The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

THE CARNIVAL

  The rise of Solidarity, the trade union that was also a social movement and a de facto political opposition, intensified the communist war against John Paul II, even as it challenged the diplomatic conventions of the Vatican Ostpolitik and set Poland on a social and emotional roller-coaster ride that would be known later as “the Carnival.”

  There had been nationwide waves of dissent in communist Poland before: in 1956, 1968, 1970, and 1976. 1980 was different, because dissent in Poland had matured—not least because of the revolution of conscience ignited by John Paul II in June 1979. To be sure, Polish dissidents were better organized in 1980, more sophisticated in their communications strategies, and more clever politically than they had been in the past. The dissident coalition was more comprehensive, involving both workers and intellectuals; that diversity gave it a tensile strength that proved far more resilient against communist provocation, deception, disinformation, and pressure than in previous eruptions of mass protest. Yet the character of the opposition had also matured. Living in the truth, the theme that John Paul II had hammered on throughout the Nine Days of June 1979, had become both a watchword and a program for human rights organizations throughout central and eastern Europe, as both religiously based dissidents and secular dissidents recognized that this form of morally grounded, culturally focused resistance struck at the heart of the communist enterprise, which was constructed on a foundation of falsehoods and maintained through an official strategy of lies.

  What began in the Gdańsk shipyard in August 1980 represented a coming together of several strands of national experience, some reaching back into the nineteenth century, others of more recent vintage. The Polish insurrectionary tradition, which had been fed by the poems, novels, and plays of Polish Romanticism, met a new Catholic maturity, forged in Wyszyński’s Great Novena and refined in John Paul II’s Nine Days, to produce a unique movement of social renewal and antitotalitarian resistance that was politically sophisticated and determinedly nonviolent. There were more prosaic factors at work, of course. The economy was a wreck, which had a drastic effect on what one historian neatly described as the “Achilles’ heel of a socialist economy,” food prices and supplies.50 The Gierek regime’s dependence on Western credits limited the government’s scope for brutality, which was also tempered by memories of the 1970 crisis and the fall of Gomułka. Still, the “1980 difference” that made the most difference was a moral difference, which displayed itself in the character and program of those who, as John Paul II later put it, took “the risk of freedom.”51

  That moral difference showed itself almost immediately as the Gdańsk shipyard strike broke out on August 14, 1980. It was an occupation strike, in which the workers took over the entire shipyard complex, thus creating an oasis of free space in the totalitarian system. Rigorous discipline was maintained, aided by an absolute ban on alcohol in the yards. Religious seriousness was manifest, publicly evident in open-air Masses and confessions. Perhaps most crucially from the point of view of what followed, the workers, having been tutored by John Paul II in the larger meaning of their dignity as men and women, refused to settle for the economic concessions the regime quickly offered. Thus on the night of August 16–17, the Miedzyzakladowy Komitet Strajkolwy [Inter-Factory Strike Committee, or MKS] was established to press a broader set of demands, including the establishment of independent, self-governing trade unions, and to coordinate strike activities throughout the Baltic region. The famous “21 Points” agreed upon by the MKS presidium (in which the key actors were Lech Wałęsa, Joanna and Andrzej Gwiazda, Bogdan Lis, and Andrzej Kolodziej) emphasized economic change while including a full menu of basic human rights, specifically mentioning, among others, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and an end to discrimination against religious believers “of all faiths” in terms of access to the media. The goals of dissent had been enlarged and deepened; as one worker-poet would put it a few months later,

  The times are past

  when they closed our mouths

  with sausage.52

  A few days after the strike broke out, the MKS leaders’ negotiating position was strengthened when a seven-member experts’ commission, which included the Catholic intellectuals Tadeusz Mazowiecki and Bohdan Cywiński and the secular historian Bronisław Geremek, arrived in Gdańsk. This unprecedented coalition of workers with meager educations and activist intellectuals had been prepared, throughout the mid-1970s, in the experience of KOR and similar groups; it also reflected the sense of national solidarity across traditional class barriers that had been created in the Nine Days of John Paul II. Thus, facing government negotiators who were themselves nervous about a local situation that had rapidly become a national movement, the striking workers were in a far stronger position than ever before.

  The results proved the point, as the government agreed to the principle of free trade unions and signed an agreement with the MKS on August 31. It was not an accident, as Poland’s remaining Marxists might have said, that Wałęsa signed for the strikers using a giant pen topped by a portrait of John Paul II—a souvenir from the Nine Days of June 1979 that underscored the linkage between that epic journey and the path embarked upon by what quickly became a vast and unprecedented national social movement.53

  On September 17, a national meeting of strike committees from across the country was held in Gdańsk, and Karol Modzelewski’s suggestion for a name by which the new union would be known was adopted: the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union Solidarity [NSZZ Solidarność]. “Solidarity” had been the name editor Krzysztof Wyszkowski had given to the strikers’ bulletin published in the Gdańsk shipyard in August.54 “Solidarity” was also, and perhaps not altogether coincidentally, the title of one of the concluding sections of Karol Wojtyła’s 1969 philosophical magnum opus, Person and Act; there, the future pope described “solidarity”—a condition in which personal freedom serves the common good and the community supports individuals as they grow into true maturity—as the most humanistically authentic attitude toward society.55 The first words of the organization’s title were, of course, as important as the last, soon to become world-famous in the jumbly-letter logo that had been invented for the strikers’ bulletin by artist Jerzy Janiszewski: “independent” meant “not under the control of the communist party or the state,” and “self-governing” meant that its members were taking responsibility for their own decisions and actions. Both themes echoed lessons taught in the Nine Days of June 1979. Solidarity also took care to reappropriate parts of the Polish past that the regime had long tried to ignore or deny. Solidarity buttons often featured the crowned Polish eagle, an emblem banned by the communist regime because it evoked memories of Mary, Queen of Poland. Moreover, the workers’ demands in Gdańsk had included the building of a memorial to those workers killed by the regime in 1970—the dramatic Three Crosses Monument was finished in a few months and dedicated in December 1980.

  The growth of Solidarity, the independent self-governing trade union that was also a social movement, was phenomenal. Within sixteen months, the union/movement had some ten million members—more than one-fourth and almost one-third of the country—brought together in a cascade in which Poles from every class and sector of society (including farmers, peasants, and students) participated. Moscow’s reaction to all of this was predictable and ominous. Both the Politburo and the KGB agreed that “the Gdańsk Agreement represented the greatest potential threat to the ‘Socialist Commonwealth’ … since the Prague Spring of 1968.” Two weeks before Solidarity was officially formed and named, the Politburo adopted “theses for discussion with representatives of the Polish leadership,” a not-too-subtle way of describing the demands that the Soviets intended to make of the Polish comrades, among which was to “prepare a counterattack” that would give “overriding significance to the consolidation of the leading role of the Party in society.” Always aware of the danger from the east, Polish black humor asserted itself again: referring to Gomułka’s ouster in 1970, one joke
queried the difference between Gomułka and Edward Gierek, to which the answer was, “None, only Gierek doesn’t know it yet!” Leonid Brezhnev was not, however, in a joking mood, telling the Politburo on October 29 that “the counterrevolution in Poland is in full flood,” and broaching the possible “necessity” of martial law. The next month, KGB chairman Andropov warned the new Polish interior minister, General Mirosław Milewski, that Solidarity and the Church were a lethal, and linked, threat:

  Even if you left Wyszyński and Wałęsa in peace, Wyszyński and Wałęsa would not leave you in peace until they had achieved their aim or they had been actively crushed by the Party and the responsible part of the workers. If you wait passively … the situation slips out of your control. I saw how this happened in Hungary [in 1956].… There is every reason to fear that the same may happen in Poland also, if the most active and decisive measures are not now taken [against] … Wałęsa and his fascist confederates.56

  Among the “measures” Andropov immediately took was a new infiltration of “illegals” into Poland, aimed at penetrating Solidarity, through the Church if necessary. One such illegal, FILOSOV (Ivan Bunyk), posed as a French poet and made contact with an old friend and colleague of John Paul II, Father Andrzej Bardecki. Bardecki (who, as Andrew and Mitrokhin note, had “no possible means of identifying” Bunyk, one of his many foreign visitors, “as a KGB ‘illegal’ ”) introduced FILOSOV to Tadeusz Mazowiecki, then editing the Solidarity weekly newspaper, Tygodnik Solidarnosść (and equally unaware of the true identity of his visitor).57

  Mazowiecki, for his part, had gone to Rome in early October, after the formation of NSZZ Solidarnosść. He was received by John Paul II, eager for news from Poland from sources in whom he had confidence. The Pope had one overriding question: “Will it last? Does this movement have a future?” Mazowiecki assured John Paul that it did.58 But if the Pope received this news with satisfaction, tempered by concern over what the Polish communists or the Soviet Union might do to strangle the infant Solidarity in its cradle, the Ostpolitik managers of the Roman Curia took a somewhat different view, which began with concern rather than satisfaction. “Stability” was the diplomats’ watchword, and it was clear to both Cardinal Casaroli and Archbishop Silvestrini that Solidarity had the capacity to be a deeply destabilizing force throughout central and eastern Europe: not in and of itself, but because of the Soviet reaction it might provoke. True, Primate Wyszyński had given Solidarity his blessing; but according to Silvestrini, Wyszyński was also worried that a Soviet intervention would trigger the collapse of the Polish communist regime, thus effectively partitioning Poland a fourth time by turning it into a de facto province of the USSR. As for the curial diplomats, while they could see Solidarity as a “natural effect” of the Nine Days of June 1979, they also worried that Wałęsa and the other Solidarity leaders might not have Wyszyński’s well-honed sense of where the edge of the cliff was. Moreover, information was sketchy; direct telephonic communication between John Paul II and the Primate, or between the Vatican diplomats and the Primate, was impossible because of bugging.59

  The curialists’ concerns about Wałęsa were misplaced. Throughout September and October, when the Polish regime set numerous obstacles in the way of Solidarity’s legal registration, the Gdańsk electrician consistently played a moderating role, giving Solidarity radicals a chance to speak their minds but always guiding decisions toward a resolution that did not back the regime into a corner from which it could extricate itself only with massive repression—its own, or the Soviets’. Given the intoxicating, first experience of democracy, this was no easy task, but Wałęsa’s own political skills, as well as what one suspects was his intuition that John Paul II would have wanted things played the way he was playing them, kept the movement on course, even if it cost Wałęsa some support within the Solidarity rank and file and among the more radical union leaders.60 That rank and file, for its part, was still growing rapidly, drawing members from previously dormant rural areas and student groups; both Rural Solidarity and the students’ group were refused registration, which only led to greater demands from NSZZ Solidarnosść on their behalf. Then, on October 27, “the [democratic] plague invaded the citadel” (as Andrzej Paczkowski neatly put it) when a group of communist party members met in Toruń to form a “Consultative-Coordinating Commission of Party Organizations” that directly challenged the “democratic centralism” of the Polish Communist Party and thus the party’s capacity to mount a coordinated response to the Solidarity challenge.61 Yet this crack in the party walls itself mirrored the public mood toward the regime, aptly characterized by KOR founder Jacek Kuron: “If the government had actually produced a golden egg, people would say that it was not golden; second, that it was not an egg; and third, that the government had stolen it.”62

  ON THE BRINK OF THE ABYSS

  The dispute with the regime over Solidarity’s legal registration, which unfolded over three weeks in late October and early November 1980 and was resolved on November 10, was quickly followed by an even graver confrontation, this time international in scope, in late November and early December. As early as October 30, East Germany ended free movement across its Polish border, a step replicated by the equally hard-line Czechoslovak regime on November 18. Polish-Soviet military exercises on Polish territory began on November 9. Party newspapers in Berlin and Prague attacked Stanisław Kania (the new Polish party chieftain, who had replaced Edward Gierek on September 6) as a weakling and drew ominous comparisons between the fall of 1980 and the Prague Spring of 1968—rhetorical attacks that would have been unlikely absent prior Soviet approval. Kania’s Central Committee responded on December 4 by making an unprecedented appeal to its “fellow-countrymen,” while the Central Committee’s press spokesman warned on December 5 that “if power slips from the hands of democracy … Poland’s communists will have the right and duty to call for assistance”—a formulation both ironic (what democracy?) and ominous (“assistance” could only mean the Red Army).

  The crucial meeting took place that same day, with Vasili Mitrokhin providing details from the KGB files:

  On December 5 an extraordinary meeting of Warsaw Pact leaders assembled in Moscow to discuss the Polish crisis. Kania heard one speaker after another castigate the weakness of his policies and demand an immediate crackdown on Solidarity and the Church. Otherwise, he was told, Warsaw Pact forces would intervene. Eighteen divisions were already on the Polish borders and Kania was shown plans for the occupation of Polish cities and towns. The meeting was followed by a private discussion between Kania and Brezhnev. Military intervention, Kania insisted, would be a disaster for the Soviet Union as well as for Poland. “OK, we don’t march into Poland now,” Brezhnev replied, “but if the situation gets any worse we will come.”63

  Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin argue that Brezhnev’s threat was a bluff.64 Andrzej Paczkowski suggests that a complicated game was being played: that a decision on Warsaw Pact military intervention had only been deferred, with the Poles being urged to take tougher anti-Solidarity measures and the Soviet comrades assuring a Polish communist party that “plainly did not feel strong enough to engage in a once-and-for-all showdown” that military “assistance” was available if needed. “Somehow or other,” Paczkowski concludes, “crisis was averted.”65

  The game was complicated indeed. Thanks to the brave work of Colonel Ryszard Kukliński, the Polish officer who had been providing the United States with Warsaw Pact operational plans, the U.S. government (then in the last days of the Carter administration) had a very clear idea of how the invasion would proceed—perhaps a clearer idea than General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the Polish defense minister. The Soviet plan, it should be noted, included the complete elimination of the Solidarity leadership by summary courts-martial and firing squads. Kukliński’s materials were amplified by ongoing satellite reconnaissance, and by information being fed to the West by a Red Army general in Moscow. President Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzez
iński, was sharing information with President-elect Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser, Richard V. Allen, and the two men had agreed to coordinate their principals’ public statements. Allen was also sympathetic to a plan by Lane Kirkland, the president of the AFL-CIO, the American trade union federation, to threaten a global blockade of Soviet international commerce by coordinated union action throughout the world; Brzeziński made sure that news of this initiative leaked to the Wall Street Journal. At the same time, Brzeziński took advantage of the sievelike U.S. State Department by sending it a memo on possible U.S. military sales to China, knowing that the memo, like the AFL-CIO plan, would leak to the papers and thus get quickly to Moscow. With Reagan’s agreement, President Carter sent a “hotline” message to the Kremlin, warning of “grave consequences” should the Warsaw Pact invade Poland.66

  On December 7, when it was still unclear what moves, if any, the Soviet Union and its clients would make toward Poland, Brzeziński called Pope John Paul II to brief him on what the United States knew (from Kukliński and other intelligence sources) and on the steps the Carter administration had taken to signal Moscow in every way possible that invading Poland would be a very bad idea. John Paul II then prepared his own direct appeal to Soviet leader Brezhnev, which took the form of an unprecedented personal letter dated December 16 (when, of course, no one in the West knew that the invasion had been either scuttled or deferred).67 Although written in a formal diplomatic style, it was a tough letter: it described events in Poland as that country’s internal affair, citing the Helsinki Final Act; it defended Solidarity by a deft reference to the “solidarity” necessary if societies were to move forward economically and socially; and, by referring to Poland’s martyrdom in 1939, John Paul subtly suggested that he was prepared to use all the moral power at his command to identify Brezhnev and any new invasion of Poland with the “fascists” who remained a principal boogeyman of the Soviet propaganda machine. The letter, according to then-Vatican foreign minister Silvestrini, was John Paul’s “personal initiative”; its language suggests that the Vatican’s senior diplomats were at least consulted about the text, which they were responsible for getting to Moscow.68