Last Days in Old Europe

by Richard Bassett

  Today, in an era of instant communication, the isolation someone from the West might feel behind the Iron Curtain is hard to imagine. Telephone links between Warsaw and the outside world were at best intermittent, and communications generally relied on a large telex machine in my drawing room which now and then sprang into life. This pace of existence was not, however, entirely without its virtues. In the well-stocked library of the flat, there was time to immerse oneself for days on end in the substantial volumes of Adam Zamoyski and Norman Davies, then the essential foundations for any intelligent observer of Poland’s condition. One of the pages torn off my telex machine’s printer in those days remains evocative of the fragility yet richness of communication in a pre-digital age:

  264971 times g

  172345 exforeign

  1. thanks shipyard used inside page top tuesday above binyon file.

  1 a. general point: polish sub-editor-in-exile asks we remind you that Pilsudski was never a general but was a marshal.

  2. no rush about series on ordinary poles but glad to learn you have them in hand (if you see what i mean

  Regards

  Ends ib

  ‘ib’ stood for Ivan Barnes, the demanding but scrupulously fair Foreign News Editor. A stern critic of slovenly work, he always had the interests of his correspondents at the forefront of his thinking, with the result that they often produced high-quality work in the early 1980s which carried as much weight as a diplomatic dispatch. One of the most distinguished was the Moscow correspondent, Michael Binyon.

  Sometimes days would pass without even these laconic messages. As I gazed out from my book-lined study at the red winter sun setting across Łazienki Park and at the lamp-lighter with his bicycle and ladder, laboriously illuminating each gas lantern by hand, it was hard not to imagine that the greater part of the post-war twentieth century had passed Poland by.

  Thanks to the kindness of Adam Zamoyski, his cousins the Radziwiłłs took my formal Polish education in hand. As well as indeed providing a beautiful sister to give me regular Polish lessons, a dashing equestrian cousin, Ewa Dzeduszyńska, promised to take me riding in the Masurian Lake District. The Polish welcome was so embracing that I was even invited to join the Polish chapter of the Maltese Knights on their annual pilgrimage to Lourdes. This generous offer I had to decline ‘for operational reasons’, but I later learnt that as the Polish invalids’ train drew in to the Gare de l’Est the flower of French aristocracy, both Bourbon and Napoleonic, welcomed their impoverished Polish cousins with crates of champagne, caviar and other delicacies before the more adventurous of the malades were taken up the Rue Pigalle in their wheelchairs to catch a glimpse of the more exotic side of the 9th arrondissement. The imminent departure of the night train for Lourdes prevented anything more than a glimpse of the professional ladies of the environ, but for the malades, men who had been deprived of the chance of travel to Western Europe for three and a half decades, it was enough.

  One evening after I had been in Warsaw for a week, I went to hear the visiting Hallé Orchestra play in the Warsaw concert hall. They played Elgar, always a poignant experience for the Englishman abroad. It was deepest winter and as I waited near the Garderobe to pick up my coat I saw a pretty blonde woman quickly curtsey when an admirer briefly took her hand and kissed it. Such elegant manners were becoming rarer everywhere on the continent, but Warsaw still preserved what Paris and London had given up many decades before. The following morning I paid my first visit to the BBC office where, to my delighted surprise, I was let in by the very same blonde young lady I had glimpsed curtseying the night before.

  Liliana was another product of those unusual times. Like several of her compatriots, she had become engaged to a British foreign correspondent at the height of the martial law crisis of 1982 but in this case the young man had been expelled, on the advice (so it was mischievously rumoured) of another British correspondent who at that time enjoyed intimate relations with a senior member of the Polish Foreign Ministry and was keen to eliminate a rival. Unable to travel to the West, and with her fiancé now banned from visiting Poland, Liliana had been the victim of this intrigue. She had quietly resigned herself to the long wait which might or might not lead to reunion with her beau. She was fond of quoting a Polish proverb with which her mother had comforted her: ‘You do not need to own a brewery to enjoy a beer.’

  I was to come to rely on Liliana in emergencies, and her selfless sense of duty and courage were never better displayed than during one spring weekend when cycling near Jabłonna, a few miles out of Warsaw, I was attacked by a dog which drew blood and sent me tumbling into a ditch. Cycling back to the city I found a bar still open in the deserted old town. In those days when people had no money to spend socializing outside the home, Saturday nights in Warsaw were very quiet, even quieter than in Vienna. Many of the inhabitants left to visit friends and family in the country. I asked the waiter for some brandy and went outside to clean the wound. After a few minutes, he came out to ask if he could help. I thanked him and recounted what had happened. He was much alarmed when I told him that I had been bitten by a dog and he said I should see a doctor immediately because rabies was widespread throughout the area beyond Warsaw’s city boundaries. As if to underline the warning he pointed his hand at me, rapidly opening and closing it to give an unmistakable impression of imminent lunacy.

  As it happened, the embassy in Warsaw had a British doctor on its staff, so I left a message with the duty officer to ask him to call me. When there was no reply after a couple of hours, it seemed best to find a local doctor. By happy chance Liliana was at home when I called and immediately offered to accompany me to the hospital, where a young doctor saw us within minutes. His response was not encouraging: ‘If you have been bitten by a dog outside Warsaw, you have a big problem.’ He urged us to track down the owner of the dog and find out for certain whether it was infected. We would have about twenty-four hours in which to do this before the symptoms of rabies would begin to manifest themselves. It was somehow characteristically Polish to regard this event as life-threatening but not desperately serious. At the crack of dawn, Liliana and I drove to where I had been bitten and immediately saw the dog and a man who appeared to be its owner. Completely undaunted by the fact that it might be infected and that it had an aggressive temperament, Liliana simply walked up to the dog and examined it before ordering the reluctant owner to take it to a clinic to have it put down. Dire threats were rained upon him if he did not comply. The dog was destroyed and, to my great relief, on examination of its remains was found not to be infected. On Monday morning, when the British embassy doctor finally got round to calling me, I was able to assure him that all was well, thanks to Communist Poland’s state medical service.

  During the spring of 1988 the political temperature in Poland began to rise. As in the past it was not in the capital but in Gdańsk on the Baltic coast where the escalating confrontation began to send tremors through the ruling elite. The weapon of a long and difficult strike in the shipyards had been tested to its extremes during the turbulent days before martial law. Would the authorities put up with a similar demonstration by Mr Wałęsa’s Solidarity movement? What pressures might be brought to bear on the Jaruzelski regime from Moscow, where Gorbachev was making it abundantly clear that he expected the governments of Eastern Europe to follow the twin paths of glasnost and perestroika to reach a modus vivendi with their populations’ more reformist elements?

  We were about to find out. A renewed period of unrest at the shipyards began. The striking dockers were surrounded by heavily armoured riot police hoping to starve Wałęsa and his fellow shipyard workers into some kind of submission. It began to look as though we could be returning to the days of martial law. The small Polish press corps rushed up to the coast to watch the conflict develop. As journalists from outside Poland were denied entry visas for several days, the rest of the world had to rely on a handful of people for any information about events. In these circumstances, the foreign co
rrespondent en poste had the advantage. In a few hours, a fast train brought me to Gdańsk, where the beautiful Grand Hotel at Sopot evoked the glories of the old Prussian Riviera. Built on the edge of the sea under German technical supervision, it commanded an unimpeded view across the Baltic.

  Gazing out from the bedroom’s ornate and decrepit balcony, I noticed that the sand in front of me seemed to have turned black. Suddenly the whole building shuddered. Deep in its bowels, a boiler of immense size and strength juddered into life to provide sixty rooms with heat and hot water. As the hum of the machinery grew louder I saw flakes of black coal float down on to the beach. In 1988, the Grand Hotel’s plumbing had stood unchanged for the sixty-one years since it was built. This did not imply inefficiency. Drawing a bath a few minutes later, I was astounded to see the deep Prussian tub fill in less than half a minute, a tribute to an age of pioneering plumbing, even if the environmental consequences left something to be desired.

  A few miles away, on the cobbled streets of the rebuilt old town of Gdańsk, a few journalists and camera crews, mostly from Scandinavian countries, sought ways of getting into the shipyard. The main herd of Western journalists had been kept waiting outside Poland’s frontiers through rigid enforcement of the visa regime. Any local correspondent worth his salt would want to get into the shipyard before they arrived on the scene. Fortunately, the Poles rose to the occasion as they always have done. As I was turned away from the main entrance to the shipyard and walked back towards the old town, I was accosted by a teenage boy and girl who offered to smuggle me in. They were about to deliver supplies of food and water in their rucksacks to the striking shipyard workers. Throughout this strike these teenagers, often as young as fourteen, were the vital link between what was happening in the shipyard and the outside world. Patriotic Poles, they asked neither fee nor favour for their help.

  The direct routes to the shipyard were blocked by lines of heavily equipped riot police, the infamous Zomo, with their shields, helmets and batons. The courier routes that these teenagers invited me to follow them along were an altogether more circuitous affair. First we took a tram in the direction of the city stadium, heading out of the town centre. From there we set off on foot, carefully passing under the stadium whose uppermost terraces had uniformed police posted at intervals to watch the ground below. By keeping close to the walls of the concrete stadium, we remained invisible because the line of sight of those watching above was obscured by the shape of the building, which bent inwards along its base.

  Beyond the stadium, we paused in the long grass. Fifty yards ahead at a checkpoint more uniformed police were inspecting a vehicle. Keeping to the long grass, we slipped past these men who were preoccupied with the lorry they were searching. Another hundred yards across a stretch of industrial wasteland brought us to a railway track which we followed for twenty minutes until we spied a level crossing. In a shed near by, another two police officers appeared to be deep in their newspapers. One after another, discreetly and above all silently, we crept past this last checkpoint and reached a low wall over which we jumped, to be met on the other side by some shipyard workers who immediately offered to take us to Wałęsa.

  I had met this most famous of electricians and union leaders a few months earlier on my first visit to Gdańsk when his rapid-fire Polish had appeared complacent, arrogant, almost unfriendly. He had warned then that the calm prevailing during those weeks was unlikely to endure. In the crisis now he seemed far more in his element, commanding his men with natural authority. He exhorted the demoralized to hold on for the sake of their country and not to be intimidated by the tactics of the surrounding riot police, who regularly staged feints and provocations in an attempt to undermine morale. When his men became disheartened – one even threatened suicide – Wałęsa was quickly able to restore confidence. He was, he insisted, answerable to God for the safety of his men and God would not let him or them or Poland down. This fine performance showed Wałęsa’s mettle and went a long way towards persuading Western journalists to forgive his brittle attitude towards them.

  Because there was no chance of returning to Sopot that evening, we prepared for a long night. To prevent anyone inside from sleeping, the Zomo pretended at frequent intervals to be massing for an attack. Sleep was at best intermittent, and in the early hours of the morning I slid away with the first couriers of the new day. As I said goodbye to a young lady writing for the Chicago Tribune, a paper with an important Polish readership, she quipped, ‘I’m minded to write a story which will be headlined: How I spent the night with Lech Wałęsa.’

  These politically charged events soon died down. Neither side was keen to push the confrontation to extremes. Both Wałęsa and the government claimed victory when the strike ended a few days later, just as the international press corps arrived in strength. Thanks to Polish officialdom, they were far too late to record anything of interest. Short-lived though the strike had been, it had furnished a vivid example of Polish courage and fortitude. The risk taken by the young teenage couriers was a reminder of the exceptional bravery which even the youngest Poles could display. Had they been caught, their fate would have been far more unpleasant than any punishment meted out to an officially accredited foreign correspondent.

  Nineteen-eighty-nine began quietly. In Warsaw the snow fell with relentless monotony. As in previous years, my thoughts turned to the south and the Mediterranean. A year earlier, I had been present when Gorbachev visited Dalmatia during days of dazzling January sunshine. The few of us who had accompanied his entourage were especially struck by the affection he clearly felt for his wife, Raisa. She had even managed to persuade him to lose some of his minders one morning and deviate from the official programme to visit the city’s Jesuit church. It was tempting to hope that a similar distraction this January might provide me with a visit to the clear blue skies of the Adriatic again. As I ruminated on how I might avoid the sub-zero Polish January, a telex message informed me that the remains of the last Montenegrin King, Nikola I, were going to be reburied in the family crypt, high in the mountains above the former royal capital, Cetinje.

  Gorbachev’s visit the previous year had highlighted some of the tensions which had been growing in the federal state of Yugoslavia since my days working there as a musician. Albanians in Kosovo, Croats and Slovenes, even Macedonians, were beginning to question the status quo which had kept the lid on the powerful centrifugal forces underlying the relatively calm exterior of Yugoslavian life. That winter, it was the turn of the Montenegrins to display some independent tendencies. In previous years there had been plenty of opportunities to travel down the coast to the former mountain kingdom and I had come to know it reasonably well. Fitzroy Maclean was fond of describing what the Montenegrins said were the origins of their rocky landscape: ‘God, when he had finished creating the world, found some stones left over which he fashioned into Montenegro.’ Certainly the Montenegrins appeared to possess unique characteristics, even among the endlessly fascinating peoples of the Balkans. Thanks to their traditional dependence on good marksmanship, they had the lowest incidence of myopia in the world. They were also the tallest people in Europe, and their women were renowned for their stature and dark-eyed beauty. The transferral of the remains of King Nikola to Montenegro from Italy, where he had been buried in 1921, seemed too good an opportunity to miss.

  The land route to Montenegro from Warsaw ran through Vienna and the old Südbahn to Trieste. In Ljubljana, I dined with Professor Ravnikar, whose kindness had so enriched my life in the Slovene capital eight years earlier. Although the Professor insisted he was ‘apolitical’ in outlook, as usual he had his finger on the pulse of events. He predicted that Slovenia would soon redefine its relationship with the rest of Yugoslavia. The link with Belgrade would be broken. This prediction delivered one sunny morning in January 1989 was certainly more prescient than any from British diplomatic observers en poste in Yugoslavia at that time, but then the nearest they were to Ljubljana was Belgrade. Cuts to the Foreig
n Office budget had long eliminated even their token consular presence in Ljubljana and Zagreb.

  In the studio of Ravnikar’s pupil, Aleš Vodopivec, another ‘apolitical’ Slovene, a team of architects were busy designing a ‘new’ Slovene flag. If the generally law-abiding Slovenes were so keen to part company with Belgrade and Serbia, the break-up of Yugoslavia was inevitable. Both Vodopivec and Ravnikar gave the expected date of the rupture as June 1991. They were exceptionally intelligent.

  The Slovene capital had been described in the Italian press as being in a state of alta tensione but of this there was little to be seen. The streets around Plečnik’s Three Bridges were calm and I saw not a single policeman. My Italian colleagues, Benetazzo from La Repubblica, Altichieri from Corriere delle Sera and Rumiz from Il Piccolo, had taken up position in the foyer of the Union Hotel and we lunched at the nearby Opera Klet (cellar), one of my old haunts. After five minutes discussing the political situation, Altichieri took out a tin of shoe polish stamped with bold 1950s Eastern European lettering spelling out the word ‘Illyria’, the fabled kingdom of the Adriatic. Holding up the tin for us all to see, he asked in his fluent Milanese-accented Italian, ‘Is it not a tragedy, gentlemen, that all that is left of Illyria in this modern world is a tin of Communist boot polish?’ Benetazzo, a lion of a man, with a head straight out of the Roman Forum and a friendly disdain for the weaknesses of the Anglo-Saxon world, observed, ‘In England i posti prestigiati sono sempre malpagati’ (In England prestigious jobs are always badly paid), another piece of practical wisdom. These civilized men reflected the generally high level of education of the Italian press corps. Their insights were often sharper and more interesting than those of other colleagues, for whom a sense of history and irony had been replaced by ideology or political correctness.

  That evening I continued the journey to Montenegro and took a wagon-lit to Belgrade. The carriage was a generation older than the Italian carrozza-letto and Austrian Schlafwagen. The space within each sleeping compartment was more generous, with a luggage stool, wood-panelled walls, a decanter of water, two glasses and starched linen. The cork of a small bottle of delicious Slovene Refošk was pulled by a tall Serb in the brown uniform of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits. I slid between the immaculately crisp sheets and watched the landscape change while the train rattled into the defiles of Steinbrück (Zidani Most) towards the junction for Zagreb. Long before we reached the Croatian capital, I was fast asleep.