times, and apparently Walesa listened.
Once out of prison and in the presidency, and given a chance to thank Reagan directly, Walesa said to the American president: “We stood on the two sides of the artificially erected wall. Solidarity broke down this wall from the Eastern side and on the Western side it was you….Your decisiveness and resolve were for us a hope and help in the most difficult moments.”27 He said that Reagan “emboldened” and “encouraged” him, and was an “inspiration.”28 Walesa saw Reagan as essential not just to Solidarity’s survival but to the end of Communism, and went on to reference the Reagan radio gaffe that back in 1984 had enraged the Soviets and many liberals: “People thought it was unfunny, but I’m of the opposite opinion, that it was not only a good joke, but the words were also prophetic.”29
Poles had needed a friend, said Walesa, “and such was Ronald Reagan.” He said Reagan challenged rather than avoided problems and was “favored” by the “muse of history”; that muse liked Reagan “so much” that she whispered in his ear and told him what to do. “We owe so much to Ronald Reagan,” concluded Walesa. “We Poles owe him freedom.” Teary-eyed, he said Reaganesquely: “God bless America.”30
POLAND WAS THE WEDGE
Ronald Reagan had long felt that Poland and Solidarity held the golden key. Recall that he had written in his diary on December 15, 1981, two days after martial law was declared, that at the NSC meeting that day he had taken a stand that “this may be the last chance in our lifetime to see a change in the Soviet empire’s colonial policy re[garding] Eastern Europe.”31 Less than three weeks later, Bill Clark arrived to help ensure that the president’s policies to make that happen were in fact carried out.
After his presidency, Reagan wrote in his memoirs: “The events in Poland were thrilling…. [T]he first break in the totalitarian dike of communism.” He had “wanted to be sure we did nothing to impede this process and everything we could to spur it along. This was what we had been waiting for since World War II. What was happening in Poland might spread like a contagion throughout Eastern Europe.”32 The splinter could be a contagion to the body of the Soviet empire. As Reagan said at Eureka College in May 1982, the Soviets feared the “infectiousness” of the threat of freedom posed by Solidarity.33
In sum, Poland was the domino that catalyzed the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe during the fall of 1989. And yet, despite its significance, the Poland story barely registers in the two preeminent biographies of Reagan; in fact, incredibly, Lech Walesa is not mentioned even once in either book.34
But while the biographers missed the importance of Solidarity (somehow even after the fact), Ronald Reagan never did. As it turned out, the labor movement—as well as the Polish pontiff—was every bit as influential as he had always estimated. Together, these factors inside Poland were the wedge, the splinter in the bloc. Once the wedge was hammered deep enough into the crack, the fissure spread, and the entire block (or bloc) came apart. As Bill Clark put it, in Poland, the Soviets lost an empire.35
NOVEMBER TO DECEMBER 1989
With Poland gone, it did not take long for the remainder of the Eastern bloc to break away, and less than six months later, many of them had started to fall. By November 1989, the Berlin Wall was rubble. The “March of Freedom” strolled into East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and, somehow, even to Romania, where, in December, Eastern Europe’s most brutal dictator, Nicolai Ceausescu, was put on trial by the Romanian people, convicted, sentenced to death, lined up against a wall, and shot on Christmas Day—a day he tried to ban. That evening the news anchor on Romanian state television cheerfully announced his country’s liberation: “Good news this Christmas Day: the Anti-Christ is dead!”36
Aside from Ceausescu’s violent death, the end of Communism in Eastern Europe occurred with complete tranquility, without shooting, without a war, and certainly without World War III—the “DPs” were at long last free. As these events unfolded around the world, one could not help but think of Reagan’s line from his Westminster Address, in which he had seven years earlier hoped that Eastern Europeans would “choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.” (Emphasis added.) That was in fact surprisingly the way the revolution unfolded in Eastern Europe in the fall of 1989. Who would have guessed that if and when the Berlin Wall came down, it would fall peacefully as celebrants stood atop it cheering and toasting with champagne glasses? In Czechoslovakia, the revolution was so smooth that it was dubbed the Velvet Revolution.
MR. REAGAN GOES TO WARSAW
In September 1990, as most of Eastern Europe was approaching the first year anniversary of Communism’s demise, Ronald Reagan visited Gdansk, home of the shipyard in which Solidarity was born.
There, the former president received what both UPI and Reuters described as a “hero’s welcome.” Despite a torrential rain and punishing hail, seven thousand braved the storm to greet Reagan in front of the shipyard gate where they sang “Sto Lat,” which means “May He Live 100 Years,” a Polish anthem sung only to honor the nation’s heroes. They chanted “Thank you, thank you!” In a gesture Reagan must have loved, Lech Walesa’s parish priest handed him a sword and explained: “I am giving you the saber for helping us to chop off the head of communism.”37 In turn, Reagan told them: “You have triggered fast changes in the political map of Central and Eastern Europe.” Referring to the other dominoes that subsequently fell, Reagan said: “One might say that [this] was the shipyard that launched a halfdozen revolutions.”38
Poles’ gratitude to Reagan did not stop. They continue to look for ways to honor him. This includes a grassroots movement that looks to name things after Reagan. “I will not rest until there is a Ronald Reagan Square in Warsaw,” says Radek Sikorski, who in the 1990s became deputy minister of foreign affairs and deputy minister of defense for free Poland. “We want some major form of commemoration,” says Sikorski. “They [Poles] at least want a Reagan statue in a place of significance.”39 Precisely that was proposed by a committee of Poles called the Ronald Reagan Legacy Committee. Sikorski is chair of the committee, which includes Polish cabinet members, senators and members of Parliament, and major Solidarity figures.
Still, Poles did what they could. Reagan was made an honorary citizen of Gdansk and Krakow, the cities where the Solidarity tradition was strongest. Separately, a competition was held to choose a name for a square in front of a train station in Warsaw. No suggested names were listed. The public voted. Naturally, the winner was the architect who constructed the train station. Ronald Reagan, however, was runner up.
21. The Coroner Comes to the Kremlin: 1990–1991
IT DID NOT TAKE LONG FOR THE JOYOUS DEVELOPMENTS OF 1989 in Eastern Europe to have a ripple effect on the Soviet Union, one that Mikhail Gorbachev did not desire, that he in fact dreaded, and that careened out of his control. For Gorbachev, Eastern European freedom was a train wreck screeching down the tracks and headed smack for the middle of Red Square.
It was not supposed to happen like this: Gorbachev had not initially favored what blossomed in Eastern Europe. “Gorbachev never foresaw that the whole of Eastern Europe would fly out of the Soviet orbit,” said Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, stating the obvious. He became, said Dobrynin, a “helpless witness” to the inevitable.1 He also did not foresee that at the start of 1990 Eastern Europe’s next generation of
