Revolution 1989

by Victor Sebestyen

  The West German government played a significant role in the removal of Kádár. During Grósz’s manoeuvres, Horst Teltschik, Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s foreign policy adviser, told the coup plotters that if they succeeded in removing Kádár and began economic reforms ‘then the West German government would support this programme . . . with financial credits . . . We kept our word . . . in the shape of a billion Deutschmark credit.’ Why should the West German government help to topple a long-serving Hungarian leader? ‘What we were doing was to support policies of reform, wherever they began to develop, but obviously . . . we were hoping that this would increase pressure on East Germany.’ It was claimed in return that the new leaders in Budapest passed on Warsaw Pact secrets to Bonn - in effect turning Hungary into a spying organisation for the West. But this has always been denied and though the suspicion may remain, there is no evidence to prove one of the most fascinating conspiracy theories about the fall of communism.13

  The money went straight into paying interest on the other out standing foreign loans, explained Miklós Németh, the forty-year-old economist who took over from Grósz as Prime Minister. Németh had realised earlier that ‘in a nutshell, everything had gone wrong with communism. We were close to an abyss at this point, close to total crisis. The killing of the socialist bloc, of the Communist system, began at the moment the Western banks and financial institutions gave loans to countries like Hungary. At that point we were on a hook.’ A shrewd, intelligent, intense-looking and quietly spoken man, Németh was appointed as a Communist Prime Minister. ‘But I knew that under the one-party system there was no way to make life better, to make reforms work,’ he said. ‘If you wanted to achieve basic reforms you had to make major changes not just in the economy, but politically as well. It meant overthrowing the Communist system.’14

  TWENTY-THREE

  ENDGAME IN POLAND

  Warsaw, Wednesday 31 August 1988

  STRIKERS WERE ON THE PICKET LINES in Poland - again. There was an air of familiarity about the wave of industrial protest that had swept across the country since the early summer. Poland had been here often in the past dozen years. But this time the sense of crisis and chaos were overwhelming and the regime ran out of options to deal with them. The government had tried all the usual methods of rule: bribery, coercion and finally a civil war against its own people. None had worked. The country was in a state of economic, political and moral collapse. The regime, still largely run by military men though martial law had been lifted long ago, embarked on something new: serious talks with Solidarity. When the Interior Minister and former spy chief General Czesław Kiszczak met Lech Wałesa on a searingly hot day in central Warsaw and offered to ‘discuss everything’ with him, it began a direct process of negotiations that led to the collapse of East European communism.

  Martial law offered temporary relief, but no solutions. It enfeebled the Communist Party, which according to a senior official had ‘used up all its strength and imagination in the battle against Solidarity in 1980-82’. The Party had fatally lost confidence in itself. More than half of its three million members had left in the past five years. An internal Party in 1986 showed that nearly a third admitted to attending Catholic mass regularly, while a further 20 per cent went to church but would not admit to it. Membership now was made up of older people and those who had joined principally in order to keep their jobs. Barely any young people were joining. They could sense that it was no longer as advantageous to be a Party member as it was: the nomenklatura system was breaking down.

  In an attempt to break the logjam, Jaruzelski took a huge tactical gamble, and lost. The previous November - after consultations with Gorbachev - he hastily called a referendum designed to win support for a package of perestroika-style reforms. He tried to present himself anew as a liberal, though he represented, as Adam Michnik said, ‘not so much Communism with a human face, as Communism with some of its teeth knocked out’. The referendum asked strange, detailed questions about how much voters thought prices should increase - and whether ‘you approve of the government’s economic reforms, even if it means two or three years of sacrifice?’ Then it asked vague questions: ‘Do you favour the Polish model of profound democratisation? ’ The General’s advisers assured him the plebiscite was a clever way to put the opposition on the spot. If Solidarity urged a Yes vote, the union was co-opted as a partner of the regime. If it came out against, it could be portrayed as being against reform. But the referendum proved to be a spectacular mistake. The turnout was 67 per cent, and of those 66 per cent voted Yes. That was still a defeat for the regime, though. Jaruzelski himself had added a provision in the rules to ensure that 51 per cent of registered voters had to approve the measures - a suicidal amendment. Adding up the abstentions, the General had ‘won’ 44 per cent of the vote. The referendum was meant to show that the government was as democratic as Solidarity. Instead, Jaruzelski appeared like a loser.

  A bad loser, too. Another of Poland’s periodic financial crises hit the country soon after the referendum debacle, prompted as usual by foreign debt. Poland was close to defaulting on loans, again a familiar position for the country. But this was worse than before. Now inflation was running at more than 50 per cent and rising fast. Living standards were deteriorating badly. There were severe shortages of basic necessities: milk, most medicines, cotton wool, sanitary pads, most cuts of meat, bread, fresh vegetables, mineral water. This was a time, said Michnik, ‘that the fondest dream was to find a roll of lavatory paper’.1

  It was worst for the women, as they had to do most of the queuing. Alina Piekowska was a nurse at the Lenin Shipyard, a Solidarity activist from the first days of the 1980 strikes and married to a trade union organiser who had been one of the leaders of the Solidarity underground in the martial law years. ‘It was a struggle to get basic things like washing powder,’ she said;

  That was almost impossible . . . I had to wash my hair with egg yolks because there was no shampoo. Getting hold of things required a lot of time and patience . . . A working woman just didn’t have enough time (in the day). If you wanted to live at a certain level, with work and standing in queues, you had practically no time for anything else. One of the worst things was that family ties, contact with my child, was getting so small . . . One could not satisfy the needs of growing teenagers. There was not enough protein and things that were essential for a developing child . . . After I paid for the kindergarten and rent there was hardly anything left. If we didn’t have information about life elsewhere, that would have been different. But we were conscious of the way [other] people lived.2

  In April 1988 Jaruzelski did what all his Communist predecessors in Poland had done. He raised prices - by 40 per cent on most foods. Within weeks much of the country was at a standstill. The first strike, on 1 May, started in the bus and tram depot in the north-west city of Bydgoszcz, where workers demanded a 60 per cent pay rise. They spread rapidly. At the Lenin Steelworks in Nowa Huta, the giant sprawl- ing plant near Kraków, 15,000 men downed tools and demanded a 50 per cent wage increase. Security forces stormed the factory and detained around a dozen workers, as well as the Solidarity adviser Jacek Kuro. Strikes closed sixteen coal mines and the shipyard in Szczecin. Stoppages were being planned throughout the country’s transport network and at the Gdak plants.

  The unrest revived Solidarity, which came through a period in the doldrums. Membership was less than half the nine million or so that it had been at the height of the union’s first flowering in 1980-81. Martial law and the following years of stagnation dashed people’s hopes and led to widespread apathy. Solidarity’s influence waned. The gnome-like features of Jerzy Urban, the face of Polish communism as press spokesman for Jaruzelski, was often to be heard calling Solidarity ‘a non-existent organisation’ and Lech Wałesa ‘the former head of a former trade union’ or ‘a private citizen’. Archbishop Glemp had told Vice President Bush, who visited Warsaw on a whistle-stop tour towards the end of 1987, that ‘Solidarity is a closed chapter
in Polish history’.3

  The regime had tried hard to discredit Wałesa. The secret police resorted to crude forgery at least twice. It released a film, Money, purporting to show him at a birthday meal with his brother Stanisław at which they are heard talking about how much cash the Solidarity leader was receiving personally from the West. It was a bungled exercise, as were so many of the SB’s operations. The dialogue had been made by splicing together some of Wałesa’s statements and meshing them with misleading extracts from a stolen tape they had of him meeting other Solidarity figures. The voice was not Wałesa’s, but that of an actor imitating him. It was a libellous fabrication and so obviously a fake that it was entirely counter-productive. Jaruzelski told the Soviet Ambassador, Aristov, that the SB was assembling new material, including some pornographic pictures of Wałesa in a com promising position, that the General said would expose the Solidarity leader as a ‘scheming, grubby individual with gigantic ambitions’. That never saw the light of day, as it did not exist.4

  Rumours began to circulate that Wałesa was an SB informer who had betrayed around a dozen Solidarity activists to the authorities during the martial law years. His opponents inside the union, with whom he had fallen out over the years, were spreading these stories with alacrity. It is true that in the early 1970s Wałesa had been ‘in contact’ with the secret police, as the SB files state. The documents name him BOLEK and apparently implicate him in links with the intelligence services. He signed a few ‘interrogation protocols’, but these appear to have been routine statements he made when he had been picked up for questioning. They show little else. This was the period before he was Solidarity leader, when he was a relatively unimportant figure. The SB was notorious for exaggerating its competence, often boasting it had recruited informers when all it had done was to ask a suspect a few questions. Like all espionage agencies, it had a vested interest in claiming successes it may not have earned. KG B and Polish security files do not prove anything against Wałesa. One Soviet document claims that when he was detained under martial law the SB had tried to intimidate him by ‘reminding him that they had paid him money and recorded information from him’. This may be the only reference to money passing hands in thousands of pages on him in Polish and Russian secret police files. It is more than likely to be part of the various plans to smear him. Wałesa always denied that he ever betrayed anyone to the SB and there is no evidence that he ever did - least of all while he was detained, when his brave resistance to the military regime infuriated the junta.5

  The strikes continued throughout the summer and Wałesa put himself at the head of them. He was convinced now that this would be the final showdown with the Communists, but winning would be a laborious process. ‘I knew that the Communist system was finished,’ he said. ‘The problem was what would be the best way to get rid of it.’ He repeatedly pleaded for talks with the regime to form ‘an anti-crisis front’. General Jaruzelski always thought of himself as a realist. It was a conversation he had with Gorbachev that finally convinced him that it was time to face the fact that the government needed Solidarity. Some Communist reformers had been saying so for some time. His Foreign Minister, Marian Orzechowski, said: ‘Martial law could work only once . . . The army and the police cannot be mobilised against society again.’ The new Prime Minister, Mieczysław Rakowski, said that ‘in practice we have recognised the opposition as a lasting element in the country’s political map’, and it was time formally to accept the realities. Still, the General delayed.

  On 12 July Gorbachev visited Warsaw and was given a rapturous reception by, mainly, Solidarity supporters. Jaruzelski told the Soviet leader that he was considering legalising Solidarity and negotiating with Wałesa. Gorbachev asked what he was waiting for and urged him on. Jaruzelski knew that the Soviets would do nothing to save him if his political skin was in danger and he had to look out for himself. The strikes had brought the country to a virtual halt. Poland was almost ungovernable. He had managed to obtain a loan of half a billion dollars from the Soviets to stave off immediate bankruptcy, but he realised that no money would be forthcoming from the West unless he could find a way to cut a deal with Solidarity.6

  On 26 August Jaruzelski contacted Wałesa and proposed a ‘Round Table discussion’ to end the impasse facing Poland, but he left it up to his Interior Minister to work out the details. Kiszczak was a curious figure, a dapper sixty-three-year-old career intelligence officer who had much good humour and charm for a man of his profession. He established a curious relationship, almost a friendship, with the opposition even though he was their sworn enemy, the man who had presented the harsh face of military rule. He was one of the chief sponsors of the Round Table talks and did much to ensure their success, while simultaneously spying on the opposition. When he met Wałesa, he said Solidarity could be legalised, and that a wide range of democratic reforms could be introduced, if the union leader would get the striking workers to return to their jobs. Wałesa knew how high the stakes were. He calculated that he had to accept the offer, though breaking a strike yet again could risk undermining his authority within Solidarity. Many of his closest advisers warned him that he was making the biggest mistake of his life by entering into the talks. Bronisław Geremek, one of the canniest members of Solidarity’s leadership, understood the regime’s tactic. ‘What they meant to do was to corrupt Solidarity, divide us, compromise us,’ he said. Wałesa persuaded him and the other doubters that there was no alternative. He understood the risks, he said, ‘but better a round table than a square cell’. There was no way of winning without talking, he added. A crucial factor was that the Pope supported the talks, as did the Church in Poland, which was one of the chief sponsors of the Round Table.7

  But even the talks about talks were heavy going. Wałesa told Kisz czak that there had to be a timetable for the legalisation of Solidarity. The police chief said that was impossible. At the end there might or might not be a legal union, depending on how the negotiations went. Wałesa accepted the deal. For the next few days he toured the country, using all his skill and energy to persuade the workers that negotiating with the regime was the only way to secure what they wanted. He assured the workers that he could be trusted not to sell them out. Reluctantly, most of the membership went along with him.

  Jaruzelski had problems of his own. His advisers - particularly Rakowski - outlined a cynical strategy that they assured the General would preserve real power for the Party, while appearing to grant major concessions to Solidarity. The opposition would be given a few ministerial posts in a new ‘unity’ government. Solidarity would share responsibility for the crisis - and the blame if things went wrong. The West would be impressed by Poland’s move towards liberalism and offer new loans. Jaruzelski was convinced, and declared that ‘it was worth the risk’. Many in the high ranks of the Party were deeply sceptical. The ‘cement group’ of diehards were certain that to share power would ultimately be to lose it and they were scared of giving up their perks and privileges. ‘Many of us were afraid that [if we accept Solidarity] now . . . we would not be able to put the genie back in the bottle,’ said Stanisław Ciosek, a former Polish Ambassador to Moscow. ‘The Party was much better able to understand and trust the Catholic Church, another strong and centralised structure, than an unbridled Solidarity.’8

  Some were scared of losing their lives if the ‘counter-revolutionaries and reactionaries’ took over the country. They demanded, and got, more time to consider such a momentous decision that one of them said ‘will be the beginning of the end for us’. The General had a battle on his hands persuading his comrades to accept his leadership.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  PRESIDENT BUSH TAKES CHARGE

  Washington DC, Tuesday 8 November 1988

  THE OVERWHELMING ELECTION VICTORY of George H.W. Bush in the US presidential election was hardly a surprise. He had been a well-known figure even before he became Ronald Reagan’s Vice President eight years earlier. He rode on the coat-tails of one of the most popular
Presidents in American history and he had faced a lacklustre Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, who mounted a poor campaign. Despite the Iran-Contra scandal that engulfed Reagan during his last term, he remained a hugely admired, a loved, figure at home. He had succeeded in his main aim of making America feel good about itself. And now he could claim, reasonably, that he had played a leading role in reducing Cold War tensions. Bush was widely respected, if not much liked. He was a fit-looking sixty-four at his election, tall with a loping stride and a patrician air. While Reagan was warm and approachable, Bush could appear cold and distant. He had been training himself for the top job in American politics for decades. He was the son of a Senator, a Washington insider, though he had moved to Texas in his twenties to make his fortune in the oil business. Earlier, he had been a decorated fighter pilot in World War Two. Bush had served administrations of both colours, as Ambassador to China, Director of the CIA, Ambassador to the UN and finally as Vice President. He was vastly experienced, particularly in foreign affairs.