Down with Big Brother (11 page)

“A soldier in a tank is only effective if he is willing to shoot. These soldiers are Poles, and we don’t know if they would be willing to shoot at workers.”
⁹¹

Gierek postponed a decision on what to do. He seemed to be hoping for a miracle or at least more concrete guidance from Moscow on how to deal with a crisis that confounded all Marxist-Leninist theory. The situation had continued to deteriorate, and by Friday, August 29, half the country was out on strike. By official count, some seven hundred factories were being occupied by around seven hundred thousand workers. “Strike alerts” had been declared in many of the country’s remaining factories. The protests were on the verge of becoming a general strike. The labor unrest had spread from the Baltic coast to the textile city of Łódż in central Poland and the coalmining region of Silesia in the south. Practically every sector of Polish industry was affected.

The news that the coal miners had joined the strike was a terrible blow. Gierek regarded Silesia as a personal fiefdom, the one region of Poland that would never betray him. Silesia had been the springboard from which he had launched his political career. Its people were reserved and industrious, not given to dramatic political gestures. The local security forces kept a tight rein on dissidents. As the situation in the rest of the country grew progressively worse, Gierek considered making a last stand in Silesia.

“We will withdraw from Warsaw to the South and then we will reconquer
the country vojvodship by vojvodship,” he told an associate, in the desperate tone of a man who knows that he has already lost.
⁹²

Over the past two weeks the first secretary had changed his mind several times about how to respond to the labor unrest. In his memoirs, written ten years after the event, he claimed he consistently opposed the use of force. His Politburo colleagues and Soviet interlocutor present a different picture of his actions and state of mind during those tension-filled days. According to these accounts, Gierek considered calling for Soviet military assistance at the beginning of the crisis. His Politburo colleagues opposed the idea, and nothing came of it. At other times Gierek insisted that the protests be defused peacefully. Many different emotions were churning inside him: the desire to hang on to his job; bitterness at the disloyalty of those around him; concern for his own reputation.

“There were many different Giereks,” recalled Kania, the man closest to him during this period. “Not only the early Gierek, the man of the early seventies, who had social support, and the later Gierek, who had to leave the political scene. In every period there were several Giereks, and during the most difficult times there were several Giereks in the course of a single day.”
⁹³

Now Gierek sat quietly as the debate swirled around him at the Politburo meeting. His tactic of choice—procrastination—was no longer feasible. There were essentially two alternatives: agree to the demand for free trade unions or suppress the unrest by force. The Interior Ministry task force had devised a plan to storm the Lenin Shipyard and take over the Baltic ports. That morning, the head of the task force, General Bogusław Stachura, had reported that his men were ready “to liquidate the counterrevolutionary nest in Gdańsk.”
⁹⁴
In the Politburo the spokesman for the hard-liners (or men of cement, as they were known in Polish) was a former trade union boss named Władysław Kruczek, an elderly holdover from the Stalinist era. He demanded the immediate declaration of a state of emergency.

“The regime must begin to defend itself. Even the most beautiful speeches are not producing any results.”
⁹⁵

This was the signal for the Politburo members in charge of security to mount a counteroffensive. Although they had secretly begun drawing up plans for a crackdown, they thought it was too early to put them into effect.
⁹⁶
Kania described the proposal for Wałęsa’s arrest as “a daydream.” Jaruzelski, the practical military officer, pointed out that the Polish constitution made no provision for a “state of emergency.” If force was used, the government would have to declare a “state of war”
(stan wojenny)
, but such
a step was “unrealistic” at a time when half the country was on strike. One should not give orders that could not be carried out. A similar point was made by the police minister, Stanislaw Kowalczyk. The security forces lacked the manpower to crack down everywhere at once. His men could seize port facilities in Gdańsk, but there would certainly be bloodshed.

The Politburo was in a quandary. Gierek’s frantic appeals to Moscow for guidance had produced no result. Brezhnev was officially said to be “unavailable.” The Kremlin was not prepared to issue a dispensation to the Poles to embrace the heresy of free trade unions, which it saw as tantamount to the “legalization of the antisocialist opposition.”
⁹⁷
On the other hand, Soviet leaders were frightened by what might happen if the Polish leadership failed to reach some kind of agreement with the workers. So they did what Soviet bureaucrats usually did when they could not make up their minds: They stopped answering their phones. They also put their own forces in the region on “full combat alert” and called up one hundred thousand military reservists.
⁹⁸

The first secretary summed up the mood of the meeting by telling his Politburo colleagues that free trade unions were unacceptable, ideologically and politically. There was, however, no other acceptable short-term solution. “We are being threatened with a general strike. We have to choose the lesser evil and then find a way of extricating ourselves from it.”

GDAŃSK
August 31, 1980

T
HE LAST DAY OF THE STRIKE
at the Lenin Shipyard began, as usual, with a mass. A wooden platform had been erected in the middle of the shipyard to form a makeshift altar, complete with carpet and wooden crucifix. A few yards away, on the wall of an administration building, was a faded hammer and sickle flag. A priest in resplendent white vestments broke a ceremonial wafer in front of ten thousand kneeling workers and television cameras from all over the world. Other priests fanned out through the crowd to hear mumbled confessions.

When the time came to sign the agreement giving workers the right to form independent labor unions, Wałęsa produced a foot-long souvenir pen of the pope’s pilgrimage to Poland the previous year. It was a typical Wałęsa gesture, a tongue-in-cheek way of sending a message to millions of his fellow Poles. He knew that state television planned to broadcast large parts of the signing ceremony, and he wanted to distinguish himself from the party functionaries with whom he had been negotiating. He would never permit himself to become one of them. He also wanted to recognize publicly his debt to the man who had inspired the nation to voice its opposition to totalitarian rule. The ploy was successful. That evening Polish television viewers were permitted their first glimpse of the strikers who had been defying
the Communist government for the past two weeks. When they saw a worker with an oversize mustache and a pen with a portrait of the pope on it sitting next to some bureaucrats in expensive-looking suits, they immediately knew which side they were on.

Unusually for him, Wałęsa read his speech declaring an end to the strike from a prepared text. He paid tribute to Jagielski, the government negotiator, and “a certain rather reasonable group” in the Politburo that had resisted the use of force. “We reached agreement as Poles with Poles.… Did we achieve all we wanted, fulfill all our longings and our dreams? … Not everything. But we all know we gained a lot.… We got all we could in the present situation. The rest will be achieved because we have what matters most: our independent, self-governing trade unions. That is our guarantee for the future.”
⁹⁹
He stressed the words “independent” and “self-governing” as if they were a magical mantra, before concluding, “I declare the strike over.”

It was Jagielski’s turn to address the delegates and the huge crowd gathered outside in the brilliant August sunshine. The deputy prime minister had spent a fretful forty-eight hours, shuttling between Gdańsk and Warsaw for meetings with his Politburo colleagues and the Soviet ambassador. The Kremlin had never responded to the doctrinal query about free trade unions. Polish leaders had taken the Soviet silence as a sign that it was up to them to do whatever was necessary to bring the strikes to an end.

“Esteemed audience,” Jagielski began. “We tried to show the practical limits of what we could undertake and actually implement. I reiterate and confirm what has been said. We talked as Poles should talk to one another, as Pole with Pole.”

As he echoed Wałęsa’s thought, Jagielski was interrupted by a loud burst of applause. By common consent, he had acquitted himself well during the weeklong negotiations. He had represented a corrupt and unpopular regime with dignity.

After the government delegation had departed, members of the strike committee hoisted Wałęsa onto their shoulders and carried him to gate number two one last time. A refrain of
Sto lat, sto lat
(May he live a hundred years) echoed around the shipyard. As Wałęsa scrambled on top of a forklift truck and punched his fists in the air in celebration of victory, the huge crowd broke out into chants of “Le-szek, Le-szek.” It looked like a scene from a movie: the sea of jubilant, exhausted faces; the white and red Polish flag fluttering in the breeze; the red banner reading “Workers of all Factories, Unite!” Indeed, it soon became a movie. The crowd at the shipyard
gate included Andrzej Wajda, who had just come up with an idea for a new film, to be called
Man of Iron
.

As the cheering died down, Wałęsa told the crowd that he had been unable to achieve anything by himself. “We did this together. Everybody together, that is power. That is strength.” He then reminded his listeners why he kept coming back to gate number two. “My actions are connected to December 1970. Perhaps someone will accuse me of being a dictator, but I say we must always meet here on December 16. Always, always. We must always remember those who were killed.”
¹⁰⁰

The chants of “Le-szek, Le-szek” started up again, this time with even greater force. Workers in yellow hard hats flung open the shipyard gates, and the strikers streamed out into the sun-filled streets of Gdańsk. At that moment everything seemed possible. August had been a triumph of memory over forgetting. In fact, the storm clouds were just beginning to gather.

WASHINGTON
December 3, 1980

M
ONITORING THE
P
OLISH DRAMA
from his office in the White House, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser was becoming increasingly pessimistic. Like most Polish-Americans, Zbigniew Brzezinski had been exhilarated by the rise of Solidarity and the resurgence of Polish national feeling, but he also found it difficult to believe that the Kremlin would ignore such a serious challenge to its authority. The Soviet Union had shown repeatedly—in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968—that it was willing to use force to defend its East European empire. Polish history was full of brave, but ultimately doomed, insurrections against Russian rule.

Brzezinski knew very well that the United States could not prevent Soviet tanks from rolling into Poland without being prepared to risk a nuclear war. But it could raise the stakes. If Washington had reason to believe that the Soviet Union was preparing to invade Poland, it had a duty to say so. In August 1968 the United States had picked up clear evidence of massive Soviet troop movements around Czechoslovakia but had failed to act on the information. American passivity, Brzezinski believed, had unwittingly strengthened the hand of the hard-liners in the Soviet Politburo. Had the Johnson administration warned Brezhnev of the devastating impact that an
invasion of Czechoslovakia was likely to have on East-West relations, history might have turned out differently. Brzezinski, the author of the standard university textbook on the Soviet bloc, was determined that Carter would not repeat LBJ’s mistake. His strategy was to make as much noise as possible in order to dissuade the Soviets from military intervention.
¹⁰¹

By the beginning of December American spy satellites had picked up information that seemed to support Brzezinski’s worst fears. Satellite photos showed that civilian traffic along East Germany’s border with Poland had dwindled to a trickle, suggesting that the frontier had been sealed. On Poland’s border with the Soviet Union, soldiers were unfolding hospital tents and stockpiling ammunition. In northern Czechoslovakia long columns of tanks and artillery pieces were moving up to the frontier. The roads were icy and treacherous, making this an unusual time of year to be holding such a huge exercise. Occasionally a tank slithered into a ditch or a telegraph pole. In Poland itself the two Soviet tank divisions stationed near the southwestern town of Legnica were on a state of high alert.

The information gleaned from the spy satellites was confirmed by an exceptionally well-placed Polish agent. Disillusioned with communism and disgusted by the December 1970 massacre of workers in Gdańsk, Colonel Ryszard Kukliński had been cooperating with the CIA for almost a decade. He was an intelligence agent’s dream. A brilliant staff officer completely trusted by the defense minister, General Jaruzelski, he had access to the innermost secrets of the regime. He had already supplied Washington with sensational details about Soviet war plans and the degree to which the Polish army was subject to Kremlin control. In October 1980, just three months after the creation of Solidarity, he had been invited to join a secret working group set up at the Ministry of Defense to lay the groundwork for the introduction of martial law. He was now able to provide the CIA with up-to-the-minute details of the Soviet campaign to intimidate the Polish government.
¹⁰²