Revolution 1989 (11 page)

 

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.’
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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.
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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.

Jaruzelski ruled with a Council for National Salvation comprising a group of senior officers, not Party apparatchiks. Polish martial law seemed in many ways as much a coup against the Communists as against Solidarity, though the declared object was to ‘save socialism and national honour’. Marx and Lenin would have called Polish martial law classic ‘Bonapartism’. Newsreaders now wore uniforms. A dusk-to-dawn curfew was imposed in all major towns. Strict censorship was placed on official newspapers. The junta tried to cut off Poland from the outside world, severing phone links. It attempted, in vain, to limit internal travel to prevent information moving around the country. In the first few days more than 6,000 people were arrested without charge and detained in dozens of internment camps. They included well-known writers, actors, academics, musicians and artists as well as trade union activists. The great philosopher Leszek Kołakowski said the martial law declaration was the moment the Polish Communists ‘declared war on their own people’ and the idea stuck. Everywhere Poles referred to the next few months as a period of war.

The Soviets fondly imagined that they had paid a relatively small price to pacify their perennially troublesome colony. Again they had reasserted their authority, and this time the Poles had themselves done the dirty work. In the Kremlin the sight of Polish tanks, patrolling Warsaw streets, commanded by a Polish Communist, was seen as a relief and a victory. But quickly it began to look like no sort of victory at all.

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Kabul, Sunday 13 December 1981

 

THERE WAS ONE overriding reason why Red Army tanks were not sent to Warsaw to suppress Solidarity. It was explained by Mikhail Suslov, perhaps the most hardline apologist for Russian imperialism in the entire Moscow leadership. ‘We simply cannot afford another Afghanistan,’ he said, when the Soviet magnates agonised over what to do in Poland. By December 1981 Soviet troops had been fighting the battle for socialism on their Central Asian border for two years and it was clear they had been led to a disaster. Already about 2,000 Russian soldiers had been killed - more than the number who had died on active service in the three and a half decades since the end of World War Two. The old men in the Kremlin searched for a way out, but could not find one that did not involve international humiliation.
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they would not contemplate. They were trapped by Russian nationalism, and by their own ideology. They believed that the tide of history was with them, that communism must inevitably triumph, and that no country which had seen a socialist revolution - even one as unlikely for communism to take root as Afghanistan - must ever be allowed to slide back. In hard-headed terms, they felt that if they admitted defeat anywhere it would be a sign of weakness that would give encouragement to their opponents everywhere. They allowed themselves to be sucked deeper into an unwinnable conflict in hostile, mountainous terrain, surrounded by enemies they did not begin to understand.

The Soviets never planned a war in Afghanistan. Their intention had not been to occupy the country. The other occasions since 1945 in which Soviet troops had been sent into conflict abroad had been to Warsaw Pact neighbours, their satellite states, to reassert their dominion. Those - such as Hungary in 1956 - had essentially been police actions in countries they regarded as their possessions. Afghanistan was different. It was not in the generally acknowledged Soviet sphere of influence. Now it became part of the Cold War as a ‘proxy’ dispute between East and West. A war in Europe in the era of Mutually Assured Destruction was deemed unthinkable. But superpower rivalries spread to the Third World and, especially, to the Middle East, where both sides saw vital strategic interests at stake. If on their western flank the Soviets were worried about the Pope, in the East the leadership feared the mullahs. They were anxious about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Iran, as well as ‘Western imperialism’ in Afghanistan, which bordered its Central Asian republics.

At the end of April 1978 a small group of left-wing army officers seized power in the Afghan capital, Kabul. All the coup leaders were Communists, members of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), and had close links with Moscow. The Soviet Ambassador, Alexander Puzanov, had been told about the takeover plan and opposed it. So did Moscow. The KG B begged the plotters not to proceed, but was ignored. The first the Kremlin knew that the coup had taken place was from a Reuters wire report. Swiftly, the Soviets changed their tack, started referring to the Afghan leaders as comrades and hailed the revolution as a great victory for socialism. The Russians sent a contingent of advisers - engineers, doctors, road builders as well as intelligence agents - to advance the cause of international communism.

The new Afghan leader was a bookish sixty-one-year-old Marxist thinker, Mohammed Taraki. He began to put his theories into practice in the traditional way, despite the deeply conservative nature of the country’s Islamic society. He rounded up and executed hundreds of opponents and trod on ancient customs. He tried to force farmers to grow other crops instead of poppy and had elaborate plans to collectivise agriculture. Women were sent to schools, given literacy classes and discouraged from wearing the traditional bhourka.
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As Saher Gul, a mullah in the remote Laghman Province, explained: ‘The Communists tried to change the law of God. They wanted to destroy Islamic traditions - to rid everyone of poverty and make everyone equal. This is against the law of Islam. God has decided who is rich and who is poor. It can’t be changed by Communists.’
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