The Atlantic and Its Enemies

told people, even in 1946 when he was just a parish priest, ‘Don’t worry, they’ll finish themselves off.’ But he was also a good tactician: the formidable Cardinal Prince Sapieha promoted him, and when he went to Rome, though he did not like the changes in the Church that came with Vatican II, he was careful not to make a personal issue of things. He was also a considerable intellectual, very well-read in Catholic philosophy and able, when he invited the world’s philosophers to the Vatican, to hold his own. Other Popes before him had either been deeply troubled about the modern world, not really knowing what to do, or perhaps too keen to go along with it. John Paul II — the name he took — had no doubts. He really came from the triumphalist world of the later nineteenth century, when Leo XIII, with Rerum Novarum in 1891, had made an effort to reconcile Catholicism with socialism. Here, Leo had quoted Aquinas from the thirteenth century — when ‘capitalism’ had started — and tried to identify a Christian answer. The Conservative Party in England belonged in this context, and the Christian Democrats in Italy and Germany were exemplars; perhaps, even, the most interesting question in France is why there never was an equivalent. Pope John Paul certainly had the measure of the modern world, and had a good idea as to how it might be managed. For instance, he did not bother very much with the media, and had his chauffeur read out a fortnightly summary of the press in the back of the car. He did not bother very much about the secular pieties, such as democracy, which he probably associated with ugly women and uneatable food. However, he had a wonderful sense of timing, of stage presence (much admired by Sir John Gielgud), and a papal appearance was a memorable occasion. In Poland the audiences were in hundreds of thousands. It was the man and the hour. On 13 May 1981 Mehmet Ali Agca tried to kill the Pope. There was a Bulgarian connection; Agca himself was a Turkish Fascist who had already murdered the editor of a Turkish left-wing newspaper and had mysteriously escaped from his prison. The circumstances have never been explained, even by Agca himself after long years of incarceration: he seems to have lost his mind. But it would not have been stupid on the KGB’s part to want rid of this Pope: for he did destroy them.

Communist Poland now disintegrated, at any rate down to its most basic parts. Gierek had a heart attack, was even imprisoned for a year and in the event he died in 2001 aged not far off a hundred. He was succeeded by a nonentity, Stanislaw Kania. Communist Poland was now down to its essence, the army, in the shape of General Wojciech Jaruzelski. On 9 December 1981 Marshal Viktor Kulikov, as head of the Warsaw Pact forces, moved on Warsaw. On the 12th, at night, roadblocks were set up, borders were sealed, and special troops moved on the telephone exchanges with long axes to cut the wires abroad. At 6 a.m. on came the general, national anthem to the fore, sternness of gaze, while tanks patrolled the streets outside. It was a military coup. In military form, Jaruzelski was almost a fossil of the Kolakowski generation. It was not that he believed in Communism, but he did believe that the Poles must find a method of living with Russia, that the great mistake of the country’s history was to fail to do so. A good part of the aristocracy had thought the same, sometimes with a corrupt side, in the Convention of Targowice in the age of Catherine the Great (1792). Some priests at that time had behaved in a suicidally nationalist manner. Pope John Paul was determined not to let this happen again: the Church would this time have a strategic sense. He managed matters in Poland. He had gone there in May 1979, to an audience of 400,000 in Plac Zwyciestwa, and through Cardinal John Krol in the USA he had a good contact with Reagan. This Pope was not at all popular with the media, but the morning Mass in the Vatican was crowded as never before. In June 1983 he returned to Poland. This time round, a million people turned up for the Black Virgin at Czestochowa, and some pilgrims betook themselves there from Warsaw on their knees. The Politburo in Moscow were apoplectic. They had Afghanistan on their hands, and no-one wanted to repeat the experience of Prague in 1968 let alone Budapest in 1956. The only hope was that the Poles would themselves do something.

In September-October 1980 there were agreements of the government with Solidarnosc, in the context of a strike threat, and coal output going down by 90,000 tons and inflation at 12 per cent. In mid-January 1981 Jaruzelski took over the government — a weird figure, be-corseted because of lumbago, and wearing dark spectacles because of eye problems that went back to the privations of resettlement in 1940. He did ask Brezhnev for troops but the entire Politburo voted against this: he would have to do it on his own. Nine million Poles were now in Solidarnosc. On 3 April 1981 he and Kania, the Party chief, by now, as was solemnly recorded in Politburo minutes, a very serious drunk, went to Brest-Litovsk. Solidarnosc held a conference in the autumn and there were Soviet descents on Warsaw — the head of ideology, Mikhail Suslov, and even the minister of foreign affairs, Andrey Gromyko. The Communist Party sacked all but eighteen of the Central Committee and Gierek was the scapegoat as the economy now crashed: there was not even tea to be had at hotel bars in Lublin. By November 1981 matters were in place for a declaration of martial law. A colonel, Ryszard Kuklinski, told the Americans. Jaruzelski took over the Party and tried to have Solidarnosc in a subordinate role, which Walesa refused; on 13 December 1981 WRON, the national security council, of fifteen generals and a cosmonaut took over. Walesa was put in a comfortable villa with his wife (seventh time pregnant) and apologetic generals. It had been Gomulka’s and he was there for seven months. There was no European reaction — quite the contrary, as Claude Cheysson even said, ‘socialist renewal’ was at stake. There were problems as soldiers took over the mines and the Seym produced a huge reform package that meant decentralization, etc., but it led nowhere. There were over 10,000 internments, and over 150,000 ‘prophylactic discussions’ but the overtones were farcical. If you lifted the hotel telephone you were told ‘Rozmowa kontrolowana’, meaning that someone was listening. That the tape was old and wheezing did not inspire fear, and conversations with the Polish intelligentsia anyway consisted of funny stories.

At any rate, Moscow was having considerable difficulty in digesting Poland, but there was worse. Could Poland digest the Soviet Union? There was an imponderable, television. Telecommunications were now such that in the furthest reaches of the Soviet Union truth could be told: people would know that they lived ‘like dogs’, as Richard Pipes’s fellow traveller had known in fifties Leningrad. Maybe in Brezhnev’s time the blockage of information meant that most Soviet citizens imagined that the West still lived in the world of Dickens’s novels, that the imperialized Third World was only waiting for shining tomorrows courtesy of Moscow. But cameras could now be dropped in the remotest places, from there to beam instant images to a waiting world (Robert Harris’s Archangel has a good description of the process). In East Germany Western television had generally been available, such that the inhabitants were under no illusions as to the relative poverty of their living conditions — as Enzensberger said, Communism was the highest stage of underdevelopment, and East Germany was a state that sich selber mitmacht, an imitation of itself, as Musil had called Austria-Hungary. This line was now true of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. What was to be done? A sign that matters were going out of control was that the secret police took charge.

This situation was not at all new for the bosses in the Kremlin. In 1921 the West had not followed the Bolsheviks’ pattern. There had been no revolution, or at any rate not a 1917, in Germany. By rights, the Germans should have produced one, and for a few weeks there had been workers’ and soldiers’ councils on the Soviet model. But then there had been deals — the Social Democrats with the generals, the trade unions with the bosses — and the final revolution was not Lenin’s but Hitler’s. Moscow had responded by finding common ground with Berlin. Now there was a wooden replay of this, an effort to separate the Europeans from the USA. ‘Our common European home’, an old tune of Molotov’s in 1954, came up again under Brezhnev.

In 1921 Lenin had responded quite creatively. In the short term the Revolution had failed. There was famine, and there were revolts. In 1920 the peasants were given a New Economic Policy, by which private buying and selling had again been allowed. Then there had been an approach to the Germans, and German industrialists and even military officers had co-operated with the new Soviet Union. Bolshevik diplomats put on white ties, appeared in the West, talking good French, and money came their way. On the whole, the West did not really understand 1917. Why could the Bolsheviks not be bought, like everybody else? Now in the 1980s, as Moscow saw the failure of everything, everywhere, that calculation came back in great force. Lenin is said to have said, around 1921, that there were Western ‘useful idiots’ who would talk about feminism or ecology or town planning or humanism and who could be put on the same platform as Bolsheviks whose intentions were to take over the planet. Now Moscow came up with the last useful idiot, Mikhail Sergeyevitch Gorbachev, in himself an obviously decent man, whose task was to soft-soap the West. Seeing him in action, Yuri Lyubimov, a theatrical producer of genius, scratched his head and wondered as to whom Gorbachev reminded him of. He said, at last, ‘Chichikov’, the anti-hero of Gogol’s Dead Souls, who worked out a scheme for buying serfs whose deaths had not been recorded — a scheme which in the short term makes Chichikov appear to be a great landowner, but which ends in farcial collapse. In the Soviet Union, there were many equivalents.

The statistics of the seventies could not conceal a slowing down and even a reversal of the economy. Labour was no longer migrant, and construction — its forte — slowed down. In the sixties labour began to run short, then in the seventies arable land, then in the eighties fuel, energy, petrol, and, as Vladimir Bukovsky puts it, ‘the system