Macierewicz and his friends soon had their day: In June 1989, unlike the Soviet broken promises at Yalta forty-four years earlier, Poland honored its promises and held genuine elections for a limited number of chambers in two houses of Parliament, which resulted in an overwhelming victory for Solidarity. The old chamber of the legislature opened 35 percent of its seats to balloting and a second newly created upper chamber was fully contested. In the old chamber, all 35 percent of the open seats were won by Solidarity candidates. Of the newly created upper chamber, which had 100 new seats, 99 were won by Solidarity candidates and the other by a millionaire capitalist. Not one seat was won by a Communist.
In short, Solidarity won over 99 percent of available seats in June 1989. Lech Walesa capped the tumultuous decade by emerging as Poland’s freely elected president, beating challenger Stanislaw Tyminski by a margin of 75 percent to 25 percent. (Tyminski was an emigre businessman from Canada. Communists were not to be found in this race.) Walesa refused to form a coalition government with the remaining Communist Party delegates in the old chamber, and eventually, Parliament accepted a Solidarity-led government. Antoni Macierewicz, the former prisoner, found new incarnation as Poland’s minister of internal affairs.
A crucial component to this peaceful outcome came from Mikhail Gorbachev who, in 1989, spoke by phone with the head of the Polish Communist Party. During the phone call, he stated that the Soviet Union, which had tried to crush Solidarity, would accept the outcome of the free election—that is, a government with a Communist minority and non-Communist prime minister. “That phone call,” wrote scholars Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, “ended the Cold War.”9 That sentiment was shared by others, including Gorbachev himself, who later admitted that once Poland held elections, he and the Soviet foreign ministry knew the game was over. In his memoirs, he spoke of how the Soviet leadership realized that the emergence of Solidarity threatened not only “chaos in Poland” but the “ensuing breakup of the entire Socialist camp.”10
THE REAGAN AID
It was only after the June 1989 elections that the full extent of Reagan’s aid to Solidarity during the years after martial law was imposed became evident. As a result of NSDD-32 and other subsequent efforts, the Polish underground received tons of equipment—printing presses, photocopiers, cameras, computers, telephones, transmitters, short-wave radios, and fax machines (the first in Poland). Such equipment was smuggled into Poland by CIA agents, priests, and labor officials; among other things, it enabled the creation of underground newspapers and broadcasting operations. Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Carter and a Poland native, who played a key consulting role, emphasized: “This was about getting the message out and resisting: books, communications equipment, propaganda, ink and printing presses.”11
While the actual amount that Reagan spent to keep Solidarity alive remains elusive, a commonly cited figure is roughly $8 million per year over a six- to seven-year period, or a total of approximately $50 million—a significant amount.12 This aid was used in a variety of ways, among the most significant of which was to assist the crucial operation of Tygodnik Mazowsze, the underground Solidarity newspaper which was widely read and respected. The newspaper had a circulation of 70,000 to 80,000. Typically, it was a fourpage paper, eight pages for a special issue. One source said that to produce a typical issue with a normal print run required sixteen tons of paper. He stressed that in a country in which everything had to be rationed, including paper, finding such a volume of material was a daunting task. “Some [of the paper] had to be stolen from government ministries and bureaucracy,” said the source, who asked not to be identified. “It was quite a feat. The organizational effort that went into this was enormous.” Hence, any support from the Reagan administration, particularly financial, was crucial.
Most vital to Tygodnik Mazowsze’s effectiveness was the wider, unstoppable means of mass communication that broadcast the newspaper’s contents throughout Poland—namely, Radio Free Europe (RFE). In fact, most people digested the weekly by hearing its articles and opinion pieces read over RFE, a juggernaut unto itself, and among Ronald Reagan’s most cherished projects.13 He never lost his love for radio, nor its inherent importance in communicating to huge swaths of people.
As Radek Sikorski put it, “everyone and his brother” listened to Radio Free Europe.14 Reagan’s team even added religious programming to RFE, including the Catholic Mass.15 Poles were thrilled with this; in the USSR, priests were banned from radio and TV. Asked about RFE’s import to Solidarity, Lech Walesa said, “Would there be the earth without the sun?”16 He called RFE “the most precious gift of the West for me.”17
Reagan administration financial and technical support of media was especially crucial because of the inability of internal sources of Polish freedom—such as Solidarity—to operate radio stations. Solidarity officials today ruefully remember those difficulties. “Inside [Poland], organizing underground radio was impossible on the regular basis,” said one member in a 2003 interview.18 At best, they settled for Pyrrhic victories: For instance, state-run stations employed many government technicians secretly allied with Solidarity; occasionally, the technicians cut in to state radio or television programs and inserted pro-Solidarity messages. Poles laughed as they listened or watched. The messages lasted only a few minutes until the military or police arrived at the station to shut down the malfeasance. These messages were programmed to emit automatically after the technicians left; the technicians did this at considerable personal risk. Try as they might, however, Communist authorities could not arrest RFE.
Richard Pipes, who, as a native of Poland, followed no other country with as much personal interest, said that the assistance that Ronald Reagan extended to Solidarity—in 1982 in particular—“later made it possible for Solidarity to survive and ultimately compel the communists to yield power.” Specifically, Pipes cited the “strong moral support” that Solidarity received from the Reagan administration, which he says helped sustain Solidarity’s morale and “by the end of the decade forced the communists to surrender power.” He said that Ronald Reagan showed “a far deeper understanding” of the Poland situation and the stakes involved than anyone in the State Department, which said Pipes, had written off Poland as a total loss—as a “lost cause.”19
In addition to Reagan, there were a number of other sources that contributed to Solidarity’s ultimate success. Lane Kirkland, AFL-CIO president, funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars through the organization’s headquarters. Similarly, the U.S. Congress also provided aid, sending $1 million in 1987 and 1988 during the buildup to Poland’s June 1989 elections. And then there were individuals like Bill Casey, who, aside from his vital work at the CIA, personally donated $50,000 of his own money to purchase printing equipment that was smuggled into Poland through Vatican channels.20
But while this American aid was helpful, the role of John Paul II was monumental. On the Pope’s role, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who himself was important, stated: “We involved the Pope directly; and I don’t want to talk about it. I can’t go into details…. [T]o sustain an underground effort takes a lot in terms of supplies, networks, etc. And this is why Solidarity wasn’t crushed…. This is the first time that communist police suppression didn’t succeed.”21 Russia historian and Librarian of Congress James Billington emphasized that in addition to Reagan’s political support, John Paul II spiritually inspired the movement.22
Despite the involvement of many figures, few did more to help the Polish people than Reagan, and his impact was felt by Poles throughout the country. In early 1990, Arch Puddington, who worked for RFE, did a series of interviews with Eastern European emigres and visitors. He asked their opinion of various U.S. presidents. He found that almost all had a highly favorable view of Reagan and his role in the fall of Communism—some even dubbed him “Uncle Reagan.” He left a great impression on Poles.23
This was obvious to men like Colonel Henryk Piecuch, a high-level official in the Polish Interior Ministry in the 1980s, who said that, “Ronald Reagan was considered a god by some in our country. This pertains especially to the lower ranks of Solidarity.”24 This book could be filled with testimonies to Reagan’s importance, whether from ordinary Polish workers to members of the Communist government and Solidarity to Polish academics now teaching in the United States, as well as men like Vladimir Bukovsky, who spent twelve years in the gulag.25
By the 1990s, free to speak, Lech Walesa spoke for many of these individuals, saying that he was thankful for Reagan’s “very strong backing.” He praised Reagan’s devotion to “a few simple rules: human rights, democracy, freedom of speech” and his “conviction that it is not the people who are there for the sake of the state, but that the state is there for the sake of the citizens.”26 Reagan had indeed said exactly this many
