Revolution 1989

by Victor Sebestyen

  a country torn from its past by violent measures imposed by the Communists but so bound to that past that the capital demolished in the war was rebuilt from the pictures of Canaletto . . . it has a capital where the citizens have taken up residence again in the ‘old city’ which is entirely new . . . a country where the (official) average monthly remuneration does not exceed the price of two pairs of socks, but where there is no poverty . . . a socialist country where church festivals are public holidays . . . a country of total disorganisation where nonetheless the trains run on time . . . a country where censorship and satire both flourish . . . the only country in the socialist bloc whose citizens are freely allowed to buy and sell US dollars but not to possess them . . . a country where one can talk with the waiter in English or German and the cook in French, but the Minister only through an interpreter.’6

  Poland seemed as anarchic to an orthodox Marxist as it did to a capitalist brought up on free markets. It limped along from economic crisis to crisis, utterly dependent on Western loans guaranteed - and this was another surreal part of Polish socialism - by Communist Party bosses in the Kremlin. Now there was a Pope who understood communism from first-hand experience, and this worried men like Yuri Andropov.

  One of the first decisions Pope John Paul made was to visit his homeland. If his election had been a shock to the men in the KGB headquarters at the Lubyanka it had also come as an enormous surprise to the Faithful. The Catholic world for centuries had been used to elderly Italian popes. Here was a vigorous fifty-eight-year-old, a man who still looked athletic, a Slav, an inspirational pastor rather than a Curia politician. He believed God had selected a Polish pontiff for a purpose, and that Poland’s suffering in the twentieth century was for a purpose. His own tragic childhood and youth typified his country’s painful history. Karol Wojtyła’s mother died when he was eight; he lost his only sibling, his elder brother Edmund, three years later and his only other close relative, his father, died in the war when the future Pope was in his teens. He had to train as a priest underground during the Nazi occupation.

  Pope John Paul had a natural gift for timing. He wanted to make a substantial difference quickly with a grand, symbolic evangelising mission that would set an early seal on his papacy. In Poland his election had been welcomed with extraordinary scenes of joy. The authorities knew better than to suppress any of the huge public celebrations. Even some among the Communist leadership were secretly proud that a Pole now sat on the throne of St Peter. On the day after the election the Polish Party boss, Edward Gierek, messaged Moscow, probably more in hope than with any real conviction. ‘It is good that Wojtyła has left for Rome,’ he told Vadim Zagladin, the highly influential senior man at the Soviet Communist Party’s International Department. ‘Here, in Poland, he would be a disaster. He could create great difficulties for us. In Rome, he is less dangerous . . . to some extent he can even be useful there. After all, he has “exported” a lot of ideas and considerations inspired by communism.’7

  In early November 1978 the Pope ordered his officials to start negotiations with the Warsaw regime for a papal visit as soon as it could be organised. The talks were delicate. The Polish Communists wanted to refuse, but thought they could not. Denying Poles a visit seemed politically impossible. They believed they would be taking the lesser risk by letting him come on a carefully controlled tour and thought they could even gain some credit for allowing Poles to see their national hero. Some more far-sighted figures warned of the consequences, but they were voted down. The Soviets had to be persuaded to let the tour go ahead. Grudgingly, they agreed. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev told Gierek: ‘Take my advice, don’t give the Pope any reception. It will only cause trouble.’ Gierek spoke of the domestic pressures on him and said he couldn’t risk vetoing the pilgrimage. Brezhnev reluctantly gave his approval: ‘Well, do as you wish. But be careful you don’t regret it later.’8

  The lacklustre Polish leaders regretted it almost as soon as Pope John Paul’s Alitalia Boeing jet arrived on the tarmac at Warsaw airport at about 11 a.m. on Saturday 2 June 1979. The Pope knelt, kissed the ground in a gesture that became famous on all his many future foreign tours, opened his arms in a blessing and was greeted by rapturous applause from an adoring crowd. A heatwave hit Poland that summer. Temperatures soared to more than 40°C. The Pope criss-crossed the country for a week. A third of the entire population went outside to see him in person at some point during the visit. People waited for hours in boiling conditions along his route just to catch the briefest glimpse of him. His visit was proof that after three decades, the Roman Catholic Church commanded far more loyalty among Poles than Communism ever had. More than two million people attended some of his outdoor masses. His final address on 10 June, in Kraków, was by the government’s own admission the largest public gathering ever held in Poland. His addresses were carefully scripted. Vatican officials had agreed with the Soviets and the Polish regime that at no point would Pope John Paul say anything incendiary or anything that could be taken as an anti-Communist crusade. But they were amazingly powerful speeches that resonated with everyone who heard them. ‘I have come to talk about the dignity of man,’ he said at one of them. ‘Of the threat to man, to the rights of man. Inalienable rights which can be easily trampled on - by man.’ Everyone understood what he meant, though technically he never broke the terms of his agreement.

  The Pope ran rings around the regime, who had no answer to the sensational power of his appeal and his message of hope. He grasped the nature of public relations instinctively. State television, in a typically cack-handed way, tried to show that the crowds were mainly swooning nuns or elderly peasants. All Poles had to do was go outside on street corners to see otherwise. Their efforts brought more people out to meet the Pope. ‘Why did I go?’ one congregant managed to tell the Pontiff. ‘To praise the mother of God - and to spite those bastards.’9

  He inspired and galvanised people as nobody had before and he fatally wounded communism - a fact acknowledged by the grim-faced Polish Defence Minister, General Wojciech Jaruzelski. The Pope never said so openly but his triumphant return home amounted to an unmistakable call for resistance to oppression rather than compromise. The call was heeded a few months later.

  THREE

  SOLIDARITY

  Gdansk, Poland, Saturday 9 August 1980

  ANNA WALENTYNOWYCZ was a diminutive woman. In her fifty-first year she was beginning to put on a little weight, but throughout the vast, sprawling Lenin Shipyard she was still called ‘Tiny’ Anna. Everyone in the shipyard knew Anna, one of the most popular workers in the plant. A bustling figure full of energy and warmth, she had worked there for thirty-three years. Now she was just five months short of retirement.

  Orphaned in the war during the occupation of Poland, she became a convinced Communist. Her dream from adolescent years had been to build socialism and the place she would start was at the Lenin Shipyard. She was a model worker, a welder who because of her size was often sent into the most remote and narrow crannies of a ship’s frame where other workers could not reach. At twenty-one years old, a proud member of the Rosa Luxemburg work brigade, she won a ‘Hero of Labour’ award. During 1950, according to the citation, she had increased her work productivity by 270 per cent - ‘one of the proudest moments of my life’.1

  After sixteen years with the blow-torch, Anna rose to the more responsible position of operating a crane. Only a handful of women at the yard - which mostly made cargo vessels for export to the USSR - were qualified to handle such valuable and potentially dangerous machinery. She was married, briefly, in 1964, though the relationship did not last. The following year she was diagnosed with cancer and given less than five years to live. Later, after radiotherapy, the doctors told her they had been entirely wrong and gave her a clean bill of health. Throughout these personal crises she had been a hard worker, patriotic, loyal to communism. She was so well respected that, increasingly, co-workers brought their problems to her. She would try to help in practica
l ways or, more often, just listen sympathetically to moans and complaints. Gradually, she began to open her eyes and see how short of the ideal socialist paradise her new model Poland had fallen. But Anna was no natural rebel.

  In 1970, anger erupted in Poland when, with unerringly crass timing just a fortnight before Christmas, the government increased prices on staple foods like meat, bread, milk and eggs by 36 per cent. There were riots in several Polish cities. The worst were in Gdansk where police fired on unarmed demonstrators outside the Lenin Shipyard. Forty-four workers were killed.

  Anna had then stayed out of trouble, as she did in the next big wave of Polish unrest in 1976, during which thousands of people were arrested. But, like so many of her compatriots, she was becoming radicalised the more she saw of everyday life in People’s Poland. She always referred to the workers who had died in 1970 as ‘martyrs’ and was one of a steadily increasing number who would ensure there were candles and flowers by their gravesides on the anniversary of their deaths. She uncovered a racket involving a large-scale fraud from which some leading figures in the official trade union at the plant, run by the Communist Party, personally profited.

  On May Day 1978 she took the first step that marked her out by the Communist apparatchiks in Poland as a potential problem. She joined a group created that day with the cumbersome title ‘A Founding Committee of Free Trade Unions on the Coast’. Soon it would gain a more catchy and famous name, Solidarnose, or Solidarity. It started a magazine, Robotnik Wybrzeza (The Coastal Worker), that declared on the front page of its first edition its principal, overriding aim: ‘Only independent trades unions, which have the backing of the workers they represent, have a chance of challenging the regime. Only they can represent a power that the authorities will one day . . . have to deal with on equal terms.’ Anna Walentynowycz was one of sixty-five activists who signed the magazine’s charter on its founding day.2

  A new round of industrial unrest engulfed Poland in spring and early summer 1980. Strikes hit dozens of factories throughout the country. The railway workers of Lublin, in eastern Poland, blocked the main line that took passengers and goods to the Soviet Union. The strike was settled when the Deputy Prime Minister, Mieczysław Jagielski, went personally to make peace by announcing a government climb-down. But the pattern throughout the 1970s in Poland had been that every time the regime made a concession with one group of workers, it would deal harshly with others somewhere else. This time the regime’s eye alighted on Walentynowycz.

  At around noon she was summoned to the shipyard’s personnel department and fired. The pretext was that she had been spotted over the last few nights at various graveyards around Gdansk gathering candle stubs. She was planning to reuse them as fresh candles to light at a memorial ceremony for the forty-four ‘martyrs’ of the 1970 crackdown. A police report accused her of stealing. If she was fired for a disciplinary offence she would lose her pension, even though she was so close to retirement. A low-level official apologised to Anna with the weasel words of cowardly apparatchiks everywhere: ‘I’m sorry, but I have no choice. If I don’t do it I’ll be sacked myself and then somebody else will sack you anyway.’ She replied with the spirit of Solidarity: ‘Well that other one should refuse to do it, then the other one and the one after that. They can’t sack everyone can they?’3

  The reaction was swift and bold. Five days later a petition called for a strike at the shipyard ‘to defend the crane operator Anna Walentynowycz . . . If you don’t, many of you will find yourselves in the same dire straits as her.’ The petition was signed by seven people who workers would have recognised as campaigners for better working conditions and, especially, for free trade unions outside the control of the Communist Party. The final crisis of Polish communism had begun, typically in a workers’ state, with a grievous injustice to an honest worker.

  FOUR

  THE ELECTRICIAN

  Gdansk, Thursday 14 August 1980

  THOUGH ANNA WALENTYNOWYCZ was such a popular figure and her treatment had been so clearly unfair, the activists in Gdansk who issued the strike call were uncertain how the workers would react. The big towns on the Baltic coast were relatively quiet throughout the summer. Party chieftains locally were beginning to think that perhaps the worst of the troubles were over. In the days since Walentynowycz was fired, hundreds of copies of the strike appeal had been distributed on the trams and trains which brought workers to the yard from the outlying housing estates. The strike was due to begin at dawn.

  At six a.m., when the first shift clocked on, about 100 workers began to march through the shipyard. Some held banners demanding the reinstatement of Walentynowycz and others were shouting to their workmates to join them. There were not many, but the management was beginning to feel worried. A half-hour later around 500 had joined the demonstration. They reached the shipyard Gate Two, one of the main exits, and were ready to march into the city. There they hesitated, remembering it was when they marched into central Gdansk that the forty-four workers were killed in December 1970. During this pause the director of the shipyard, Klemens Gniech, climbed on to a crane to address the strikers. Gniech was an energetic, tough but generally fair-minded man who was respected, even well liked, by his workforce. In a smooth speech he promised that he would discuss their demands as long as the workers returned to their jobs. For a while it seemed as if his audience would be appeased. There were mutterings amongst them that they might as well return to work. At this point, a short, squat man with a large moustache clambered up on to the crane next to Gniech. He tapped the manager on the shoulder and began to improvise: ‘Remember me?’ he asked. ‘I worked here for ten years and I still feel I’m a Lenin Shipyard worker. I have the confidence of the workers here, though it’s four years since I lost my job.’ He went on to talk about Walentynowycz and about the need for an independent trade union. To resounding cheers and applause Lech Wałesa called for an ‘occupation strike’. Immediately, a strike committee was formed - with Wałesa at its head - and Gniech beat a retreat. He agreed to negotiations and as a signal of good faith he dispatched his own shiny black Volga limousine to collect Anna Walentynowycz from her home to take part in the negotiations.1

  The occupation strike was one of the most successful weapons used by Solidarity over the succeeding years. It was a carefully calculated tactic designed primarily to protect strikers from being attacked on the streets by police. Taking over a factory filled with hundreds of workers would require a military operation - a costly and potentially bloody enterprise only the most brutal governments would adopt. It had other advantages too: in effect, it holds valuable machinery hostage and it prevents the management employing ‘blackleg’ labour. Psychologically, it turned out to be vitally important by holding strikers’ morale together in siege-like conditions and reminding workers that they could control the workplace.

  The strike spread rapidly. Within hours workers at factories in Gdynia, a few kilometres away, joined in. They were soon followed by all the other 50,000 workers in the Gdansk region. The government had immediately cut all telephone lines between the Baltic coastal towns and the outside world, in a futile attempt to contain the protests. Naturally, neither television nor radio mentioned the strikes, but everyone in Poland knew about them.

  While Wałesa and the other strike leaders were closeted in a lecture room in the shipyard’s health and safety centre negotiating with Gniech, conditions in the rest of the yard were growing increasingly uncomfortable. On the first night more than 2,500 strikers slept on foam mattresses and across benches in the main halls or in the hospital. The mood was uneasy, expectant and fearful. It was not revolutionary. ‘We’re thinking about better working conditions, more money and the right to strike,’ Wałesa declared. Nobody was talking about challenging communism. Support for the strike wavered, depending on the news from the negotiating room. Gniech was under instructions by the Party bosses in Warsaw and locally to play for time, but eventually to make enough concessions to secure a deal. Their aim, a
s so often in the last decade, was to divide and rule. They wanted to reach separate agreements with different groups of workers so that at no time could they feel united. In August 1980 it nearly worked.2

  The key moment came on the third day, the 16th. Early that morning Wałesa’s strike committee accepted a package offered by Gniech. It included the reinstatement of Anna Walentynowycz and Wałesa to their shipyard jobs, a pay rise of 2,000 złoty a month (about 7 per cent), an increase in various family allowances roughly on a par with the police and immunity from prosecution for all the strikers. The major sticking point had been a demand that a memorial should be built to honour the dead workers of December 1970. On that Saturday, with tension growing throughout Poland, the Party bosses were so desperate to reach a settlement that even this big symbolic concession was made.

  But almost as soon as hands were shaken on the deal it fell apart amidst confusion and chaos. Gniech announced on the shipyard’s loudspeaker system that the strike was over. Wałesa punched his fist in the air and declared: ‘We’ve won.’ He quickly sensed something was wrong. Scores of workers started to head for the gates - and home. But some people in the crowd began yelling ‘traitor’ and ‘sell-out’. The crowd was wavering. They were swayed by a representative of other local workers who were also on strike. They depended on the Lenin plant - the region’s biggest employer - as the flagship of Gdansk industry to secure a deal that would be favourable for all of them. A big, burly woman with short cropped hair, Henryka Krzywonos, had been leader of the Gdansk tram drivers for years. She was not a great speaker but she was able to make her point forcibly. She pleaded with the shipyard workers not to ‘sell out too cheaply and leave your comrades in the lurch’. She said they must not allow workers in different industries to be picked off by the regime one by one. ‘If you abandon us we’ll be lost. Buses can’t face tanks.’ Cheers echoed throughout the yard.