The End and the Beginning

by George Weigel

  It seemed, to many, a brazen attempt to liquidate someone whose continued witness on behalf of freedom could not be tolerated; that certainly was the consensus opinion among the vast throng that gathered in a “White March” in Kraków’s Old Town market square to express their solidarity with their fellow Cracovian in Rome. President Ronald Reagan, who still bore the scars of a gunshot wound inflicted six weeks before, called Cardinal Terence Cooke of New York to express his sympathy and concern, while issuing a statement deploring this “terrible act of violence” and sending a telegram of concern to the Pope himself, promising his prayers.91 Reagan’s CIA, however, was loathe to consider, much less investigate, what seemed evident to most Poles and to many close friends of John Paul II: that the Soviet Union was not an innocent in this affair, no matter that the actual gunman had been a Turk with Bulgarian connections.92*

  Two weeks after the assassination attempt on the Pope, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński died in Warsaw—another hard blow to Polish morale and to the Church’s capacity to give a measure of protection to Solidarity. Whether the assassination attempt on John Paul II was timed to coincide with Wyszyński’s demise cannot be proven, but that the Primate was in grave condition at the time when the Pope was shot was certainly known to Soviet-bloc intelligence. The Pope was thus faced with the difficult task of choosing a replacement for the irreplaceable Wyszyński, while he was himself recovering from Agca’s bullets and from the effects of a virulent cytomegalovirus he had contracted from a tainted blood transfusion; gravely weakened, the Pope had had to return to the Policlinico Gemelli, where a proper diagnosis of his condition was finally made in late June.94 Time was of the essence, as Solidarity’s first National Congress was scheduled for September and the ever-present threat of a Warsaw Pact attempt to crush Solidarity by armed force was never far from the Pope’s mind, or Cardinal Casaroli’s. The choice eventually fell on Bishop Józef Glemp, whom Wyszyński may have recommended to John Paul as the kind of man needed for what the Primate saw as the next phase of the struggle: a lawyer, with degrees in both canon and civil law, who could read the fine print in any proposed deal.95

  ON THE WAY TO A COUP D’ETAT

  For their parts, Polish Communist Party first secretary Stanisław Kania and prime minister/defense minister Wojciech Jaruzelski were more interested in surviving than in deal-making with the new archbishop of Gniezno and Warsaw. In the late spring of 1981, the KGB’s Moscow Center told the Warsaw KGB that it was time for Kania to go and that Poland needed both a new party leader and a new prime minister; the Soviet candidates were two hard-liners, Tadeusz Grabski and Stefan Olszowski, who, according to the KGB, were “imbued with a firm Marxist-Leninist outlook and are prepared to act decisively and consistently in defense of Socialist interests and of friendship with the Soviet Union.”96 Meanwhile, several Polish generals approached the KGB with a proposed plot to replace Jaruzelski because of his unwillingness, thus far, to impose martial law.97 Nonetheless, Moscow decided that it was best to keep Jaruzelski, so he and Kania remained in power for the moment, although they brought into prominent positions two hard-liners: General Czesław Kiszczak as minister of internal affairs and Jerzy Urban as party spokesman. Kiszczak’s appointment suggested that the plans for martial law, which had been under development since the fall of 1980, were maturing, as Kiszczak would brook no internal party opposition to a crackdown when the time came.98 Underscoring the urgency of the situation from the communists’ point of view, the party’s membership continued to crumble, even as Solidarity’s continued to increase.99

  By August, the month before the Solidarity Congress was to open, General Jaruzelski had decided that martial law would have to be imposed; the prime minister/defense minister cleared his detailed plan with the Warsaw Pact commander in chief, Soviet Marshal Viktor Kulikov, while interior minister Kiszczak informed KGB chairman Andropov that the SB had deeply penetrated the Church and that the new primate, Glemp, would be far easier to deal with than Wyszyński. The remaining problems, Kiszczak concluded, were the Pope and the moral authority of the Polish Church. Andropov seemed impressed and did not badger Kiszczak as he had the Pole’s immediate predecessors. But the KGB chairman was still very worried: “The class enemy has repeatedly tried to challenge the people’s power in the Socialist countries.… But the Polish crisis is the most long drawn out, and perhaps the most dangerous. The adversary’s creeping counter-revolution has long been preparing for the struggle with Socialism.”100

  The first Solidarity National Congress embodied what the Polish Communist Party claimed to be and manifestly wasn’t: an assembly representative of Polish society. The Congress opened on September 5 in Oliwa, near Gdańsk. Its chaplain was John Paul II’s old friend Father Józef Tischner, who preached several brilliant sermons on the reform of Polish labor. One of them concluded in these lyrical terms, far removed from the world and the words of Yuri Andropov and Czesław Kiszczak:

  We must look at the issue [of work] from above, like looking from the peaks of the Tatras, where the waters of the Vistula have their beginning. The very liturgy of the Mass encourages us to do this.… This bread and this wine shall become in a moment the body and blood of the Son of God. This has a deep meaning.… Were it not for human work, there would be no bread and wine. Without bread and wine, there would not be among us the Son of God. God does not come to us through a creation of nature alone, holy trees, water, or fire. God comes to us through the first creation of culture—bread and wine. Work that creates bread and wine paves the way toward God. But every work has a part in this work. Our work, too. In this way our work, the work of each one of us, paves the way to God.…

  Our concern is with the independence of Polish work. The word independence must be understood properly. It does not aim at breaking away from others. Work is reciprocity, it is agreement, it is a multifaceted dependence. Work creates a communion.…

  We are living history. A living history means one that bears fruit. Christ has said, “Let the dead bury their dead” [Matthew 8.22]. Thus, let us do the same. Let us become occupied with bearing fruit.101

  While Father Tischner was preaching (and the Congress was adopting a resolution to include his words in its official records), Soviet and other Warsaw Pact warships were cruising off the Baltic Coast, visible on the horizon beyond the famous cranes of the Gdańsk shipyard. The Soviet Politburo was beside itself, accusing Solidarity of having become a “political opposition that conflicts with the vital interests of the nation and the state.”102 The Soviet press agency TASS ranted on about an “anti-socialist and anti-Soviet orgy.”103 In the aftermath of the Congress, the Polish Communist Party, while flatly rejecting Solidarity’s call for free elections, made a pro forma attempt at co-optation, proposing a new kind of “national front” in which Solidarity would play a role; the trade union, which took the word “independent” in its formal title seriously, declined.104

  The sands were running out on Stanisław Kania, the man who didn’t want to be the butcher of the Polish people, and on October 18, 1981, he was replaced as party first secretary by General Jaruzelski, who now held all the levers of power: party chief, prime minister, and defense minister. Nine days later, Leonid Brezhnev phoned Jaruzelski to congratulate him:

  “Hello, Wojciech,” Brezhnev began. “Hello, my dear, deeply esteemed Leonid Ilyich!” Jaruzelski replied. He maintained the same sycophantic tone throughout the conversation: “Thank you very much, dear Leonid Ilyich, for the greeting and above all for the confidence you have in me. I want to tell you frankly that I had some inner misgivings about accepting this post and agreed to do so only because I knew that you support me and that you were in favor of this decision. If this had not been so, I would not have agreed to it.”105

  Brezhnev’s mental faculties might not have been at their most acute in late 1981, but he knew his man in General Jaruzelski. Even as the SB continued its efforts to penetrate and disrupt Solidarity and the rubber-stamp Polish parliament considered draft legislati
on with the ominous title “Extraordinary Measures to Defend the Interests of Citizens and the State,” Jaruzelski agreed to a “Big Three” meeting on November 4 with Primate Glemp and Solidarity chairman Wałęsa, which achieved nothing. While the facade of legality and “dialogue” was being refurbished, plans for the imposition of martial law were refined and Kiszczak’s interior ministry gave a preview of what was to come by using a helicopter assault to break up a student strike.106

  The decision to declare a “state of emergency” and impose martial law was taken by the Polish Party Politburo on December 5.107 The cast of mind of the hard-liners was neatly summed up by Józef Czyrek, recipient of those encoded cables reporting on Vatican attitudes: “Major historical crises have never been resolved by expanding democracy but by giving extraordinary powers to rulers, by introducing dictatorship.”108 This attempt to cast General Jaruzelski in the role of Cincinnatus may have been of some comfort to those Polish comrades who believed they were being forced into this position by the imperative of acting themselves, lest Soviet tanks crush Poland. But it ill fit the facts. Unlike the situation a year before, when Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces were poised on Poland’s borders, no such imminent threat of invasion was being mounted at this juncture.

  On December 11, Solidarity’s radicals won a debate at a meeting of the union’s National Commission in Gdańsk, and adopted a resolution calling for a referendum—either nationwide or within Solidarity—on whether Poland’s future should be communist. Official regime propaganda later cited this as the casus belli for the imposition of martial law—which was a lie, as that course had been irrevocably adopted a week earlier. Indeed, if there was a note of classic historical drama in Poland in December 1981, it did not have to do with Jaruzelski-as-Cincinnatus but with the fact that the impasse toward which Poland had been heading at least since August 1980, and more likely since the Nine Days of John Paul II in June 1979, had finally been reached: as Jan Olszewski, a Warsaw lawyer and Solidarity leader put it with admirable concision, “People are determined not to reconcile themselves to the system and the government is not prepared to change it.”109

  On the night of December 12–13, 1981, the Polish Communist Party and government staged what amounted to a coup d’etat against the Polish state and Polish society. General Jaruzelski spoke to the country at 6 A.M. on December 13, long after the first arrests had been made and telephone communication cut off within the country and between Poland and the world. “Our homeland was on the edge of a precipice,” Jaruzelski declared, and therefore he was assuming absolute authority as chairman of a Military Council of National Salvation [WRON]—a title rich with irony, as it was the nation against which war was being waged and the party that was to be saved.110 Three days earlier, Jaruzelski had warned the KGB that Primate Glemp could become “a second Khomeini,” declaring a holy war; it was as unlikely a casting as Jaruzelski-as-Cincinnatus, for Glemp urged calm in two December 13 sermons, begging, “Do not begin a fight of Pole against Pole. Do not lose your heads, brother workers … every head and every pair of hands will be invaluable in rebuilding the Poland that will exist, and will have to exist, after martial law has ended.”111 Five thousand Poles were arrested in December 1981; between then and the end of martial law in July 1983, that number would more than double, with many spending months in internment camps. The worst violence took place outside Katowice, at the Wujek mine, where a Polish Special Forces platoon opened fire on striking miners, killing nine.112 The SB behaved with its accustomed “casual brutality,” subjecting Lech Wałęsa’s wife and daughters to strip searches and inflicting similar humiliations and beatings on other Solidarity activists, while doing everything in its power to dismantle Solidarity’s organizational and communications machinery.113 The WRON controlled the entire media and used it for mindless propaganda, adding yet another joke to the thick catalogue of Polish anticommunist humor: “What is the lowest rank in the army? Television commentator.”114

  John Paul II was informed of the imposition of martial law at 1 A.M. on December 13, in a phone call from the Polish ambassador to Italy. Unable to reach anyone in Poland by phone, the Pope spent a difficult Sunday, using the word “solidarity” six times during his Angelus address and repeating the invocation of the word now banned in Poland during the weekly general audience the following Wednesday—during which he also began the custom of invoking Our Lady of Częstochowa at the end of his remarks. The day after the massacre at the Wujek mine, John Paul wrote General Jaruzelski an “urgent and heartfelt appeal … a prayer for an end to the shedding of Polish blood,” ending with “an appeal to your conscience, General.”115 While the Pope had been warned by a phone call from Zbigniew Brzeziński that something seemed to be afoot in Poland, Stanisław Dziwisz remembers the Pope as being “anguished and surprised” that martial law had been imposed. It was, Dziwisz later said, “a profound humiliation for Poland. After all that it had suffered throughout its history, Poland didn’t deserve this new martyrdom. It didn’t deserve to be punished so severely.”116 The humiliation, of course, came from the fact that the latest martyrdom was inflicted on Poles by Poles.

  President Reagan called the Pope on the evening of December 14, beginning by saying that he wanted John Paul to know “how deeply we feel about the situation in your country” and assuring the Pope that “our sympathies are with the people, not with the government.”117 That same day, the Pope met in Rome with Solidarity leader Bohdan Cywiński, who had been out of the country when martial law was imposed; they met on three other occasions during the following week, to exchange what information they had and to consider the future. It was, Cywiński recalled, a time for serious reflection, after the initial shock had been absorbed. Solidarity had clearly underestimated the staying power of the communists, as some in the Church had previously underestimated Solidarity’s possibilities. John Paul regularly expressed concern for the suffering families of interned Solidarity activists; but neither he nor Cywiński engaged in any “conspiracy” to assist those families using Vatican funds or recycled funds from Western intelligence sources, reports to the contrary notwithstanding.118 Throughout the initial period of martial law, according to both Cywiński and former Radio Free Europe Polish service head Jan Nowak, John Paul II was cautious, careful not to say or do anything that would make matters worse, and doubtless concerned that serious and detailed information was hard to come by.119

  On December 15, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli had a working lunch with President Ronald Reagan in the White House Map Room. Casaroli was accompanied by Archbishop Pio Laghi, the apostolic delegate in Washington, and by Archbishop Silvestrini’s deputy, Msgr. Audrys Bačkis; in addition to Reagan, the Americans present included Vice President George Bush; Secretary of State Alexander Haig; presidential chief of staff James Baker; acting chief special assistant for national security affairs James Nance; William Wilson, the president’s personal envoy to the Vatican; principal deputy assistant secretary for European and Canadian affairs, H. Allen Holmes; and Dennis Blair, a member of the National Security Council staff. The burden of the ninety-minute conversation was carried by President Reagan and Cardinal Casaroli.

  At the outset of the discussion, and according to the classified memorandum of the conversation that summarized each point in it, Casaroli said that he believed Jaruzelski had acted “both because of Soviet pressure and to prevent the Soviets themselves from intervening.” Based on “his personal knowledge of Jaruzelski,” the cardinal “felt that he was nationalist enough not to want the Soviet Union to intervene directly.” The discussion (which took place the day before the Wujek mine massacre) then turned to reports, unconfirmed, that striking workers had been fired upon, with Cardinal Casaroli saying that he “could understand harsh punishments for sabotage, but could hardly see them applying to workers who failed to come to work.”

  President Reagan, operating on the assumption (which turned out to be false) that it was Solidarity’s call for a referendum on Poland’s communist fu
ture that had triggered martial law, said that the West should take “full propaganda advantage” of that response to a call for free elections, because it was “a clear comment on the lack of popular support for the government.” Casaroli responded that “this was a telling point,” but then argued that “it was unrealistic to think that one east European country could be extensively liberated on its own,” as “the Soviets would simply not tolerate such a situation.” Casaroli also suggested that, while “it was important to support movements for liberalization in Eastern Europe,” it was also his settled view that “no country could be far ahead of the others.” The Vatican secretary of state also told the Americans that John Paul II was convinced that “change in Eastern Europe would come only gradually and at the same rate in all Eastern European countries.”

  Later in the conversation, Casaroli suggested that “the events in Poland were unfortunate but predictable,” as he had been told by a visiting Polish government official that the “economic deterioration in Poland” was due to a “lack of worker discipline.” This, in addition to the continuing pressure from the Soviet Union, made it almost inevitable that “the Polish government would be forced to intervene openly.”