The Gdańsk Agreement of August 31 contained breathtaking concessions. In addition to allowing independent trade unions, it pledged new legislation allowing the right to strike without reprisals. It also called for greater safeguards for press freedoms, increases in pay, and improved working conditions. Employees would be allowed to take Saturdays off, and Sunday mass would be broadcast into workplaces over loudspeakers. The agreement was meant to give the communist government breathing room. The hard-line but incompetent premier, Edward Gierek, was dismissed. His successor, Stanisław Kania, promised to honor the agreements, noting ominously, however, that “antisocialist elements” were turning the country’s problems to their own purpose. We know now that at the same time these agreements were struck, the National Defense Committee was developing an action plan for the implementation of martial law.
Still, the government had shown weakness and the newly empowered labor unions were not about to relieve the pressure. A single national labor organization was formed at a meeting in Gdańsk on September 17, and just to drive home the point, a one-hour work stoppage, a “warning strike,” paralyzed the country again.
The history of what transpired after that is murky and there are competing versions of Poland’s road to martial law. Did Polish communist leaders declare the state of emergency to preempt a Soviet invasion? Or did the Poles themselves simply decide to put an end to domestic unrest?
Clearly, the rise of an independent trade union, a key element of a potentially independent civil society, got the dreaded attention of Moscow. Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister, reportedly said that “we simply cannot and must not lose Poland.” The implication was, of course, that if the Polish government was too weak or too stupid to act, Moscow might have to do so in its stead.
And it was easy to see that the Communist Party of Poland was in chaos at every level. The Party’s first secretaries in eighteen of forty-nine provinces were ousted on November 22. A few days later, the governments across Eastern Europe began issuing denunciations of the developments in Poland. This was reminiscent of the rhetoric employed by Warsaw Pact states against the regime of Alexander Dubček in Prague in 1968 that was seen as too compliant and insufficiently tough to defend party control.
The United States was sensing too that a repeat of the invasion of Czechoslovakia might be in the offing. President Carter sent a hotline message to Brezhnev saying that the United States would not exploit the issue but warning against Soviet action. When the Warsaw Pact convened an extraordinary meeting in Moscow on how to deal with the crisis, the ground was clearly being laid for intervention. Reportedly, the Polish leaders told Soviet leaders at that meeting that they would prevent a change to the constitutional order by whatever means necessary. They were trying to buy time to solve the crisis themselves.
But the troubles did not abate. Indeed, before the ink could dry on one agreement between the government and the unions, it would break down, only to be followed by another pact, and another. Perhaps to bring order, but more likely to prepare for the army’s intervention, General Wojciech Jaruzelski was appointed prime minister. Ross Johnson of the Rand Corporation and one of America’s best experts on Poland noted that there was a kind of creeping coup. “Every day another ministry falls under the control of a general,” he told me.
The government, though, seemed to be torn between a desire to end the crisis by accommodation and increasing pressure to end the insurgency by force. The plans for a state of emergency continued to mature and harassment of Solidarity leaders accelerated. And yet on March 30, 1981, the Polish government reached an agreement with Solidarity and secured a promise from Lech Wałęsa to postpone the general strike scheduled for the next day. The political events and efforts at compromise were unfolding against a backdrop of increasing chaos.
The same indecision that characterized the party leadership was evident within Solidarity as well. Some members of the union argued for cooperation with what they saw as an increasingly compliant government. Others, though, believed that the communists could not be trusted and pressed for doubling down on confrontation.
The West too seemed uncertain of what to do. Hoping to avoid the complete breakdown of order in Poland, Western governments agreed to allow more time for the repayment of billions of dollars in Polish debts.
The Communist Party continued to waver as the crises worsened, sending contradictory signals and indeed experiencing internal radicalization not unlike that challenging the leadership of Solidarity. At the end of an Extraordinary Plenum of the party in July 1981, only four of the previously selected eleven members of the Politburo remained. Jaruzelski was among those selected to remain.
By the fall, it was clear that neither the economic nor the political crises were abating. Solidarity had moved well beyond the agenda of workers’ economic rights to an avowedly political agenda, calling in September for free elections at the local and national levels. Everyone in the country seemed to know that martial law was being prepared and becoming more likely. But Solidarity was now unwilling to pull back. And the leadership could likely not have done so in any case. Even more radical elements were emerging. A group calling itself the “Self-Governing Republic Clubs—Freedom, Justice, and Independence” announced on November 30 that it would no longer agree to “one more attempt to preserve the monopoly of a narrow elite for party power.”1 That attack on the monopoly of power of the Communist Party was likely the last straw for Warsaw and certainly for Moscow.
The sense that the country was reaching a point of no return came to a crescendo in the first half of December. Comments by Lech Wałęsa were leaked and broadcast nationwide. In them, he advocated for confrontation with the regime. He would say that the remarks were taken out of context, but now the hardest-line elements had what they needed: “evidence” that Solidarity was interested in the revolutionary overthrow of the communist regime.
The middle ground had collapsed on both sides. Moscow was very much present too—anxious and hovering and insisting on action of some kind to stop the erosion of communist authority. And so Jaruzelski took the step that most had come to expect: Martial law was declared late on December 12, 1981. Before the public announcement the next morning, Wałęsa, Solidarity activists, and other opposition figures, including reformist communists, were rounded up—several thousand in all—and imprisoned. The military took over and basic rights were suspended. Meetings were banned, curfews were imposed, and the only available news came from one government channel. The Kremlin orchestrated a statement of support for Poland’s leaders from socialist countries across the Warsaw Pact.
Protests spread across hundreds of enterprises, but the army was now in control. Six thousand soldiers in tanks and armored vehicles backed up “citizens’ militias,” the party’s paramilitary force, known as ZOMO, and they took over striking factories in cities across the country. In Silesia, nine miners were killed and scores were injured there and in other places. It did not take long for resistance to collapse, with the last of the strikes called off at the Piast coal mine on December 28. Trade unions, including Solidarity, were banned on October 8, 1982, by an act of parliament.
The comprehensive siege did not last long. Pope John Paul II visited the country in June 1982, obtaining the release of thousands of prisoners and amnesty for them. And the world recognized Lech Wałęsa, who had been released from prison in November 1982, with the Nobel Peace Prize. Martial law formally ended in July 1983.
The Polish Communist Party, or, more accurately, the Polish military, had asserted control and the “uprising” was over. Poland’s leaders were anxious to return to something resembling normalcy. They needed help from the West and knew it. The leadership in Warsaw and, more important, in Moscow, could afford to be generous. The “constitutional order” in Poland had been preserved.
In one of history’s great ironies, though, this dark moment for freedom in Poland laid the groundwork for communism’s undoing when a democratic opening—Mikhail Gorbach
ev’s reforms—came. The opposition’s organizational capacity survived underground between 1981 and 1989, gaining strength and nurtured by an unlikely international troika: Lane Kirkland mobilized the AFL-CIO using a network of American and European NGOs, Ronald Reagan turned to the CIA to help covertly, and the Polish Pope’s “divisions” of local Catholic priests became foot soldiers for change.
How Many Divisions Does the Pope Have?
When Harry Truman mentioned the Catholic Church in Poland, Josef Stalin famously and sarcastically asked that question. History would show that the answer was, “A lot.”
Some have called it a miracle that Pope John Paul II emerged as leader of the Catholic faith in the late 1970s. The Polish cardinal Karol Józef Wojtyła was the first non-Italian Pope in more than four hundred years. And he ascended at a time of growing Polish nationalism and anti-Soviet resentment. His first visit to his homeland as Pope, in June 1979, was a sensation. The economy was worsening, discontent was rising, and the crowds were immense. He provided spiritual inspiration to Poland’s drive for freedom, and to the institutional power of village priests who rallied the faithful against communist rule.
Workers were the second element of Poland’s rich institutional landscape. We have seen that strikes and work stoppages were for decades a potent weapon against the regime. In the late 1970s, the AFL-CIO began providing financial support to a Polish organization called the Committee for Workers’ Defense, a forerunner of Solidarity. Ironically, workers were central to the communist mythology. They were in Marxist lore the “vanguard of the revolution.” But in the end their true champion would turn out to be the independent trade unions of the free world. The AFL-CIO’s head, Lane Kirkland, was a staunch anticommunist who became enthralled with Solidarity’s cause and went on to serve as one of its greatest advocates in the West.
After the summer of strikes in 1980, the Carter administration became concerned that the AFL-CIO’s growing support for Solidarity would provoke a backlash from Soviet hard-liners, who would use the excuse of American meddling to intervene on behalf of their beleaguered comrades. U.S. officials urged Kirkland to keep a low profile, and he did, but he never wavered in his support.
Kirkland believed Solidarity embodied the kind of popular outpouring that had brought down many authoritarian regimes in the past. “History moves when civil society reaches a critical point,” he later said. “It is not decided in the foreign ministries or in the palaces of power but on the streets and in the workplaces. And when a critical mass has been reached, then there is nothing you can do unless you are willing to kill and slaughter and put the whole country in chains.”
The imposition of martial law in December 1981 was an attempt to do exactly that—to put the genie of Solidarity back into the bottle and to restore communist authority once and for all. But instead, the events convinced Solidarity’s international supporters of the need to do more.
The third element of the troika, the CIA, began providing significant sums of money—hundreds of thousands of dollars—to several Polish groups, mainly run by Poles in exile. They in turn supported organizations that were trying to subvert the communist regime from within the country. Instead of lethal aid, the CIA provided the means for Solidarity to tell its story and rally its supporters. The assistance included printing materials to publish leaflets and journals, communication equipment to circumvent the ban on meetings, and financial support to the families of political prisoners. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) also provided support openly to a range of groups associated with the Polish opposition—even during the period of martial law. As a result of these efforts, Poland had a strong indigenous movement at the ready when Gorbachev began to encourage change in Eastern Europe.
The Pope returned to Poland for his third visit in June 1987. He held prayers alongside one and a half million worshippers in Gdańsk. On the very same day, and only a few hundred miles away, President Reagan was standing at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, challenging Mr. Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” The Polish people were about to dismantle their communist regime—peacefully.
When Brent Scowcroft called after the 1988 election to offer me the job as the White House Soviet specialist, he made a firm but understated pitch. “A lot is happening with Gorbachev,” he said. “This could be an interesting time and the president needs someone to help him sort it out.”
A month or so later when George H. W. Bush assumed office in January 1989, it was pretty clear that the times would be not just interesting, but historic. Still, when I took up my role as director for Soviet and East European affairs, we were feeling our way. How much would Mikhail Gorbachev tolerate? It was one thing to pronounce, as the Soviet leaders had done in December 1988, that the countries of the socialist brotherhood could go their own way. It was quite another to see that “their own way” might mean the end of communist rule in the Soviet bloc.
I followed events hour by hour. But even as one of the closest observers in the American government, I was shocked at how quickly Soviet and communist power collapsed in the summer and fall of 1989.
The year before the Bush administration arrived in Washington had been an extraordinary one in Eastern Europe. Throughout 1988, Solidarity had sparred with the government, calling and suspending strikes as it positioned itself for the upcoming Round Table talks, during which the authorities had agreed to sit down with the opposition. Protests throughout 1988 weakened the hand of a government that seemed powerless to do anything about the deteriorating economy. Once again, price hikes—40 percent on food, 50 percent on rents, and 60 percent on fuel—helped to mobilize the population. Intellectuals within universities, workers within shipyards and mines, and churchgoers in villages repeatedly took to the streets to demand change.
Though the government kept insisting that it would not negotiate fundamental changes like the legalization of independent trade unions, it was clearly running out of options. The Polish Communist Party needed Lech Wałęsa more than he needed them. Finally, the members of the Party Plenum said the magic words: They were prepared to accept pluralism in the trade union movement. The shocked reaction of the official trade union leader, who complained of feeling “bitterness and dissatisfaction,” said it all. Solidarity had won the right to negotiate with the government on an equal, if not better, footing.
The talks began on February 6, 1989, just two weeks after George H. W. Bush took office. The president welcomed the negotiations, noting the importance of national reconciliation. I followed every twist and turn of the talks, frankly surprised at how rapidly they were moving to conclusion. When on April 5 the parties announced agreement, we were ready with a response from the White House. Actually, we were a little too ready.
Marlin Fitzwater, the White House spokesman, was about to hold his noon briefing. We gave him a prepared statement applauding the outcome of the Round Table negotiations. Unfortunately, the actual participants had broken for dinner and had not yet concluded the agreement. No one seemed to notice, though, and a few hours later the talks were indeed finished.
Solidarity was legalized under the agreement and new elections were set for June. The Round Table accords stipulated that 65 percent of the seats in the Sejm (the parliament) were reserved for the United Workers’ Party (the communists) and their affiliated groups. The upper house, the Senate, had no such limitation.
In assessing the situation, we expected a slow and relatively orderly transition based on the blueprint laid out that April day. There might, we thought, be a slight non-communist majority in the Senate, but the communists would lead the government. Eventually, perhaps in the next election, the democratic forces would triumph once and for all. It was to be what political scientists call a “pacted transition,” with the old regime essentially negotiating itself out of power.
The Polish people had other ideas. In the actual election, Solidarity won virtually every available seat in the lower house. In the newly created Senate, it won ninety-nine out of one hundr
ed seats. The communists, on the other hand, could not even fill their uncontested seats, because none received more than 50 percent of the vote.
In the second round, Solidarity agreed to modify the election rule and urged their followers to vote for reform-minded communists, but with only minimal success. More astonishingly, Jaruzelski ran unopposed for the new post of president and still managed only a one-vote margin. He, in turn, asked another communist general, Czesław Kiszczak, to form a government. Protests erupted, and with Solidarity voicing its opposition to him, he could not do so. Though Solidarity wanted to observe the Round Table formula, the inevitability of a coalition led by the labor union was growing.
When President Bush arrived in Poland a month after the election, the political situation was still chaotic. Wałęsa asked the president to talk to Jaruzelski and urge him to accept the presidency. The general was a proud man, Wałęsa explained, and, stung by the election results, was reluctant to serve. The Round Table accords provided certainty—the communists, Solidarity, and Moscow were all on board. Wałęsa said publicly that he did not want Poland to have the “Chinese experience” (meaning Tiananmen Square), a point that he reiterated to President Bush.
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