In this second night that fell over Polonia Sacra, Poles of Wojtyla’s generation saw a clear signal from God that neither the messianic role imagined for their country by its past and dead dreamers, nor its republican status attempted between the two world wars, was to be Poland’s destiny. All that was null and void. It did not fit with God’s overall plan for Europe. Nor did it fit with God’s particular providence for this people. Their true greatness, it seemed, tied always to the Three Pacts of Polishness, was to be linked to the larger Europe that had always extended, in their geopolitical reckoning, from the Atlantic to the Urals.
What was needed at this fresh moment of oppression, however, was a new attitude. A fresh initiative. A plan for coping with the here and now of the in-house Soviet Stalinists. In the vulgar but vivid image used by Jozef Swiatlo after he defected from Soviet Marxism to the West in 1953, Poland at this moment of its latest betrayal was like a virgin whose bedroom was filled with rapists. “Unless she has a plan,” said Swiatlo, “probably the sun will rise on the morrow, but surely she will no longer be a virgin on that morrow.”
Poland’s plan was to be devised by Stefan Wyszynski. And as that plan unfolded, it was to be implemented in all of its wiliness and tenacity by his whole hierarchy.
Under Archbishop Adam Sapieha, Karol Wojtyla had learned to survive in the face of an enemy who dealt almost exclusively in gore and death. Hitler had decided to liquidate the Poles because he knew he could not change what they were as a people. Hitler’s problem was that he was dedicated to evil. But he was not stupid.
During his years under Archbishop Stefan Wyszynski, the younger man would now begin to learn the hard, down-to-earth, nuts-and-bolts lessons of how to live and cope day by day with forces irremovable by ethnic unity and intent upon snuffing out all allegiance to Polish romanitas and all religious faith itself.
At the outset, in 1948, Wojtyla was a parish priest in Krakow, still “wet behind the ears” and with much to learn. Quickly enough, however, he would come to be one of Wyszynski’s most valued associates, once he was nominated Bishop. It took very little time for the two men to find the collaboration between them easy and fruitful. Wyszynski found that already, as a young Churchman, Wojtyla was thinking along universal lines—like himself—and that there was no hint of parochialism in Wojtyla. Added to this was Wojtyla’s sense of timing and his wide knowledge of men and human affairs. The two men thought alike. In time, it would be Wojtyla who would be at the Archbishop’s side through the thick of Stalinism and the thin of the world’s pointed neglect of Poland.
For the fate of Poland, for the formation of Karol Wojtyla, and for what can only be called the geopolitics of sheer survival, there could not have been a more apt Interrex as Poland’s leader than Wyszynski; nor a more important time for Providence to bring him onto the world stage.
A professional and widely traveled sociologist with over a hundred publications to his name by the early thirties, Wyszynski had never made a secret of the fact that he regarded the National Socialism of Hitler’s neighboring Germany as “a return to the barbarism of the jungle.” One result was that he spent all the years of World War II on the move, with a price on his head. The fact that he was never caught may have been the first of the thousand and one reasons that, by and by, people began to call him the “Fox of Europe.”
Soon after war’s end, in 1946, Wyszynski was made Bishop of Lublin. After the death of Cardinal Hlond, two years later, and despite the fact that he was the most junior of Poland’s bishops, he was named Archbishop of Gniezno and Warsaw. At the age of forty-eight, he was Primate and Interrex of Poland. The task of keeping Poland and Polishness alive was his.
What Wyszynski wanted was a third road between revolutionary Marxism and liberal—or “rigid,” as some people thought—capitalism. As everyone knew by then, however, that was not what Stalin had in mind for Poland.
Even before the end of World War II, in fact, Stalin had decided that this time he would ensure the Soviet Union’s possession of Poland. He would tolerate no repetition of Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky’s ignominious defeat of August 15, 1920. There would be no new “Miracle of the Vistula,” because this time Stalin would see to it that no Polish legions remained on Polish soil to resist the invading Soviet forces, led now by Marshal Ivan Koniev.
Stalin’s decimation of the Polish officer corps began with a string of massacres. The first batch to be slaughtered numbered 4,143; all were buried hastily and surreptitiously in Katyn Forest, near Smolensk, in Russia. Other massacres of Polish officers followed. These atrocities were followed by the formation of a Polish army as part of the Soviet armed forces, and by the deportation of some hundreds of thousands of Poles into the Gulag.
On the political front, meanwhile, Stalin had no intention of allowing the Polish government, still in exile in London, to take over again in wartime Poland. For that government was led by the great Peasants Party of Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, a staunch anti-Communist who was anathema to the Soviets.
As early as July of 1944, therefore, the Soviet dictator had created a postwar Polish government-in-waiting, which he located in an obscure provincial center on the Polish-Soviet border. Selected to lead this Third Polish Republic of Soviet design was Boleslaw Bierut. Born a Pole, Bierut was Stalin’s head Soviet security agent, former chief of the Polish Desk at the NKVD for seven years. By December of 1944, within five months of its formation, Bierut’s government had been installed in Warsaw by the armor of Stalin’s Soviet divisions advancing steadily against the Nazis.
Just about two months later, in February 1945, the Yalta Conference was held. Stalin came away with the agreement of American President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Churchill to his imprisonment of Poland.
Another two months and, in a charade that again signaled the international acceptance of such a fate for Poland, Wincenty Rzymowski signed the Charter of the United Nations as the new “Foreign Minister” of the new “Democratic Republic of Poland.” Three months later, in July, the Potsdam agreements confirmed Stalin’s possession of virtually all of Central Europe. The Iron Curtain was in place.
Though one of over half a dozen free nations locked up in the dungeon of Soviet totalitarian control, Poland was a special sort of captive and was to be treated differently from the others. The East Germans, the Bulgarians, the Hungarians, were all to be treated as serf nations supplementing the USSR. Finland was already an autonomous state and nation within the “Soviet orbit.”
Poland was to be like none of those. The Stalinist aim, like the aim of the Three Powers in 1815 and the aim of Germany in 1939, was to liquidate all social structures that were spiritually, culturally and nationally Polish. Imprisonment was a prelude to planned death. Poland was to be a non-nation.
The old senate was abolished and replaced with a new Sejm, put together in Soviet-rigged elections. To no one’s astonishment, Boleslaw Bierut became the first President of the Third Polish Republic, with Marxist Jozef Cyrankiewicz as his Prime Minister and Russia’s Marshal K. Rokossovsky as his Defense Minister.
Throughout all of Poland, and under Boleslaw Bierut’s direct and personal control, politicians and “social technicians” imported from the Soviet Union instituted a thorough program of Stalinist totalitarianism. Political commissars carefully weeded the Polish Army corps and police of all dissidents. Soviet NKVD trainers developed a new secret police and militia. A vast registration was undertaken of every Pole, and of every Polish activity. Over every phase of Polish life there loomed the shadow of the trained missionaries of Sovietization, the political commissars.
Between 1946 and 1949, Poland was Sovietized in a three-year “reconstruction” plan; another five-year plan would be in store after that. Culture in all its organized forms—the media, scholarship, educational institutions on the primary, secondary and university levels—was subjected to the most rigid political and ideological control according to strict Leninist orthodoxy. Private property and private trading in goods
and services were eliminated. Agriculture was collectivized, and a new form of serfdom, state farms, was established. Everything was to be governed by the economic and political dictates of Stalin’s Soviet Union. The aim was to eliminate the independent, individualist Western and Latinate mind of Poland, and to replace it with the Eurasian system of thought and morals that Leninism had so successfully imposed on Russia.
Cardinal Primate August Hlond never abandoned his toughness and independence of spirit. He had not been a young man when he left Poland in 1939, however, and when he returned after World War II, he no longer commanded the sheer physical vigor to meet the incredible new onslaught of Stalinism with the wit and energy it required.
By the time Stefan Wyszynski was elevated in 1948 to the impossible position of Archbishop Primate and Interrex of Poland, Stalinist “reconstruction” had already gone very far. Nothing and no one moved outside the steel net of totalitarian control thrown by President Bierut over the whole country and the daily lives of its millions.
In those circumstances, only the most sanguine could have foreseen even a fraction of the success Wyszynski achieved. Poland was not a nation where waves of national feeling could be expressed in open confrontation, as they could in India or America. It was not a place, therefore, where great men could walk in the spotlight of world opinion to shape such passions and exhort the powers in charge toward decolonization or civil rights. Unlike a Martin Luther King, Jr., or a Mahatma Gandhi, a Stefan Wyszynski was not inevitable in the Poland of 1948. Given the forces against him within Poland and beyond its borders to east and west, neither Wyszynski nor the power he developed was even probable, much less inevitable.
Nonetheless, the reach of the power he finally came to command was geopolitical to such a compelling degree that, within his lifetime, it would mold all of the vital realities of the millennium endgame that would come to a head in the 1990s; the endgame in which Wyszynski’s protégé of thirty years, Pope John Paul II, would become so deeply and perilously engaged. Wojtyla would learn the ropes from a master tactician, and understand how one can start from the extreme position of underdog but end up leading the pack.
The nub of Wyszynski’s attitude toward Stalinism and the Stalinization program in Poland was summed up in one blistering cannon shot he included in an early sermon. “It is almost madness,” he charged, “to demand that a whole nation renounce Christianity only because a small group of people believe the reconstruction of society is impossible without a materialist ideology.”
For anyone else, that might have been an interesting thought. For the Soviet-controlled Communist government of Poland, however, and for Marxist President Boleslaw Bierut, it was one more confirmation that the total victory of Leninist Marxism would not be assured in Poland until Polish Catholicism had been extirpated lock, stock and barrel. There were no two ways about how to resolve the issues at stake. No useful compromises were contemplated. No half-victories were possible. From their point of view, each party was in it for all or nothing.
Given their experience to date with Churchmen in other countries, it is doubtful that the Soviet government in Moscow or in Warsaw contemplated any serious problems with Poland’s hierarchy. Already Cardinal Mindszenty in Hungary and his counterparts in Romania, Czechoslovakia and Lithuania were behaving much as the Russian Orthodox clergy had in the 1920s. That is, they had battened down the hatches; they put up a “moral resistance” from behind their moats of separation, and they hurled missiles as unimportant to Stalin and his Eastern bloc surrogates as Church anathemas and dogmatic definitions. If experience was any guide, then, the Church in Poland would end up somewhere between martyrdom and corruption—and totally ineffective in its supposed battle with Stalinism.
The irony was that the one thing about Stefan Wyszynski that neither the Soviets nor their puppets in Warsaw understood was the element that would finally defeat them. The irony was that in Archbishop Wyszynski, the Polish Communist government had no enemy. For he regarded Boleslaw Bierut and his regime as misguided and delinquent children of the motherland of Poland; as men who, in the words of the Christ he served, did not know what they were doing.
That wasn’t the whole of it, of course. For Wyszynski would do his level best to provide his errant countrymen as the Poles they were with some of the lessons that had escaped them until now.
One lesson he intended to teach the government in Warsaw was that, in the Primate of Poland, they were not up against the “clerical” mind they despised so much and held in such contempt. Instead, they were up against the power of the Eternal God who had repeatedly sacralized their common homeland.
A second lesson that would no doubt follow from the first was that the whole face-off that was to come between the Communist regime and the Church was to be an unequal fight. And while the government members could not know it, in Wyszynski’s eyes they would be the inferior contestants. For they had been convinced that the only two forces in the world that mattered were the brute reality of Stalin’s USSR and the decadent capitalism of the West. Further, they had been convinced that the only importance of the Church—whether in Poland or elsewhere—was as the chief bastion of capitalism. Scuttle the Church, therefore—especially in Poland—and they would be in the vanguard of the proletarian revolution that had been appointed by blind forces of history to transform the world.
Poles they might be; but in such persuasions, Wyszynski knew they were victims and dupes of a simplistic, abstract and primitive myth. Their minds had been removed from reality, impoverished in knowledge and blindsided by lies. For all that, however, he made no mistake about the ardor of their convictions.
In the circumstances, perhaps the third lesson the Primate had in store for them was in fact the first and most practical one the government members would have to deal with. For it concerned the fact that Wyszynski was not the weak-bodied sort of cleric the Soviets had found elsewhere. He would not scurry for cover in his scarlet robes. He would stand in. the open, flush them out on their own ground; and, in ways that confused everyone, he would, in the words of Cardinal Hlond, “go into action with the Church” and conduct “a mighty Catholic offensive on all fronts.”
Almost immediately upon his consecration as Archbishop Primate in 1948, Wyszynski took the initiative in his clash with Stalinism, which would continue for thirty-three years. Faced with a thoroughly installed Stalinist system, Wyszynski took the government entirely off guard with an outrageous proposal. In a meeting with the minister of public administration, Wladyslaw Wolski, the Archbishop suggested, of all things, that there be an agreement between the Church and the government.
“Let us formulate an understanding,” he suggested. “The government and the Church will establish a mixed commission of government officials and three Catholic bishops.” The object, he explained, would be to establish and maintain an “understanding” between the Episcopate and the government.
The idea was literally stunning. And not only to the Communists. Nobody had ever thought of or proposed such a thing. To his own surprised bishops, Wyszynski admitted that it was a “hazardous” undertaking but the only path open to them. To gauge the matter by his personal negotiations with the government, however, one would never have thought for a moment that hazard was involved for anyone.
His immediate problem, in fact, was that his adversaries were likely to see his call for an understanding as a call for compromise. Considering that they had total political, civil and military control of Poland—including Soviet divisions stationed on Polish soil, the secret police organized by the NKVD, and the sinister Ministry of the Interior, with its interminable files on every Pole and its blatant surveillance of their daily lives—the men he had to deal with would not be prone to compromise.
Wyszynski came at the problem from a point of view that was as outrageous as his proposal itself. His argument was that his program was the only realistic one the government could follow.
To drive his pugnacious argument home, the Archbisho
p took full advantage of the fact that, Communists or no, he was dealing with men who were Poles. In effect, he told them that they were as hidebound as he was in their common racja stanu—in that particular Polish nationalism that is interwoven with the interest and the good of the state.
Perhaps it was the smallest possible premise of concrete Polish reality; but for such professionally faithless men as these, it was also the most basic thing they had in common with Wyszynski. For racja stanu, like Polonia Sacra, was an ancient phrase embodying an ancient principle. Poles had always used it to express their nation’s right to exist; to express the right of Poland to have neither its territorial integrity nor its national identity threatened by anyone outside its borders, or inside them either.
Intentionally, Wyszynski was invoking the common heritage of all Poles, who had, as a people, been the object of annihilation since the 1700s. But he was not about to rely on a purely emotional appeal. Shifting his argument to include a good chunk of new ground, in successive meetings he challenged Bierut’s regime to explain how the government could hope to maintain even national order, much less their precious racja stanu, unless they had the cooperation of the Archbishop’s hierarchy. Poland was, after all, 98 percent Catholic. Clearly, therefore, the Church was the most permeating force among Poles; and the hierarchy was arguably the most strategic element the government had to deal with in Poland.
The argument could only have come from Wyszynski. Never mind all those Soviet divisions on Polish soil and all the security forces and all the surveillance. Wyszynski knew his Poles. His velvet-glove appeal to motherland and people had a powerful pull, even for Polish Marxists. And his iron-fist threat of civil disorder had its effect, too.
Encouraged by the fact that the government did not reject his proposal outright, and never a man to stand on one foot when he could stand on two, Wyszynski, before his adversaries had time to digest his opening arguments fully, recommended to the government’s attention a series of political and quasi-geopolitical considerations.
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