, to take account of production costs. However, most workers could only see in that the privileges of the Party, and strikes began. The private butchers were permitted to sell the best cuts of meat, and could charge almost twice for them. Now they were permitted to sell cheap cuts as well, which affected ordinary consumers. The Lublin railwaymen got it into their heads that the lack of meat was caused by exports to the USSR, and they welded a train to the railway line heading east. At that, Gierek was summoned to explain himself to the General Secretary, Brezhnev, and a frigid communique resulted (in July 1980): ‘an exchange of information as to the situation in their respective countries’. In the docks of Gdansk there was a stubborn woman, one Anna Walentynowicz, who worked a crane. There is always something of an imponderable about these working-class troubles in northern Poland: in that region, a great number of the people forcibly moved from the Ukraine had settled, including Polish Ukrainians (‘Ruthenes’) from the mountains of the south. Their children had inherited resentments to work out; and Anna Walentynowicz was herself from Rovno, in what had been a mainly Ukrainian area of old Poland. At any rate, she was refractory. She had been a good Communist and worker to start with — had even been decorated — but now she protested, and was dismissed, even though she only had a month or two before she would have reached the age of retirement. The workforce took up her cause, and there emerged another remarkable figure, Lech Walesa. Here was a good Catholic — eight children by the same wife — with a career as a fitter. He was also an organizer, and 13,000 people struck on 14 August 1980, in protest at the dismissal of Anna Walentynowicz. They occupied the workplace, the Lenin Shipyard. Priests were well to the fore. A trade union, Solidarnosc (‘Solidarity’), emerged from this, and the very name had Catholic overtones, solidarieta in Italian, involving charity and co-operative movements, under clerical patronage.
A central matter, here, was that the Pope was a Pole. Karol Wojtyla was elected on 16 October 1978, having been Archbishop of Cracow, the most religious city in Poland. He had risen from the pious lower-middle class, and brought enthusiasm to everything (he was even in his youth a good amateur actor). He knew his Communists, and
