JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT, DECEMBER 13, 1981, A SOFT SNOW FELL lightly on Warsaw, Poland, gently betraying the harshness about to befall the country’s long-repressed citizenry. Rudely piercing the peaceful silence were eleven police trucks that raced down Mokotowska Street. In mere seconds, they had blocked off both approaches to the five-story building that housed the headquarters of Poland’s fiercely independent trade union.
The structure was rapidly vetted in this literal midnight raid. Outside, riot police wielded clubs at onlookers. Tanks soon followed. When one passerby asked a policeman what was happening, the officer sufficiently explained with just one word: “Solidarity.”1
The Polish Communist regime, consenting to orders from Moscow, had declared martial law in an effort to stymie the burgeoning labor movement Solidarity, which the government had officially recognized as a legal entity sixteen months earlier. Now unfolding was an attempt to squash the union, an institution that had come to embody the hopes and aspirations of millions of Poles. While government troops were taking over the building, Solidarity leader Lech Walesa and other key labor figures were in Gdansk. Once the phone lines were severed at headquarters, the leaders were cut off from communication and police around the country scrambled to arrest union leaders. All over the country, the police tore down every Solidarity poster that they could find; those not ripped down were doused with paint.2
All throughout Poland the chaos raged. The sound of gunfire rang out in the industrial areas of Ursus and the mining lands of southeast Poland, injuring seventy people in the shootings. In Krakow, the hometown of Pope John Paul II, four others were shot.3 In every corner of the country, the Communists were murdering the workers. The party was smashing the proletariat.
Military traffic was dense, with tanks occupying all Warsaw streets. Army checkpoints were set up and borders were shut down. International flights to and from Warsaw were canceled. Western air traffic over Polish territory was prohibited.
It was “such a shock… nothing else was on TV,” said Joseph Dudek, a mining engineer from Krakow. “You couldn’t move out of your house. Tanks were outside. There were checkpoints everywhere as well as the fear of war approaching.”4
The final, remaining links between Poland and the outside world were cut on Monday night, December 14, when the elusive Reuters news service was no longer able to report from Warsaw.5 Six hours later, Communist Party leader General Wojciech Jaruzelski appeared on television to announce a state of emergency: Poland would be governed by something called the Military Council of National Salvation, a committee of fifteen generals and five colonels. General Jaruzelski would be prime minister.6
Talking into the camera in typical monotone, General Jaruzelski served up an expressionless twenty- three-minute speech. “I am speaking to all Poles,” he said. “Our country is threatened by mortal danger.” He said that “antistate, subversive activities” by “forces hostile to socialism” had pushed Polish society to the “brink of civil war.” These “anti-socialist forces,” he went on, were “often inspired and financially supported from abroad.” The goal of the Council of National Salvation, he explained dramatically, was “to eliminate the danger of the fall of the state.”7
The formal decree was posted along street corners. Public meetings—the right of assembly—were banned. The new military authorities ordered summary trial for all strike leaders, who were imprisoned. There was also an order that three influential Roman Catholic organizations—the Pax Association, the Christian Social Association, and the Polish Catholic-Social Union—cease activities. All citizens were instructed to carry identification cards, which would be randomly checked in subsequent days. Those who did not have their cards were arrested.8
Sources claimed that upwards of 1,000 people were detained in the first sweeps.9 Likewise arrested were a number of high political figures, including the former prime minister and dozens of former government figures. Governors of four provinces were replaced by military men. This was a comprehensive purge.
On Sunday, Poles gathered in crowds to read the newly issued decree from the new Polish government. It was God’s day, and the new regime was smart enough to dare not try to stop church services—the one permissible public meeting place.10 Yet, before Poles hit the churches, the Soviet leadership issued a statement of support for martial law. “All these steps taken in Poland are, of course, its internal affair,” stated the Soviet leadership, as if it had nothing to do with the situation. It was “no secret to anyone,” Moscow continued, that the “enemies of Socialism in Poland” were “aiming to overthrow the existing social system.” These same forces were striving “by all means to undermine the fraternal friendship between the Polish and Soviet peoples.”
In regard to Washington’s ultimate intentions, this was actually all true. Making reference to Solidarity and the United States, the Soviet statement concluded: “It is no accident that the enemies of independent Socialist Poland inside the country had the support of certain external circles in the West.”11 In response to these actions, Solidarity, under siege, issued an appeal to friends everywhere:
We appeal to you: help us in our struggle by mass protests and moral support. Do not watch passively the attempts to strangle the beginnings of democracy in the heart of Europe. Be with us in these difficult moments. Solidarity with Solidarity. Poland is not yet lost.12
The American president read Solidarity’s appeal, and would spend his next seven years in office heeding the precise specifics.
For now, however, there was little Ronald Reagan could do but be angry. Very, very angry. Richard Pipes, the Harvard Sovietologist and the NSC’s top expert on Poland, described Reagan’s reaction: “The president was absolutely livid. He said, ‘Something must be done. We need to hit them hard, and save Solidarity.’ The president was gung ho and ready to go.”13
At that moment Reagan committed to save and sustain Solidarity as the wedge that could splinter the Soviet bloc, as the first crack in the Iron Curtain. He estimated that the labor union held the potential to bring down the whole house of cards. As Richard Allen put it, Reagan right away “thought of Poland as a means to the disintegration and collapse of the main danger, the main adversary, the Soviet Union.”14 Ironically, it turned out that bad news in Poland was good news: In Reagan’s mind, the ugliness that was martial law afforded beautiful possibilities.
“HE HAD A PREOCCUPATION WITH POLAND”
Well before the explosive events of December 1981, Ronald Reagan had viewed the Soviet satellite as the linchpin in the Communist empire. In Poland, he saw a potential catalyst, a state whose fall could knock down the Soviet dominoes in Eastern Europe. To Reagan, the Poles were tragic victims of the two totalitarianisms he held in equally low repute—Nazism and Bolshevism. By mere geographic fate, this fine, religious people had been traumatized by villains, and while the Allies liberated Poland in World War II, they sold it down the river to the Soviets at Yalta. Reagan saw no good reason why America should not seek to free the nation from totalitarianism, this time from a despotism colored Russian red instead of German brown. Since 1939, poor, proud Poland had known nothing but foreign-imposed tyranny.
“He had a preoccupation with Poland,” said Bill Clark. “He had mentioned Yalta as far back as I go with him as being totally unfair and having to be undone someday.”15 (Reagan’s hatred of Yalta was exceeded only by Poles’ hatred of Yalta.16) Clark added that Reagan “greatly” sympathized with Poland for a number of reasons; among them, no other country lost as high a percentage of its population in World War II.17 In the 1970s, Reagan wrote several radio broadcasts on Poland’s persecution by the USSR.18
Reagan was especially affected by the pope’s nine-day pilgrimage to his Polish homeland from June 2 to June 11, 1979. The new man in Rome shrewdly chose Poland as his first foreign visit since his election in October 1978. Moscow was scared to death of the pope’s visit—another factor, like the emerging Solidarity, which
