by Tony Judt
The End of the Old Order
‘We cannot go on living like this’.
Mikhail Gorbachev (to his wife, March 1985)
‘The most dangerous time for a bad government is when it starts to
reform itself’.
Alexis De Tocqueville
‘We have no intention of harming or destabilizing the GDR’.
Heinrich Windelen, West-German Minister for inter-German relations
‘Historical experience shows that Communists were sometimes forced by
circumstances to behave rationally and agree to compromises’.
Adam Michnik
‘People, your government has returned to you’.
Václav Havel, Presidential Address, January 1st 1990
The conventional narrative of Communism’s final collapse begins with Poland. On October 16th 1978, Karol Wojtyła, Cardinal of Craków, was elected to the Papacy as John Paul II, the first Pole to hold the office. The expectations aroused by his election were unprecedented in modern times. Some in the Catholic Church regarded him as a likely radical—he was young (just fifty-eight when elected pope in 1978, having been appointed Archbishop of Craków while still in his thirties) but already a veteran of the Second Vatican Council. Energetic and charismatic, this was the man who would complete the work of Popes John XXIII and Paul VI and who would lead the Church into a new era, a pastor rather than a Curial bureaucrat.
Conservative Catholics, meanwhile, took comfort in Wojtyła’s reputation for unbending theological firmness and the moral and political absolutism born of his experience as a priest and prelate under communism. This was a man who, for all his reputation as a ‘pope of ideas’, open to intellectual exchange and scholarly debate, would not compromise with the Church’s enemies. Like Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the powerful head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (and his successor as Pope), Wojtyła had been startled out of his early reforming enthusiasm by the radical aftershock of John XXIII’s reforms. By the time of his election he was already an administrative as well as a doctrinal conservative.
Karol Wojtyła’s Polish origins and his tragic early life help to explain the unusual strength of his convictions and the distinctive quality of his papacy. He lost his mother when he was eight (he would lose his only sibling, his older brother Edmund, three years later; his last surviving close relative, his father, died during the war when Wojtyła was nineteen). Following his mother’s death he was taken by his father to the Marian sanctuary at Kalwaria Zebrzydowska and made frequent pilgrimages there in following years—Zebrzydowska, like Częstochowa, is an important center of the cult of the Virgin Mary in modern Poland. By the age of fifteen Wojtyła was already the president of the Marian sodality in Wadowice, his home town, an early hint of his inclination to Mariolatry (which in turn contributed to his obsession with marriage and abortion).
The new Pope’s Christian vision was rooted in the peculiarly messianic style of Polish Catholicism. In modern Poland he saw not only the embattled eastern frontier of the True Faith, but also a land and a people chosen to serve as the example and sword of the Church in the struggle against Eastern atheism and Western materialism alike.271 Together with his long service in Craków, isolated from Western theological and political currents, this probably explained his tendency to embrace a parochial and sometimes troubling Polish-Christian vision.272
But it also explains the unprecedented enthusiasm for him in the country of his birth. From the outset, the pope broke with his predecessors’ cosmopolitan Roman acquiescence in modernity, secularism, and compromise. His campaign of international appearances—complete with carefully staged performances in huge open arenas, accompanied by oversized crucifixes and a paraphernalia of light, sound, and theatrical timing—was not undertaken without design. This was a Big Pope, taking himself and his Faith to the world: to Brazil, Mexico, the US, and the Philippines; to Italy, France, and Spain; but above all to Poland itself.
Abandoning the cautious ‘Ostpolitik’ of his predecessors, John Paul II arrived in Warsaw on June 2nd 1979 for the first of three dramatic ‘pilgrimages’ to Communist Poland. He was met with huge, adoring crowds. His presence affirmed and reinforced the influence of the Catholic Church in Poland; but the Pope was not interested in merely endorsing Christianity’s passive survival under Communism. To the occasional discomfort of his own bishops he began explicitly discouraging Catholics in Poland and everywhere else in Eastern Europe from any compromise with Marxism, and offered his Church not merely as a silent sanctuary but as an alternative pole of moral and social authority.
As Poland’s Communists well understood, such a change in the position of the Catholic Church—from compromise to resistance—could have a destabilizing local impact, posing an open challenge to the Party’s monopoly of authority. In part this was because Poles remained overwhelmingly and enthusiastically Catholic; in large measure it was because of the man himself. But there was very little they could do—to forbid the Pope to visit Poland or to speak there would only have strengthened his appeal and further alienated millions of his admirers. Even after the imposition of martial law, when the Pope returned to Poland in June 1983 and spoke to his ‘compatriots’ in St John’s Cathedral in Warsaw of their ‘disappointment and humiliation, their suffering and loss of freedom’, the Communist leaders could only stand and listen. ‘Poland’, he told an uncomfortable General Jaruzelski in a televised speech, ‘must take her proper place among the nations of Europe, between East and West.’
The Pope, as Stalin once observed, has no divisions. But God is not always on the side of the big battalions: what John Paul II lacked in soldiers he made up in visibility—and timing. Poland in 1978 was already on the edge of social upheaval. Ever since the workers’ revolts of 1970, and again in 1976, both prompted by sharp increases in the price of food, First Secretary Edvard Gierek had tried hard to avert domestic discontent—mostly, as we have seen, by borrowing heavily abroad and using the loans to supply Poles with subsidized food and other consumer goods. But the strategy was failing.
Thanks to the emergence of Jacek Kuroń’s KOR, the intellectual opposition and workers’ leaders now cooperated far more than in the past. In response to the cautious appearance of ‘free’ (i.e. illegal) trade unions in a number of industrial and coastal towns, beginning in Katowice and Gdansk, the leaders of KOR drew up a ‘Charter of Workers’ Rights’ in December 1979: its demands included the right to autonomous, non-Party unions and the right to strike. The predictable response of the authorities was to arrest intellectual activists and sack the offending workers—among them the then-unknown electrician Lech Wałesa and fourteen other employees at Elektromontaz in Gdansk.
Whether the semi-clandestine movement for workers’ rights would have continued to grow is not clear. Its spokesmen were certainly emboldened by the Pope’s recent visit and their sense that the regime would be reluctant to strike back violently for fear of international disapproval. But theirs was still a tiny and haphazard network of activists. What triggered mass backing was the Communist Party’s attempt—for the third time in a decade—to resolve its economic difficulties by announcing, on July 1st 1980, an immediate increase in the price of meat.
The day after the announcement, KOR declared itself a ‘strike information agency’. In the next three weeks protest strikes spread from the Ursus tractor plant (scene of the 1976 protests) to every major industrial city in the country, reaching Gdansk and its Lenin Shipyard on August 2nd. There the shipbuilders occupied the yard and formed themselves into an unofficial trade union, Solidarnošč (‘Solidarity’) —led by Wałesa, who on August 14th 1980 climbed over the shipyard wall and into the leadership of a national strike movement.
The authorities’ instinctive response—to arrest ‘ringleaders’ and isolate the strikers—having failed, they opted instead to buy time and divide their opponents. In an unprecedented move, representatives of the Politburo were sent to Gdansk to negotiate with ‘reasonable�
�� workers’ leaders, even as Kuroń, Adam Michnik and other KOR leaders were temporarily detained for questioning. But other intellectuals—the historian Bronisław Geremek, the Catholic lawyer Tadeusz Mazowiecki—arrived in Gdansk to help the strikers negotiate, and the strikers themselves insisted that they be represented by their own choice of spokesmen: notably the increasingly prominent Wałesa.
The regime was forced to relent. On September 1st the police released all remaining detainees, and two weeks later the Polish Council of State officially conceded the strikers’ chief demand, the right to form and register free labor unions. Within eight weeks the informal network of strikes and ad hoc unions that now criss-crossed Poland had coalesced into a single organization whose existence the authorities could no longer pretend to deny: on November 10th 1980, Solidarity became the first officially registered independent trade union in a Communist country, with an estimated ten million members. At its founding national Congress the following September Wałesa was elected president.
From November 1980 until December 1981 Poland lived in an excited, uneasy limbo. Wałesa’s advisers—mindful of past mistakes and wary of provoking a backlash from the humiliated Communist leadership—urged caution. This was to be a ‘self-limiting revolution’. Jacek Kuroń, with the memory of 1956 and 1968 firmly in mind, insisted upon his continuing commitment to a ‘socialist system’ and reiterated Solidarity’s acceptance of the ‘Party’s leading role’—no-one wanted to give the authorities in Warsaw or Moscow an excuse to send in the tanks.
The self-imposed restraints paid off, up to a point. Overtly political issues—disarmament, or foreign policy—were kept off Solidarity’s public agenda, which focused instead upon KOR’s established strategy of ‘practicing society’: building links with the Catholic Church (of particular interest to Adam Michnik, who was determined to overcome the traditional anti-clericalism of the Polish Left and forge an alliance with the newly-energized Catholic leadership); forming local unions and factory councils; pressing for workplace self-management and social rights (the latter borrowed verbatim from the Conventions of the Geneva-based International Labour Organization).
But under Communism, even such cautiously ‘non-political’ tactics were bound to run up against the Party’s reluctance to concede any real authority or autonomy. Moreover, the economy continued to implode: industrial productivity collapsed in the course of 1981, as Poland’s newly unionized workers held meetings, protests and strikes to press their demands. Seen from Warsaw, and especially from Moscow, the country was adrift and the regime was losing control. It was also setting a bad example to its neighbors. Despite the best efforts of its cautious leaders, Solidarity was doomed to arouse the ghosts of Budapest and Prague.
General Wojciech Jaruzelski had risen from defense minister to prime minister in February 1981, replacing the now-disgraced Gierek. In October he succeeded Stanisław Kania as Party Secretary. Ensured of the support of the army, and with the Soviet leadership encouraging firm action to halt Poland’s drift out of control, he moved swiftly to put an end to a situation that both sides knew could not last indefinitely. On December 13th 1981—just as US-Soviet nuclear disarmament talks were getting under way in Geneva—Jaruzelski declared martial law in Poland, ostensibly to forestall a Soviet intervention. Solidarity’s leaders and advisers were swept up into prison (though the union itself was not formally banned until the following year, at which point it went ‘underground ’273) .
In post-’89 retrospect the rise of Solidarity appears as the opening fusillade in the final struggle against Communism. But the Polish ‘revolution’ of 1980-81 is better understood as the last in a rising crescendo of workers’ protests that began in 1970 and were directed against the Party’s repressive and incompetent management of the economy. Cynical incompetence, careerism and wasted lives; price increases, protest strikes and repression; the spontaneous emergence of local unions and the active engagement of dissident intellectuals; the sympathy and support of the Catholic Church: these were familiar staging posts in the re-birth of a civil society, movingly portrayed by Andrzej Wajda in Man of Marble (1977) and Man of Iron (1981), his didactic cinematic account of the betrayed illusions and reborn hopes of Communist Poland.
But that is all they were. They were not in themselves a harbinger of the downfall of Communist power. As Michnik, Kuroń and others continued to insist, before the imposition of martial law and after, Communism might be progressively eroded from within and from below, but it could not be overthrown. Open confrontation would be catastrophic, as history had convincingly demonstrated. Yes, martial law (which remained in force until July 1983) and the ensuing ‘state of war’ were an admission of a certain kind of failure on the part of the authorities—no other Communist state had ever been driven to such measures and Michnik himself called it ‘a disaster for the totalitarian state’ (while at the same time conceding that it was a serious ‘setback for the independent society’). But Communism was about power, and power lay not in Warsaw but in Moscow. The developments in Poland were a stirring prologue to the narrative of Communism’s collapse, but they remained a sideshow. The real story was elsewhere.
The clamp-down in Poland further contributed to the steady cooling of East-West relations that began in the late 1970s. The ‘second Cold War’, as it became known, should not be exaggerated: although at one point both Leonid Brezhnev and Ronald Reagan accused the other of contemplating and even planning for a nuclear war, neither the Soviet Union nor the US had any such intentions.274 With the conclusion of the Helsinki Accords it seemed to Washington and Moscow that the Cold War was ending to their own advantage. Indeed, the situation in Europe suited both great powers, with the US now comporting itself rather like czarist Russia in the decades following Napoleon’s defeat in 1815: i.e. as a sort of continental policeman whose presence guaranteed that there would be no further disruption of the status quo by an unruly revolutionary power.
Nevertheless, East-West relations were deteriorating. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, undertaken largely at the instigation of Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in order to restore a stable and compliant regime on the Soviet Union’s sensitive southern borders, prompted a US boycott of the upcoming 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow (a compliment duly repaid when the Soviet bloc spurned the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984) and caused President Jimmy Carter publicly to revise ‘my own opinion of what the Soviets’ ultimate goals are’ (The New York Times, January 1st 1980). The invasion also confirmed Western leaders in the wisdom of their decision, taken at a NATO summit just two weeks earlier, to install 108 new Pershing II and 464 Cruise missiles in Western Europe—itself a response to Moscow’s deployment in Ukraine of a new generation of SS20 medium-range missiles. A new arms race appeared to be gathering speed.
No-one, least of all the leaders of Western Europe whose countries would have been the first to suffer in a nuclear exchange, had any illusions about the value of nuclear missiles. As instruments of war such weapons were uniquely unhelpful—in contrast to spears, they really were only good for sitting on. Nonetheless, as a deterrent device a nuclear arsenal had its uses—if your opponent could be convinced that it might, ultimately, be used. There was, in any case, no other way to defend Western Europe against a Warsaw Pact that by the early 1980s boasted more than fifty infantry and armored divisions, 16,000 tanks, 26,000 fighting vehicles and 4,000 combat aircraft.
That is why British Prime Ministers (both Margaret Thatcher and before her James Callaghan), West German Chancellors and the leaders of Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands all welcomed the new battlefield missiles and authorized them to be stationed on their soil. In his new-found enthusiasm for the Western alliance, French President François Mitterrand was especially keen: in a dramatic speech to a somewhat bemused Bundestag in January 1983 he impressed upon West Germans the urgent need to hold firm and adopt the latest American missiles.275
The ‘new’ Cold War re-opened a prospect of terror out of all apparent
proportion to the issues at stake—or the intentions of most of the participants. In Western Europe the anti-nuclear peace movement underwent a revival, strengthened by a new generation of ‘green’ activists. In Britain an enthusiastic and decidedly English assortment of feminists, environmentalists and anarchists, together with their assembled friends and relations, mounted a prolonged siege of the cruise missile site at Greenham Common—to the bewilderment of its long-suffering American garrison.
The opposition was greatest in West Germany, where the Social Democratic Chancellor Helmut Schmidt was forced to step down after the left wing of his own party voted against the new missiles—which were then approved and installed by his Christian Democratic successor Helmut Kohl.6 The mirage of a de-nuclearized, neutral zone in central Europe was still dear to many Germans, and prominent West German Greens and Social Democrats added their voices to official East German appeals against nuclear weapons—at a demonstration in Bonn in October 1983 former Chancellor Willy Brandt urged a sympathetic crowd of 300,000 people to demand that their government unilaterally renounce any new missiles. The so-called ‘Krefeld Appeal’ against the deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles in the Federal Republic gathered 2.7 million signatures.
Neither the invasion of Afghanistan nor the ‘state of war’ in Poland aroused comparable concern in Western Europe even in official circles (indeed, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s first response to Jaruzelski’s declaration of martial law was to send a high-level personal representative to Warsaw in February 1982 to help overcome Polish ‘isolation’7). As for the ‘peaceniks’, they were far less troubled by repression in Warsaw than by the bellicose rhetoric emanating from Washington. Although NATO’s decision to deploy new missiles had been accompanied by the offer of negotiations to reduce such weapons (the so-called ‘twin track’ approach), it seemed increasingly obvious that the US under its new president had adopted a new and aggressive strategy.