had lied at Christmas time no less! Zorin apologized that he could not be cheerful on such a holiday occasion.
This speech by Zorin was restrained compared to the large Polish Army daily, Zolnierz Wolnosci. The newspaper of the Communist military said that the Christmas address by Reagan could not be regarded “as anything else than a blatant interference in the internal affairs of independent and sovereign Poland”—the standard line in press accounts from Moscow to Prague, usually accompanied by the ever-present Communist claim that there was no Cold War, but instead only nonstop Reagan belligerent attempts to restart one.76
Titled, “Blatant Interference in Our Affairs,” the Zolnierz Wolnosci piece found hypocrisy in the Christmas candle, and was especially vicious toward Ambassador Spasowski. Moscow’s TASS news agency heartily enjoyed this angle; it eagerly re-circulated the Zolnierz Wolnosci article, but only after padding it with additional inflammatory agitprop. Here is an excerpt from the TASS write-up:
Speaking of the dirty role of traitor Spasowski, who played a role in determining the United States’ present stand with regard to Poland, the newspaper [Zolnierz Wolnosci] says further, it is worthwhile quoting his impudent slanderous verbiage in front of U.S. television cameras, the verbiage which testifies to that man’s moral degradation. The traitor asked the President that a candle be lit in a White House window on Christmas Eve….
Undoubtedly, there should be a candle burning in a White House window, Zolnierz Wolnosci points out, and not only on the Christmas but every other evening as well—in memory of those hundreds of thousands of victims of military intervention and U.S. bombing raids in Korea, Vietnam, Kampuchea and Laos…in honor of tens of thousands of victims of different forms of U.S. interference in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and in honor of the Palestinian women and children killed by U.S. weapons being used by Israel.77
While scathing critiques of Spasowski such as these were broadcast throughout the Communist press, inside Poland the Polish people took Reagan’s candle gesture to heart: “When he did this, it was quite a special moment for Poland,” said one Polish woman of Reagan’s action, once she was free to speak two decades later. This was a wonderful symbol that Reagan was going to help us until we could be free like the United States. He was going to end this.78 Similarly, Jan Pompowski, a Solidarity member from the city of Wroclaw, reciprocated the gesture: “Most of us Catholics saw the future with hope. We prayed for Reagan, that God would give him wisdom.” To Poles, said Pompowski, Reagan was “a man of truth, who acted according to his beliefs, which were the same as ours. We knew he would not betray us.”79
At the time, Radek Sikorski, who later held high office in the Polish government in the 1990s, was a political refugee living in England, where he attended graduate school at Oxford. Today, he speaks of that White House candle as a major symbolic action. He remembers well the vitriol from the Polish Communist press, from
And yet, said Sikorski, the harsh media attack on Reagan backfired on the Communists. “The Communist press despised such gestures and the Reagan administration itself,” recalled Sikorski over twenty years later. “So, this told the Polish people that these people—Reagan, his administration, and the ambassador—must be okay if the Communists hate them so much.” Referring to Ambassador Spasowski, he added: “Poles would read that the man was a traitor, an enemy of socialism, a friend of the Reagan administration, et cetera, and thus they would like him.”80
What the Communists and their press had not figured was the contempt the Polish people had for them and everything they said. Poles had long ago recognized what Czech dissident-turned-president Vaclav Havel referred to as “the communist culture of the lie”; they had become conditioned to the rotten smell of deceit.
In a genuine display of hypocrisy—from the Communist side—the Marxist-atheist press fought back at Reagan’s invocation of the Christmas season in Poland by attempting to manufacture its own little Christmas snow globe with greetings from the Communist bloc: The Czech media pushed the boundaries of even Communist propaganda by running fantastic accounts of how the martial law crackdown had ushered in a new era of bliss for Poland, and fittingly just in time for the Christmas season. A December 28 piece in the Czech party organ Rude Pravo idyllically captured the scene in a Polish village: a “brightly lit Christmas tree of peace” on the square in Knurow; joyous children with caps down to their brows play as parents glance at their frolicking offspring; skiers traverse the tricky slopes; and general “good humor and happiness” abound. Such was the merriment that the “impudent” Reagan was trying to destroy by his blatant interference.81
Though the Communists placed great faith in their ability to invent their own reality, Reagan’s words and actions had carried with them the weight of truth. As for the truly faithful, Reagan’s speech directed a special line at those Poles who lit candles after Mass. Candles had burned earlier in the century, reminded Reagan, when “an evil influence threatened that the lights were going out all over the world.” “Let those candles remind us,” he shared, “that these blessings [of freedom and abundance] bring with them a solid obligation, an obligation to the God who guides us, an obligation to the heritage of liberty and dignity handed down to us by our forefathers and an obligation to the children of the world, whose future will be shaped by the way we live our lives today.”82
This last line was not a platitude, since Reagan personally felt a divine obligation in all of his actions. “We can’t let this revolution against Communism fail without our offering a hand,” he wrote in his diary. “We may never have an opportunity like this in our lifetime.”83
REAGAN’S LETTER TO BREZHNEV
On that same busy, Poland-packed December 23, Reagan also decided to deliver what he rightly called a “strong message” to the Soviets. Since the NSC meeting that morning, he had wrestled with a draft of a letter to Brezhnev. The draft was completed by evening. He sent the message to Chairman Brezhnev over the Washington-Moscow cable “hot line” known in the White House as the “Molink.” The cable was not declassified until October 1999.84
The letter condemned the Soviet role in the crackdown. Reagan began it by listing the violation of “elementary rights” of Polish citizens underway: the incarceration of trade union leaders and intellectuals, their detention in overcrowded jails and “freezing detention camps,” the “massive arrests without any legal procedures,” and the generally “brutal assaults” by security forces. He then appealed to Brezhnev directly and sternly:
The recent events in Poland clearly are not an “internal matter” and in writing to you, as the head of the Soviet government, I am not misaddressing my communication. Your country has repeatedly intervened in Polish affairs during the months preceding the recent tragic events. No clearer proof of such intervention is needed than the letter of June 5, 1981, from the Central Committee of the CPSU to the Polish leadership which warned the Poles that the Soviet Union could not tolerate developments there. There were numerous other communications of this nature which placed pressure on the Polish government and depicted the reform movement as a threat to the “vital interests” of all socialist countries. These communications, accompanied by a steady barrage of media assaults as well as military exercises along Poland’s borders, were coupled with warnings of intervention unless the Polish government sharply restricted the liberties and rights which it was granting its citizens….
Our two countries have had moments of accord and moments of disagreement. But since Afghanistan nothing has so outraged our public opinion as the pressures and threats which your government has exerted on Poland to stifle the stirrings of freedom. Attempts to suppress the Polish people—either by the Polish army or police acting under Soviet pressure, or through even more direct use of Soviet military force—certainly will not bring about long term stability in Poland and could unleash a process which neither you nor we could fully control…. The consequences of each of these courses for our relationship should be clear.85
By insisting that he was not misaddressing his communication, Reagan conveyed his understanding that the Soviet government was responsible for events in Poland. He clearly blamed the Soviet leadership for the
