crackdown, and his language about unleashing “a process” that neither side could control was especially dire, and a deliberate attempt to convey the severity of the situation.
In the cable, he went on to lecture Brezhnev that the intervention was in direct violation of international agreements the USSR had signed. He cited the Helsinki Final Act, “which you, Mr. President, personally initialed on behalf of your country in 1975.”86 This was feigned surprise, since Reagan had always thought Helsinki a sham. In the next to last paragraph of the three-page letter, he reiterated the blame, underscoring “the heavy responsibility of the Soviet Union for the present situation in Poland.”87
Here, he also reminded Brezhnev that in their previous correspondence both nations had expressed a desire for better Soviet–American relations. That, however, was being jeopardized by “the present atmosphere of political terror, mass arrests and bloodshed in Poland… the Soviet Union must decide whether we can move ahead with this agenda [of improving relations] or whether we will travel a different path.” He linked improved U.S.– USSR relations, including negotiations on “critical regional and arms control issues,” to Soviet behavior in Poland, specifying that, “representatives of the spiritual, political, and social forces in Poland need to be promptly released from detention.”88
Needless to say, this was a tough letter. The Polish democracy movement would have been elated to read such a forceful declaration from so high up in Washington. Reagan hoped that this would have the desired impact and demonstrate to the Soviets that he was serious about democratic reform in Poland. They were hard words for a hard situation, but nevertheless they were words that Reagan had been waiting to send for over forty years. Reagan concluded the cable: “I hope to hear from you in the next few days.”89
DECEMBER 25
The next few days coincided with Christmas, a holiday that demanded no time off for the Soviet leadership.90 On Christmas morning, after he opened gifts around the family tree in the White House, Reagan was handed a reply to his missive, a terse Brezhnev note sent via Molink claiming it was the United States, not the USSR, which was interfering in Polish affairs. “What a good Christmas present, I thought,” said Reagan sarcastically. Yet, the message conveyed to him that, “I’d made my point.”91
Reagan’s next move remains a bit cloudy. Reflecting the high priority of the incident, Reagan said that he wrote back to Brezhnev that same day. He said he told Brezhnev the United States would not intervene in Poland if the Soviets did not, and proposed that the Polish people “only be given the right of self-determination that had been promised to them by Joseph Stalin himself at the Yalta Conference.” Reagan was revisiting that old outrage of his: “At Yalta, I reminded him, Stalin had promised Poland and all the countries of Eastern Europe the right of self-determination but the Soviets had never granted it to any of them.”92
While Reagan wrote of this letter in his memoirs, the Reagan Library has no record of it. It does, however, hold a Reagan response he wrote and circulated internally, in which he dissects Brezhnev’s letter. This internal letter seems to match the December 25 letter that he described and said he sent to Brezhnev. In that internal letter, Reagan wrote:
On p. 3, he [Brezhnev] says we are dictating to the Poles and that no one should interfere with what the Poles and the Polish authorities are doing in their own home. It seems to me that we are supporting the right of the Polish people to vote on the govt. they’d like to have. Mr. B [Brezhnev] is supporting the right of the govt. to deny the Polish people a voice in their govt. Incidentally, didn’t the Yalta Pact call for the people having the right to vote on what govt. they would have? The Soviets violated that pact.93
Significantly, there may have also been in this Reagan letter another Reagan reference to the consideration of using U.S. military force. Somewhat cryptically, he wrote: “Mr. B [Brezhnev] says we are intervening—we know the Soviets are—maybe we should tell him we won’t if he won’t.”94 Though on the surface this might read like a possible reference to potential military conflict, in reality, this was certainly not an explicit threat of U.S. armed force. In this context, Reagan could have also meant intervention in a general political sense and not necessarily in a military way.
DECEMBER 29
On December 29, Reagan backed up his written and spoken words with action. He announced sanctions on Poland and the Soviet Union in an expression of “our displeasure over the crushing of human rights in Poland.” Regarding the USSR, he suspended negotiations on a new long-term grainsale agreement; banned flights to the United States by the Soviet airline, Aeroflot; canceled several agreements on energy and science and technology; suspended a number of key high-tech export licenses; and imposed an embargo on shipment to the USSR of critical American-made products, including the crucial pipe-laying equipment to be used in the construction of the Siberian gas pipeline. In all, seven categories of sanctions were issued.95
These moves suited Reagan’s purposes, since he wanted to strangle the Soviets economically and martial law offered a perfect excuse to heighten the stakes of economic warfare. Many of these were steps he hoped to do regardless of martial law; martial law merely provided a pretext more palatable to much of the international community.
The Soviet and Eastern European Communist press correctly surmised that martial law simply gave Reagan and his fellow “slanderers” a “pretext” to undermine socialism in the Communist bloc.96 A
On December 29, Reagan announced the sanctions to the American public, proclaiming openly the words that he had uttered privately in his cable to Brezhnev six days earlier. He stated that the USSR bore “heavy and direct responsibility” for the repression in Poland, specifying the pressure and intimidation by the Soviets and listing specific examples, just as he had in the cable. Moreover, he accused, the Soviets “now openly endorse the suppression which has ensued.”99
Reagan held forth that December 29 from the executive suite at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. Reporters, who were startled by such a confrontational move against the USSR, asked Reagan what he hoped to achieve with the sanctions. One purpose, said Reagan, was to “speak for” those who had been silenced and rendered helpless. When asked what he might do if Communist authorities failed to respond to the sanctions and continued to repress Solidarity, Reagan said cryptically: “Well, there are further actions that could be taken that we have withheld.”100
The most telling Reagan remarks of December 29 came in a conversation that afternoon with reporter Laurence Barrett. Barrett found Reagan “strangely bullish” on Poland. The president told Barrett he saw Poland as representing something much bigger:
There is reason for optimism because I think there must be an awful lot of people in the Iron Curtain countries that feel the same way [as the Poles]. In other words, the failure of Communism to provide that workers’ utopia that they have talked about for so long has been made evident in Poland. Our job now is to do everything we can to see that [the reform movement] doesn’t die aborning. We may never get another chance like this in our lifetime.101
While Reagan adamantly believed that American pressure could change Soviet behavior toward Poland, he wanted to ensure that his sanctions helped rather than hurt the Polish people. This was evident in his reaction to a December 31 Western Union telegram sent to the White House by five signers: Lane Kirkland of the AFL-CIO,
