Down with Big Brother (46 page)

The Polish Communists had already tried mass repression, and it had failed to resolve any of Poland’s underlying problems. Store shelves were no fuller than in December 1981, when Jaruzelski imposed martial law. Workers had not become more productive. Factories still churned out substandard
goods that were practically impossible to sell on world markets; even the Soviets had complained about the quality. The foreign debt crisis was graver than ever. The environment had suffered further devastation, and standards of public health had continued to decline. The psychological shock of martial law was rapidly wearing off. After a period of stunned resignation, strikes and other forms of protest were again becoming commonplace. The government was preparing a package of sweeping austerity measures, including large-scale layoffs and big price increases. Sooner or later another social explosion seemed inevitable.

In theory Jaruzelski still had the possibility of resorting to martial law once again, an option favored by Communist Party hard-liners. This time around, however, martial law would probably have to be accompanied by mass bloodshed. Repression on such a scale went against his own character and the trend of events in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev. Using force against the population would also kill off any prospect of radical economic reform.

It was here that the comparison with China broke down. In China the transition to free markets was already well under way when Deng Xiaoping sent tanks to crush the student protests. The chaos and confusion of the Cultural Revolution, coming on top of the disastrous Great Leap Forward, had produced a backlash within the Communist Party in favor of economic pragmatism. In Poland, by contrast, the reformers lacked a reliable political base, either inside or outside the ruling party. If Jaruzelski chose the path of violence, he would be forced to rely on the most reactionary wing of the Communist Party, which saw free enterprise as a mortal threat. Without popular support, there could be no reform and no chance of escaping the seemingly endless cycle of repression and revolt.

The alternative to repression was dialogue with the opposition. Jaruzelski decided to give Solidarity the chance of participating in discussions about Poland’s future in return for helping keep the peace. In order to carry out this U-turn, he had to quell a revolt from his own ranks. At a session of the policy-making Central Committee he and his key supporters silenced the critics by threatening to resign en masse.

The precise shape of the proposed Round Table and the placement of the guests became the subject of protracted negotiations. The finest carpenters in the land were commissioned to construct a huge doughnut-shaped table, with accommodation for up to sixty people. This magnificent piece of furniture was nearly twenty-eight feet in diameter, providing a safety margin of three feet over and above the world’s longest-recorded spitting distance.
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It
was periodically assembled, disassembled, uncovered, covered, brought to Warsaw and returned to the manufacturer as both sides maneuvered for political advantage. Subtables and sub-subtables were added. Finally, on February 6, 1989, jailers and jailed sat down together around the now-mythical table, their view of one another partially obscured by floral decoration. Two months later they announced that they had reached agreement on the relegalization of Solidarity and the first semifree elections in the history of People’s Poland.

In keeping with Jaruzelski’s determination to introduce democracy in carefully regulated doses, everything was done to ensure that the Communists won these trial elections. Senior members of the Jaruzelski government were permitted to run unopposed on a “National List.” An official candidate would be considered “elected” as long as a majority of voters did not go to the trouble of putting a cross through his name. Of the seats in the Sejm, the lower chamber of the parliament, 65 percent would be reserved for the Communists and their allies. Solidarity, meanwhile, would be restricted to contesting the remaining 35 percent of “open” seats in the lower chamber and all one hundred seats in the less powerful Senate.

On election day polling places were decorated in bright red and white bunting, the Polish national colors. The Communist candidates concealed their political loyalties as best they could, hiding behind the anonymity of the National List. But there was no doubt about the identity of the Solidarity representatives. Their photographs had all been taken individually with Wałęsa at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk and turned into campaign posters, which were plastered up all over Poland. Shortly before the election Solidarity had designed a final campaign poster that summarized what was at stake after forty-four years of uninterrupted Communist rule. It was a photo of the actor Gary Cooper in full cowboy regalia. “High Noon, June 4,” the slogan declared.

Everybody expected the Solidarity candidates to do well, but the results were stunning. In the first round of the election Solidarity won 160 out of the 161 seats in the Sejm that it was allowed to contest, and 92 seats in the Senate. Only 2 members of the National List managed to secure the 50 percent of the votes needed for election. After four decades of enforced unanimity and sham elections, the temptation to “throw the bums out” was simply too great for ordinary voters to resist. In fact they took what one voter described as an “almost sensual pleasure” in putting crosses through the names of well-known Communists—from the prime minister down. “I crossed out all of them,” said a voter in Warsaw, “because every one of them
is compromised. They promised us things so many times in the past, and every time they failed.”
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This was not the result Solidarity had wanted. As he voted in Gdańsk, Wałęsa had told reporters that “too big a percentage of our people getting through would be disturbing, and might force a fight on us.” He himself voted for all the names on the National List, with the exception of Interior Minister Czesław Kiszczak, his onetime jailer. Solidarity leaders knew that Jaruzelski still had the support of the army and the police. After winning their lopsided victory, they had to guard against seeming too triumphant. “We knew we had won, but we couldn’t express our happiness too openly because we also knew that they had all the guns,” recalled Bronisław Geremek, the leader of the Solidarity parliamentary group.
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When party leaders got together to discuss the results of the election, their mood was bleak and defeatist. “The election results are terrible,” conceded Jaruzelski. Like a commander struggling to keep his troops together in retreat, the general parceled out commands and assignments. He ordered a new round of discussions, with everybody from the Roman Catholic Church to the “allies,” apparatchik-speak for the Kremlin. Outwardly he seemed calm and in control, but aides who knew him well could see that he was going through another bout of intense mental anguish.
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He wanted so much to go down in Polish history as the father of democracy, but he had been unable to shake off his popular image as the general in dark glasses who had imposed martial law. His reward for choosing the path of dialogue and reconciliation, rather than the path of violence and oppression, was massive rejection by the voters.

Like Gorbachev before him, Jaruzelski made the mistake of thinking he could control the pace and scope of change. He thought he could persuade Solidarity to share responsibility for painful economic reforms without giving the movement real power. He believed that the transition to democracy would be gradual. But events had assumed a momentum of their own. By agreeing to talks with Wałęsa, he had triggered a political process that was to lead inexorably to his own downfall.

At the official inquest into the party’s electoral defeat on June 5, different explanations were suggested for the debacle. Some accused Solidarity of being too aggressive; some blamed the influence of the Catholic Church; some criticized the party for elementary political mistakes. But it was the minister for economic reform, Władysław Baka, one of the defeated candidates on the National List, who put the matter most cogently. “The people simply didn’t want us anymore,” he told his comrades.
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That evening the official Communist Party spokesman went on television to concede the obvious: “The elections had the character of a referendum, and Solidarity won a clear majority.” The following day, June 6, the outgoing Communist prime minister, Mieczysław Rakowski, invited his inner circle to breakfast. Everybody was tired, and there was a
fin de régime
atmosphere about the meeting. The scale of the disaster was summed up by the acerbic government spokesman Jerzy Urban, who just a few months ago had been describing Wałęsa as a “private citizen” and Solidarity as a “nonexistent organization.”

“This is not just a lost election, gentlemen. It’s the end of an age.”
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FOROS
August 22, 1989

T
HE
C
RIMEA HAD BEEN
a favorite vacation spot for Russian rulers ever since Catherine the Great captured it from the Turks in the late eighteenth century. A subtropical paradise of palm trees and vineyards, the mountainous peninsula jutting into the Black Sea was considered the jewel in the imperial crown. Tsars and general secretaries came here every year to take restorative cures, breathe the balmy sea air, and escape the cares of state. When power changed hands, a new palace invariably appeared along the winding coastal road, each more magnificent than the last.

Soon after he became Soviet leader, Gorbachev decided that he too deserved a grandiose summer residence. The site he chose was on the southernmost tip of the Crimea, midway between the historic towns of Sevastopol and Yalta, in a particularly dramatic and isolated spot. A two-thousand-foot-high ridge rose behind the rocky beach, creating a sundrenched semicircular bowl, sandwiched between the mountains and the sea.

Construction of the residence began in 1987 and was accorded top priority. Thousands of soldiers labored around the clock to complete the private resort, which included tennis courts, outdoor and indoor swimming pools, a helicopter landing pad, a cinema, and secret communications facilities.
Hundreds of tons of topsoil were trucked in to create a shady landscape, along with an instant orchard of peach trees. A hotel was built for bodyguards and service staff. The Gorbachev family residence itself was a tasteless architectural mishmash, consisting of two concrete boxes, with sloping red-tiled roofs, joined by a covered bridge. A sixty-foot glass escalator provided access to the beach. From the outside the compound looked like a cross between a luxury hotel and an inhospitable prison camp, surrounded by watchtowers and several high metal fences.

From the start there was an air of ill omen about Foros. The
gensek
’s bodyguards took an immediate dislike to the place, which they nicknamed the “frying pan” because it was so hot. In the fall landslides would dislodge rocks from the surrounding mountains, cutting off the approach roads. Work on the residence was as slipshod as it was rushed. Shortly after the first family moved in, in the summer of 1988, an oak beam fell on the head of Gorbachev’s grown-up daughter, Irina. She had to spend a week in the surgery ward of the local hospital, and there was some concern she would suffer permanent brain damage. After that incident the bodyguards began jumping up and down on the beds and chairs, to test the solidity of the furniture.
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By the time of Gorbachev’s second vacation in Foros in August 1989, it was not just the villa that was crumbling about him. The entire Soviet empire, assembled so arduously by his predecessors, was in the process of falling apart. The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan had been a harbinger of things to come.

T
HE ROT HAD GONE
furthest in Poland, traditionally the most troublesome of the East European satellites, with the Communist Party’s devastating electoral defeat. To make matters worse, the party had been deserted by long-subservient political allies and could no longer command a parliamentary majority. A leading Communist reformer, General Kiszczak, had tried, and failed, to form a government. In order to break the impasse, Solidarity had proposed a compromise: “Your President, Our Prime Minister.”
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Jaruzelski would be permitted to stay on as a largely ceremonial head of state but would be obliged to accept a Solidarity-led government.

Communist power was unraveling elsewhere in Eastern Europe as well. In Hungary a liberal Communist regime was physically dismantling the Iron Curtain erected by Stalin at the end of World War II to seal his empire from the West. On May 2 Hungarian soldiers had begun tearing down the
barbed-wire fences and watchtowers along the border with Austria. When President Bush visited Budapest in July, his Hungarian hosts presented him with a symbolic piece of the Iron Curtain in a glass display case. News that gaping holes had appeared in the once-impenetrable border spread quickly. Within weeks thousands of East Germans, chafing against draconian travel restrictions in their own country, were attempting to use Hungary as a transit point to the West.

To a certain extent, Gorbachev was prepared for these developments. During his meetings with East European leaders he had repeatedly warned of the danger of “lagging behind” events. He and his advisers understood that the era of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe was coming to an end, even if they did not expect the end to come so suddenly. In a speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, in July, he had called for the Cold War to be “consigned to oblivion” and had acknowledged explicitly, for the first time, that socialist revolutions were reversible: “The social and political orders of certain countries changed in the past, and may change again in the future. However, this is exclusively a matter for the peoples themselves to decide; it is their choice. Any interference in internal affairs, or any attempts to limit the sovereignty of states—including friends and allies, or anyone else—are impermissible.”
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In effect Gorbachev was abandoning the so-called Brezhnev doctrine of limited sovereignty. According to this doctrine, the security and well-being of the socialist community were indivisible. If socialism was endangered anywhere in the Soviet bloc, it was the duty of all other socialist countries to provide “fraternal assistance.” There could be no defections from the socialist camp.