Revolution 1989

by Victor Sebestyen

  A particularly disturbing report reached Andropov following a visit by his deputy, Vladimir Kryuchkov, and the KGB head of foreign counter-intelligence, Oleg Kalugin, who said the Polish ‘SB were always difficult, not like the Czechs or the East Germans. They had to be handled with care.’ On a visit to Poland for talks with the SB, the two intelligence officers, out of general interest, went to the Lenin Shipyard. Kalugin said:When we arrived we were greeted by the manager (Gniech) who asked us to leave our big limousines outside the gates. He explained there was a lot of unrest among the workers and that the sight of our . . . convoy might be too provocative. Naturally we complied. Far from being welcomed by the workforce, or clapped as was the convention during such tours, we met sullen stares and resentment. During a banquet thrown in our honour at the end of the visit to Poland I made a casual reference to the dissent in my speech. To my amazement their security minister reacted as if I had touched on a very raw nerve and insisted there was only a handful of troublemakers and all of them were under control. I knew then there was a real problem . . .21

  In October the Soviets removed Kania, whom they had installed as Polish leader barely a year earlier. He had made it plain he was reluctant to take the required brutal steps against the independent trade union. Naïvely, he had let himself be bugged by the KG B making criticisms of the USSR that were extraordinary coming from one their supposedly obedient quislings. He said: ‘The Soviet model has failed the test. The fact that the USSR was systematically buying grain in the West is an indictment of serious errors in their management . . . The power of their regime is marked only through their army and powers of coercion. If the USSR still has some strategic advantage over the US, within two or three years they may lose it because [of the weakness] of the Soviet economy.’ A transcript of the recording was sent immediately to Andropov and within days Kania was ousted. He was replaced as Communist Party leader and the ruler of Poland by Comrade General Wojciech Jaruzelski.22

  FIVE

  CIVIL WAR

  Warsaw, Saturday 12 December 1981

  COMMUNIST THEORY tells loyalists to be wary of military men. Armies are potentially an alternative source of power and must be firmly kept under the control of the Party. Yet the Soviets and the diehards among the Polish leadership saw Jaruzelski as the answer to their most urgent hopes. No professional soldier had become a Communist Party boss before - though several had worn elegant uniforms which they had never earned in the battlefield or barracks square. Jaruzelski was trusted, loyal, reliable and thought to be the man who would offer the smack of firm government. He would solve the chaos in Poland, which, as Moscow saw it, was threatening the security of all its possessions in Europe.

  Wojciech Jaruzelski hardly seemed like a natural Communist. He was born on 6 July 1923, into a wealthy landed family of noble descent in eastern Poland near Białystok. He grew up on his parents’ country estate of Trzeciny into a life of ease. He learned to fence, to ride horses and to waltz. The ‘family tradition’, as the General described it, was Polish nationalist and, especially, anti-Russian. His grandfather and two great-uncles took part in the 1863 rebellion against the Tsars, and when it failed were sent to Siberia for twelve years. His father fought for the Poles in the 1920 war against Russia - on this occasion the Poles won. He was sent to a strict Catholic school in Warsaw run by the Marian monks where, as he said, ‘every subject - history, geography, languages - was linked to the tragic history of relations between Poland and Russia’.I

  He was sixteen when the Germans invaded Poland and the family sought refuge with some friends in Lithuania. After the Hitler/Stalin pact - when the Baltic republics became part of the Soviet Union - they were all deported to Siberia. Their crime was his father’s record of nineteen years earlier and their aristocratic pedigree. Jaruzelski senior was sent to a labour camp where, already in poor health, he was worked to death. Wojciech, still a teenager, his mother and twelve-year-old sister were sent to the Taiga, the icy Siberian tundra plain, and left to fend for themselves. The journey took nearly a month in an overcrowded goods train. He spent two years in forced labour, felling trees. It was back-breaking work, and in the winter the glare of the sun on the ice damaged his eyes. The trademark dark glasses he always wore dated from that time. ‘In Siberia, the cold was indescribable. I worked very hard. All this should have made me hate the Russians. Paradoxically, the opposite began to happen. I fell in love with the Russians, with their indomitable spirit, with the country itself, with the ordinary people I got to know.’2

  No doubt a psychiatrist could explain the phenomenon more fully, but Jaruzelski became a passionately committed Communist. After the German invasion of the USSR in 1941, he was one of the first to join the Polish ranks of the Red Army. This was another defining moment in his life. He fought alongside the Soviets, through to the siege of Berlin, in some of the most brutal battles in the war. ‘I identified with them . . . My superiors, my colleagues, all those who depended on me were Russian,’ he said. They were the victorious power, he was convinced they had right on their side, they were building a great empire in Eastern Europe that would be there to stay. With a mixture of conviction and opportunism, Jaruzelski chose to serve them.

  In Poland after the war, he became a military commissar. ‘I was a fanatical believer. It went without saying that we had to defend our church and its dogmas,’ he would say. His job was to establish a loyal Communist army that would look after Soviet interests. He was a highly political general, an efficient administrator, a deft tactician and he climbed steadily through the government ranks. He had little public exposure until December 1970, when as Defence Minister he was responsible for the troops who fired on the Gdansk workers, though he did not give the order for them to shoot. He was loathed by most Poles from then onwards, who regarded this one-time aristocrat-turned-Communist ideologue as an enigma. He spoke with perfect old-fashioned, almost nineteenth-century diction, yet the words he uttered were orthodox Marxist-Leninist gobbledegook. He remained Defence Minister when he was made Prime Minister in February 1981 and, later, when he was appointed to replace Kania.

  By now Poland’s foreign debt had risen to US $25 billion, on top of the generous handouts it had received from the Soviets that went directly towards subsidising food prices. The country could barely afford to pay interest on the loans. Despite Wałesa’s appeals for calm and restraint, the more radical wing of Solidarity was making increased demands - for more pay, less government control in factories and for wholesale economic reforms. In concert with his Soviet advisers, Jaruzelski from the start played a double game to ‘squash’ Solidarity. In public he appeared to be emollient. On 4 November 1981, a fortnight after he took over as Party boss, he met Wałesa and the new Primate of Poland, Archbishop Józef Glemp, who had become head of the Polish Church in the summer following the death of the respected and deeply mourned Cardinal Wyszynski. The General declared he wanted to establish a ‘Front for National Unity’ - a kind of coalition that would bring in the Church and Solidarity as junior partners in government. Wałesa was in a conciliatory mood. ‘We do not want to overthrow the power of the State,’ he said. ‘Let the Government govern the country and we will govern ourselves in the factories.’ There was a second meeting a fortnight later, which broke down amidst rancour. Jaruzelski threatened to introduce emergency laws to ban strikes, prohibit public meetings and to use military courts to try some civilian offences. Wałesa said he would call a one-day national strike followed by an unlimited general strike if those measures came into force. The two sides were set on a collision course.3

  Secretly, though, Jaruzelski knew what he intended to do. Plans to introduce martial law if the regime felt it necessary had originally been laid months earlier. They were refined throughout 1981 under the direction of Jaruzelski’s General Staff and a highly confidential National Defence Committee. They had the codename Spring and only a few members of Poland’s political leadership knew anything about them. Kania had seen the plans but never agr
eed to implement them. They would not risk using Polish soldiers to shoot at workers. The troops might refuse. In the strictest secrecy Jaruzelski had organised a force of 15,000 specially trained riot police, known by the Polish acronym ZOMO, which he trusted would be absolutely loyal to the regime. They were paid several times more than regular police or troops and they were well equipped with the latest line in plastic shields, water cannons and state-of-the art truncheons.

  Jaruzelski, as he had always intended, deliberately engineered a pretext to crack down on the union. On 15 September, when Prime Minister and Defence Minister, he chaired a meeting of his aides in which he said they needed an excuse to impose martial law ‘which can in no way be assessed as a provocation by the government side but, rather . . . will make it clear to everyone in society exactly why it is necessary’. He resorted to forgery. In early December the government claimed it had unearthed details of a violent plot to overthrow the state. As proof, it cited what it called the Radom Tapes - a recording of a meeting of leading Solidarity activists in that city. It turned out later that the tapes were fakes, crudely doctored by the Polish secret service to make the discussion look like a plan to mount an insurrection when it was not. But the damage was done. Jaruzelski had provided himself with what he thought was, and could explain to others as, a plausible reason to act.4

  Despite the tense atmosphere, Solidarity was totally unprepared for martial law when it was imposed on the freezing cold night of 12- 13 December 1981. Wałesa repeatedly warned that ‘we should never underestimate the enemy’, yet he and his closest advisers had done so. ‘We were simply not mentally prepared for it. Nobody imagined that this seemingly weak government would prove strong enough to turn the police, or the army, against us,’ said Władisław Frasyniuk, a leading Solidarity organiser.5 If Solidarity did not know the coup would take place, the US and other Western governments did. The CIA had an informer close to General Jaruzelski who had been giving the Ameri cans valuable intelligence for several years. Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski was a senior officer in Polish military intelligence, but reported to Washington under the codename Jack Strong. He had told the Americans about the invasion threat in December 1980, though he thought it was a real danger and not a bluff. Now he tipped off the CIA about martial law. The US and other Nato countries reacted calmly to the news, but nobody thought to warn Solidarity.c6

  Most of the union’s best-known figures were arrested in their beds. The regime had carefully planned the action for this weekend, Solidarity’s annual congress. The entire Solidarity leadership was in Gdansk, apart from a few who were on trips abroad. At two a.m. on the Sunday morning, 2,000 ZOMO riot police, in their pale blue battle dress, surrounded the Monopol Hotel in the centre of the city, where most of the delegates were staying. They blocked the exits and searched all the rooms. They arrested every union official they could find, hand-cuffed them and piled them into waiting trucks where they were at first taken to holding cells at police stations and military barracks. The same happened at other guest houses and hotels.

  Wałesa was arrested at his home in a high-rise apartment block in Zaspa on the outskirts of Gdansk. His doorbell rang at 3 a.m. It was the Gdansk Communist Party chief, Tadeusz Fiszbach, along with six SB officers. Wałesa was told to dress and he would be put on a plane ‘for talks with Jaruzelski’. His first reaction was defiance. ‘I told them . . . “This is the moment you lose. This is your downfall . . . the end of communism.” Of course I was exaggerating a bit.’ He was warned the police would take him by force if need be. He packed a few clothes and went with them. A few top figures managed to get away - such as the dynamic twenty-seven-year-old leader of the union in Warsaw, Zbigniew Bujak, who was up in a bar drinking brandies with some college friends most of the night while the raids were proceeding, and had been planning to take a dawn train back to the capital. But it had been a surgical operation carried out with efficiency.7

  General Jaruzelski broadcast on television just after six that morning, looking solemn and stiff-necked as usual in his impeccably pressed olive green uniform. Two Polish flags were draped behind a desk as he spoke. He looked more like a Latin American dictator at the head of a military junta than a Communist apparatchik, as he explained that he had to take action ‘for the good of the nation . . . Our country has found itself on the edge of an abyss . . . Poland’s future is at stake, the future for which my generation fought.’ Archbishop Glemp’s sermon was shown on TV soon after the General appeared. He said martial law ‘was to choose the lesser of two evils. Assuming the correctness of such reasoning, the man in the street will submit himself to the new situation. Do not start a fight Pole against Pole.’ It was an extraordinary performance by the charmless, rotund former canon lawyer, whose calm appeal for compromise seemed to chime oddly with the Pope’s inspiring calls for resistance to godless communism.

  Jaruzelski always defended the imposition of martial law on the grounds that if he had not done so the Russians would have invaded Poland, which would have been worse for the country. For many years, however unpopular his regime became, he was believed by his opponents at home and abroad. But it is untrue. The Soviets ruled out sending a force into Poland - and Jaruzelski knew it. In fact, Jaruzelski desperately appealed to the Russians to send in their troops but was rejected.8

  At the beginning of December Poland’s then Chief of Staff, General Florian Siwicki, went to Moscow on the orders of Jaruzelski. The two had been friends as well as comrades-in-arms for years and Siwicki was a highly trusted emissary. The purpose of his visit was to persuade the Russians to intervene in Poland. Jaruzelski believed that martial law would not succeed without Soviet help and the Polish military on their own could not ‘restore order’. According to Siwicki he was carrying a document drawn up in Warsaw which was ‘a statement demonstrating that the Polish Communists do not stand alone and asked for a fulfilment of the obligations of the alliance as well as total support for the Polish government’s struggle against counter-revolutionaries’. What it meant, of course, said Siwicki, was an absolute commitment by Moscow to send in their armies to Poland. The Soviets refused to sign the document. When Siwicki returned home empty-handed, the Polish leader looked deeply disturbed and said, ‘Our allies have abandoned us . . . now we have exhausted the options available to us.’ He made a similar remark to another old friend, Red Army General Anatoli Gribkov, the Warsaw Pact Chief of Staff, when he accused the Soviets of ‘betraying an old friendship’.9

  On 10 December the magnates in the Kremlin met urgently to discuss - yet again - a crisis in Poland. This is when a final decision was made not to dispatch Soviet troops there. Andropov said: ‘We do not intend to introduce troops into Poland. That is the right position and we must stick with it to the end . . . I don’t know how things will turn out in Poland, but even if it falls under the control of Solidarity, so be it . . . If the capitalist countries pounce on the Soviet Union . . . with economic and political sanctions, that would be burdensome for us. We must be concerned above all about our own country and strengthening the Soviet Union.’ Gromyko agreed: ‘We must somehow try to dispel the notions of Jaruzelski and other leaders in Poland . . . There cannot be any introduction of troops into Poland.’10

  The next day Marshal Viktor Kulikov, head of the Soviet military delegation to Warsaw, passed on Moscow’s decision to Jaruzelski. But the Polish leader still tried to change minds in the Kremlin. According to the KGB chief in Warsaw, General Vitali Pavlov, Jaruzelski telephoned Mikhail Suslov on the morning of 12 December, just a few hours before martial law was proclaimed. Suslov was the Soviets’ chief of ideology, an inflexible diehard who had been a highly influential figure in the Soviet leadership for a quarter of a century. He had been one of the Soviet Union’s troubleshooters on the spot in Budapest when the Hungarian Uprising was crushed in 1956 and he voted enthusiastically to send the tanks into Prague in 1968. But on this occasion he told the leader of the Polish Communists, ‘under no circumstances will we send in our troops . .
. You have always said that you can handle this with your own forces.’ He did promise that if the Polish regime took action on its own, the Soviet Union would help to bail the country out of its economic mess. Yet that did not satisfy the General. He tried to call Brezhnev, who refused to speak to him. He decided to act on his own, and that night. If he delayed any longer he would have lost the element of surprise and the opportunity of finding the Solidarity ringleaders in one place at one time. The job of restoring ‘socialist discipline’ would be harder.11

  Solidarity had disastrously miscalculated. Its leadership believed that if the moment ever came the police, army and security forces - many of them union members - would disobey their superiors’ orders. They thought that even if there was a crackdown it would be only partial: the workers could shut the country down at will and the government would eventually cave in. The union was woefully ill-prepared. Even after all the leading figures had been arrested, no efforts were made to protect Solidarity’s vital printing presses - or the considerable amounts of ready money it had raised over the last year, which were confiscated more or less overnight. It had naïvely prepared no network of safe houses or meeting places. Solidarity went underground, with no organisation, no money, and had to start again virtually from scratch.

  Jaruzelski expected that Solidarity would instantly call a general strike, but the leadership were now behind bars. What was left of the movement was demoralised and nonplussed. A few isolated strikes were called but were brutally and speedily suppressed. ZOMO troops went into factories and arrested strike leaders. Nine miners in Wujek, near the industrial town of Katowice, were shot and twenty-one injured. At the Lenin Shipyard, birthplace of Solidarity, resistance lasted for less than a week. The majority of the workers were cowed into submission. In industries thought vital, like coal-mining and food distribution, the workforce was placed under army discipline.