Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  For all that they ran essentially lawless states, communist regimes were obsessed with the appearance of legality and with juridical process. Legal maneuvers and obfuscations now became the chief tool by which the new Kania regime tried to derail the Solidarity movement. The movement itself had coalesced into a genuine national structure in Gdańsk in mid-September, when delegates from some thirty-five recently created independent unions officially adopted Solidarność, “Solidarity,” as the new national union’s name. Its connection to John Paul’s message in June 1979 was clear to all concerned.19 Amid the happy chaos of men and women experiencing their first taste of democratic process, the delegates then drafted Solidarity’s statutes, which Wałęsa, in order to register the union legally, submitted to the appropriate court in Warsaw on September 24. At this point, though, it was already clear that Solidarity was not simply a new trade union. As one observer wrote, “It was, at the very least, a massive and unique social movement, a movement which was perhaps best described as a ‘civil crusade for national regeneration.’”20

  For that reason, the authorities continued to drag their feet in implementing the Gdańsk accords, and a national warning strike of one hour was called for October 3. In an impressive display of discipline, workers across the country downed tools for precisely one hour, between noon and 1 o’clock. The instructions had been relayed throughout Poland by local Solidarity committees, as the union was still denied access to the national media.21 The demonstration strike had the desired effect. The party’s Central Committee met to review the situation, and after two days of vitriolic argument agreed to internal party reform.

  Still, the courts refused to register Solidarity legally and tensions mounted during October. Tadeusz Mazowiecki went to Rome at the beginning of the month to brief John Paul. The Pope had one urgent question: “Will it last? Does this movement have a future?” Mazowiecki assured him that it did.22 The Polish Bishops’ Conference, meeting in Warsaw on October 15 and 16, issued a statement supporting the workers’ demands for full implementation of the Gdańsk accords. Three days later, the Primate met with Warsaw Solidarity leader Zbigniew Bujak and gave him his unconditional support: “I am with you.” On October 21, Wyszyński talked with the new party leader, Kania, who had just been taking counsel with the foreign ministers of the Warsaw Pact countries. Two days later, the Primate flew to Rome to attend the closing sessions of the Synod on the Family and to give the Pope his impressions of the situation.23

  The sluggish communist legal system finally got moving, only to make a serious political mistake. On October 24, Wałęsa returned to the Warsaw Provincial Court, where the judge, Zdzisław Ko?cielniak, announced that Solidarity was legally registered. But he unilaterally inserted a clause into the statutes recognizing the Communist Party’s leading role in society, the socialist system, and Poland’s international alliances. Eight million Solidarity members were stunned and angered. Wałęsa denounced the unilateral insertions and said the movement would never accept arbitrarily imposed changes in statutes it had democratically adopted.24

  The pressure now mounted exponentially inside Poland and throughout east central Europe. The Solidarity leadership demanded that the prime minister meet with them immediately in Gdańsk. Posters that had once read, “We demand the registration of Solidarity” now had an addendum in black crayon: “with unchanged statutes.” After meeting with the deputy prime minister, the Solidarity leadership agreed to negotiate with the government in Warsaw, but also set November 12 as the date of a national general strike if the registration impasse was not resolved. On October 28, Czechoslovakia closed its borders to Poland. The next day, party leader Kania flew to Moscow as the Czechoslovak and East German press unleashed a fusillade of bitter criticism against Solidarity in general and Wałęsa specifically. East German party leader Erich Honecker had already written Leonid Brezhnev, urging Soviet action before “socialist Poland” was lost.25

  The communiqué from the Brezhnev-Kania meeting suggested that Moscow had not yet lost confidence in its man in Warsaw. The Soviets may also have been playing for time. The immediate registration crisis ended on November 10 when the Polish Supreme Court overruled the Warsaw Provincial Court and struck the offensive insertions from the statutes. Solidarity compromised by accepting the addition of language from the Gdańsk accords acknowledging the party’s leading role as an appendix to the statutes.

  For the moment, a direct, massive, national confrontation had been avoided. Cardinal Wyszyński held a reception for the Solidarity leadership after their day in court, reminisced about his own days as a union chaplain in interwar Poland, and then warned obliquely against pressing demands on which the state could not possibly deliver. The Primate evidently did not believe the threat of Soviet intervention had completely receded. Afterward, Wałęsa and the other Solidarity leaders went to a celebration at a local theater, where the theme song of the evening, a political cabaret tune called “So That Poland Shall Be Poland,” nicely captured the Solidarity movement’s intention.26

  That intention made ongoing confrontation with the Polish regime and its Soviet ally unavoidable. Solidarity—the union that was always more than that, but that could not be the overt political opposition everyone knew it was—could not coexist with a totalitarian state. The Soviet Union’s leadership understood this, and had been preparing for some time to make Solidarity go—by force.

  A two-day campaign in December 1980 was planned. On the first day, more than a dozen Soviet divisions, two Czech divisions, and an East German division were to move into Poland, followed by nine more Soviet divisions the following day. All this was known to the United States government from satellite reconnaissance, from information relayed by a Red Army general in Moscow, and from information on Soviet troop dispositions and plans delivered at immense personal risk by a well-placed Polish source, Colonel Ryszard Kukliński, a Polish General Staff officer and aide to General Wojciech Jaruzelski, who also served as a liaison to the Soviet commander-in-chief of the Warsaw Pact Joint Command.27 U.S. national security adviser Brzeziński called John Paul at the Vatican on Sunday night, December 7, to tell him what the Americans had learned and how. Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops moving toward Poland had been in full readiness since Thursday, December 4, and could invade at any time. The expectation was that the intervention would be on Monday, December 8. Satellite intelligence had confirmed that troop movements toward Poland’s borders had stopped on the evening of Friday, December 5, but this could have been a pause in the staging of an invasion. Concern that a massive Soviet military intervention was imminent continued throughout the following week.28

  The Soviet invasion never took place. As was learned only years later, the halt in troop movements on December 5 was a stand-down ordered by the Soviet government.

  There were multiple reasons that the Soviets stopped. Polish party leader Kania had told Brezhnev that an invasion wasn’t necessary and that the Polish party could not ensure a passive reaction if the Polish people were confronted by Soviet troops. As the Soviet plan, detailed by Colonel Kukliński, included the liquidation of the Solidarity leadership by summary courts-martial and firing squads, this was sage counsel.29 Poland would never have stood for what its people would have immediately interpreted as a second Katyn massacre.

  The international situation also bore on the Soviet decision. The United States’ reaction to the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had demonstrated that an invasion of Poland would not be handled as gingerly as the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia had been. The Carter administration, with national security adviser Brzeziński in the lead, had also made its position on a Soviet invasion of Poland clear by direct and indirect signals. A presidential hotline message was dispatched to the Kremlin, warning of “very grave” consequences for the U.S./Soviet relationship if the USSR invaded Poland. Similar messages were sent through India, where Indira Gandhi was a useful conduit to Brezhnev, and through West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt and French President Valer
y Giscard d’Estaing. NATO went to a higher level of defense readiness, of which Soviet intelligence was aware. Knowing that it would leak and get to Moscow, Brzeziński sent a memo to the U.S. Department of State listing advanced weaponry the administration was considering selling to China, then on the U.S. “no-sell” list.30

  The administration had also talked with AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland about a worldwide trade union boycott of Soviet air transport and shipping, cutting the USSR off from international trade without a formal, state-led embargo. Kirkland was confident that world outrage at a Soviet invasion to crush Solidarity would be so great that the unions could have mounted a de facto blockade of the USSR. Brzeziński leaked the story of the plans for worldwide trade union action to the Wall Street Journal, and thence to the Soviet leadership.31 The incoming Reagan administration, elected the previous month but not yet inaugurated, issued a statement of support for the measures the outgoing administration was taking.32 Coupled with Kania’s assurances, the international costs of an invasion of Poland may well have seemed unbearable to a Soviet leadership already mired down in Afghanistan and preparing to face the challenge of an assertively anti-Soviet Reagan administration.33

  Blocked in their attempt to impose a military solution on the 1968 Czechoslovakian model, the Soviet leadership decided to liquidate Solidarity by other means.

  John Paul II Intervenes

  Amid continuing concern about a Soviet military invasion to save “socialist Poland,” Pope John Paul II took a bold personal initiative. Papal diplomats had traditionally used the language of indirect suggestion, careful to leave both the Holy See and the government in question a graceful way to retreat from a crisis without losing face. Now, using the discreet language of diplomacy but making his meaning unmistakably clear, the Pope sent an unprecedented letter to Leonid Brezhnev on December 16. Written in French on cream-colored stationery embossed with the John Paul’s personal crest, the letter read as follows:

  To His Excellency, Mr. Leonid Brezhnev,

  President of the Supreme Soviet of the Union of

  Soviet Socialist Republics

  I address myself to the preoccupation of Europe and the whole world as regards the tension created by the internal events taking place in Poland during these last months. Poland is one of the signatories of the Helsinki Final Act. This nation was, in September 1939, the first victim of an aggression which was at the root of the terrible period of occupation, which lasted until 1945. During the entire Second World War, the Poles remained side-by-side with their allies, fighting on all the fronts of the war, and the destructive fury of this conflict cost Poland the loss of nearly six million of its sons: that is to say, a fifth of its population before the war.

  Having in mind, then, the various serious motivations of the preoccupation created by the tension over the actual situation in Poland, I ask you to do everything you can in order that all that constitutes the causes of this preoccupation, according to widespread opinion, be removed. This is indispensable for détente in Europe and in the world. I think that this can be obtained only by abiding faithfully to the solemn principles of the Helsinki Final Act, which proclaims criteria for regulating the relations between states, and in particular the principle of respect for the inherent rights of sovereignty as well as the principle of nonintervention in the internal affairs of each of the participating states. The events that have taken place in Poland these last months have been caused by the ineluctable necessity of the economic reconstruction of the country, which requires, at the same time, a moral reconstruction based on the conscious engagement, in solidarity, of all the forces of the entire society.

  I am confident that you will do everything you can in order to dispel the actual tension, in order that political public opinion may be reassured about such a delicate and urgent problem.

  I vividly hope that you will be kind enough to welcome and examine with attention what I have thought it my duty to present to you, considering that I am inspired only by the interests of peace and understanding between peoples.

  JOANNES PAULUS PP. II

  From the Vatican

  16 December 198034

  Its stylized, diplomatic language notwithstanding, this was a very tough letter and could only have been read as such by its recipient and his colleagues. What was happening in Poland was a question of “internal events” that were none of the Soviet Union’s business. The implicit parallel between any Soviet invasion of Poland in 1980 and the Nazi invasion of September 1939 made clear the moral terms in which John Paul was prepared to define Soviet aggression and the nature of the aggressor. The reference to “solidarity” among “all the forces of…society” essential to national moral and economic reconstruction was phrased in terms of an ethical analysis of the situation. But the deliberate linkage to the movement that bore that name, and that could now claim to represent virtually “all the forces of…society,” was unmistakable. Had the Pope not wanted to signal his nonnegotiable support for Solidarity, he could have chosen other words.

  The multiple invocations of the Helsinki Final Act struck the Soviet Union at a point of considerable vulnerability, for the USSR had insisted on the Helsinki Final Act as a ratification of the post-Yalta status quo in Europe. What Brezhnev and the Soviet leadership had imagined as the means for securing Stalin’s external empire was now being turned on them. Its provisions on sovereignty and noninterference (a favorite Soviet dodge in the face of human rights criticism) were being used as counters against Soviet hegemony in east central Europe.

  John Paul did not, as so often rumored, threaten to fly to Poland in the event of a Soviet invasion. He was not a man to make threats of this sort. Nor did his letter mention the presence of Warsaw Pact troops all along Poland’s borders. He did not have to. He based his case on the national rights embedded in an agreement to which both Poland and the USSR were signatory, the Helsinki Final Act. At Helsinki in 1975, the Soviet Union had been pleased to act as if Poland were an independent nation. John Paul’s letter to Leonid Brezhnev was a reminder of that moral, if not yet political, truth—and an assertion that moral truth was a potent factor in politics among nations.

  The Spring 1981 Crisis

  Further evidence that John Paul II analyzed the unfolding drama of east central Europe in primarily religious and cultural terms came on December 31, 1980, when the Pope issued an apostolic letter, Egregiae Virtutis [Men of Extraordinary Virtue], naming Sts. Cyril (826–869) and Methodius (c. 815–885), the first evangelists of the Slavic peoples, as co-patrons of Europe along with St. Benedict, the founder of Western monasticism.

  Cyril and Methodius were brothers, born to a noble family in Thessalonica. To evangelize Moravia, Cyril created a Slavonic alphabet and translated the Gospels, the letters of St. Paul, the Psalms, and the Roman liturgy, laying the foundations of Slavic literature. By the time of his death, Methodius had completed the translation of virtually the entire Bible. The written word came to the western Slavs, quite literally, through the Word of God. The heirs of Benedictine monasticism had saved the culture of Western Europe during the Dark Ages; Cyril and Methodius had created the possibility of an enduring culture in east central Europe.

  The idea of honoring the two brothers matured over a year. In 1979, John Paul had quite spontaneously asked Bishop Jozef Tomko, “What do you think we can do for Cyril and Methodius?” Tomko’s first reaction was to suggest that they might be named Doctors of the Church—the honorary title given to Catholicism’s most influential theologians. Then, Tomko remembered, the Pope got this “fantastic look in his eye,” the kind he gets “when he has an inspiration,” and said: “Co-patrons of Europe.” It was, according to Tomko, a “great vision,” a powerful symbol of the Church’s drive to give back to the peoples of east central Europe their authentic history and culture.35 Egregiae Virtutis was generally interpreted in the West as a pleasant but inconsequential papal gesture of Slavic fraternity. For the peoples of east central Europe, it was another potent exampl
e of how Christian images had become the primary symbols of a rebirth of cultural integrity and freedom.

  As the first quarter of 1981 unfolded, Solidarity struggled to establish itself and to carry out its self-regulating, self-limiting social revolution. In August 1980, Lech Wałęsa had promised himself that if he lived through the Gdańsk shipyard strike and an independent trade union was recognized by the regime, his first journey abroad would be on pilgrimage to Rome to thank John Paul II.36 On January 15, 1981, a delegation of Solidarity leaders met at the Vatican with John Paul for private conversation and a public audience. The Pope’s public remarks captured his distinctive view of the driving force of history, as he described Solidarity as a movement for, rather than against, something.

  A commitment to the “moral good of society” was the “cornerstone” of Solidarity’s work, he said, and the beginning of any “real progress” in national renewal. This was a different kind of revolution. Its efforts were “not directed against anyone” but “directed toward: toward the common good” of national reform. The right to such a national renewal, he concluded with an eye toward Moscow, is “recognized and confirmed by the law of nations.”37

  The delegation returned to the Vatican on Sunday, January 18, for Mass and breakfast in the papal apartment. The Pope’s homily concluded with an exhortation that Poles “let their work serve human dignity, let it elevate man, let it elevate families, let it elevate the whole people.” Solidarity would serve the “great cause” of freedom if everyone involved were animated by a biblical commitment: “‘I come, Lord, I come, Lord, to do thy will.’”38