The Sword and the Shield

by Christopher Andrew

  Among the illegals sent on PROGRESS operations to Poland after Wojtyła’s election was Oleg Petrovich Buryen (codenamed DEREVLYOV), who posed as the representative of a firm of Canadian publishers. DEREVLYOV claimed to be collecting material about Polish missionaries in the Far East and used this as a pretext for contacting a number of prominent Church figures, most of whom recommended him to others. If arrested by the police or SB, he was told to stick firmly to his cover story and insist that he was a Canadian citizen. In case of real emergency, however, he was instructed to ask to see Colonel Jan Slovikowski of the SB, who appears to have acted as a point of contact for KGB agents who found themselves in difficulty with the Polish authorities. Among DEREVLYOV’s most prized contacts was one of the Pope’s closest friends, Father Józef Tischner, a fellow philosopher who had helped him found the Papal Theological Academy in Kraków.27 Tischner was a frequent visitor to Rome and one of those chosen by John Paul II to revive his spirits when he felt trapped in the Vatican.28

  One of John Paul II’s chief ambitions during the first year of his pontificate was to return to Poland. Early in 1979, horrified that the PUWP Politburo was prepared to contemplate a papal visit, Brezhnev rang Gierek to try to dissuade him. “How could I not receive a Polish pope,” Gierek replied, “when the majority of my countrymen are Catholics?” Absurdly, Brezhnev urged him to persuade the Pope to have a diplomatic illness: “Tell the Pope—he is a wise man—that he could announce publicly that he cannot come because he has been taken ill.” When Gierek failed to see the merit of this odd suggestion, Brezhnev told him angrily, “Gomułka was a better Communist [than you] because he wouldn’t receive [Pope] Paul VI in Poland, and nothing awful happened!” The conversation ended with Brezhnev saying, “Well, do what you want, so long as you and your Party don’t regret it later”—at which point Brezhnev put the phone down.29

  On June 2, 1979 more than a million Poles converged on the airport road, on Warsaw’s Victory Square and in the Old City, rebuilt from the rubble after the Second World War, to welcome John Paul II on his emotional return to his homeland. Over the next nine days at least ten million people came to see and hear him; most of the remaining twenty-five million witnessed his triumphal progress through Poland on television. At the end of his visit, as the Pope bade farewell to his home city of Kraków, where, he said, “every stone and brick is dear to me,” men and women wept uncontrollably in the streets. The contrast between the political bankruptcy of the Communist regime and the moral authority of the Catholic Church was plain for all to see.

  The papal visit, the Centre reported to the Politburo, had lived up to its worst expectations.30 Many Polish Party members, faced with the Pope’s “ideological subversion” of the Communist regime, felt that the ideological battle had been lost. During the visit the KGB mission in Warsaw had even thought it possible that KOR militants and anti-Communist workers in Kraków might try to seize power from the Party. Emergency preparations were also made to evacuate the Soviet trade mission in Katowice, which was headed by a KGB officer, to Czechoslovakia.31 The Centre believed that John Paul II had set out to challenge the foundations of the whole Soviet Bloc. One KGB report emphasized that he had repeatedly called himself not just the “Polish Pope” but, even more frequently, the “Slav Pope.”32 In his homilies he had recalled one by one the baptism of the peoples of eastern Europe: Poles, Croats, Slovenes, Bulgarians, Moravians, Slovaks, Czechs, Serbs, Russians and Lithuanians:

  Pope John Paul II, a Slav, a son of the Polish nation, feels how deeply rooted he is in the soil of history… He comes here to speak before the whole Church, before Europe and the world, about those oft-forgotten nations and peoples.33

  A Politburo document concluded that the Vatican had embarked on an “ideological struggle against Socialist countries.” Since the election of John Paul II, papal policy towards Catholic regions of the Soviet Union—especially in Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Byelorussia—had become “more aggressive,” aiding and abetting “disloyal priests.” On November 13 the Central Committee secretariat approved a six-point “Decision to Work Against the Policies of the Vatican in Relation with Socialist States,” prepared by a subcommittee which included Andropov and the deputy chairman of the KGB, Viktor Chebrikov. The KGB was instructed to organize propaganda campaigns in the Soviet Bloc “to show that Vatican policies go against the life of the Catholic Church” and to embark on active measures in the West “to demonstrate that the leadership of the new Pope, John Paul II, is dangerous to the Catholic Church.”34

  One of the chief priorities of SB foreign operations was to build up an agent network among the Poles in Rome and the Vatican. On June 16, 1980 the KGB mission in Warsaw reported to the Centre:

  Our friends [the SB] have serious operational positions [i.e. agents] at their disposal in the Vatican, and these enable them to have direct access to the Pope and to the Roman congregation. Apart from experienced agents, towards whom John Paul II is personally well disposed and who can obtain an audience with him at any time, our friends have agent assets among the leaders of Catholic students who are in constant contact with Vatican circles and have possibilities in Radio Vatican and the Pope’s secretariat.

  The Centre responded by proposing a series of KGB/SB “joint long-term operations” with the following aims:

  • To influence the Pope towards active support for the idea of international détente [as defined by Moscow], peaceful co-existence and cooperation between states, and to exert a favorable influence on Vatican policy on particular international problems;

  • To intensify disagreements between the Vatican and the USA, Israel and other countries;

  • To intensify internal disagreements within the Vatican;

  • To study, devise and carry out operations to disrupt the Vatican’s plans to strengthen the Churches and religious teaching in Socialist countries;

  • To exploit KGB assets in the Russian Orthodox Church, the Georgian and the Armenian-Gregorian Churches; to devise and carry out active measures to counteract the expansion of contacts between these Churches and the Vatican;

  • To identify the channels through which the Polish Church increases its influence and invigorates the work of the Church in the Soviet Union.

  Because of the Polish Politburo’s anxiety to avoid confrontation with the Catholic Church, however, the Centre had low expectations of what joint KGB/SB operations were likely to achieve:

  In our view, so long as our friends [the SB] remain fearful of damaging the development of relations between the Polish People’s Republic and the Vatican and between state and Church, they will not display great initiative in implementing the measures which we propose. Officers in our Centre and in the [Warsaw KGB] mission will need to display some tact and flexibility in order to find ways of solving the task before them.35

  Moscow’s fears that the Polish Politburo lacked the nerve to confront the challenge to its authority were heightened by its apparent capitulation to working-class discontent. Sudden rises in food prices in the summer of 1980 sparked off a strike wave which gave birth to the Solidarity trade union movement under the charismatic leadership of a hitherto unknown 37-year-old electrician from Gdańsk, Lech Wałęsa. The interior ministry informed the KGB mission in Warsaw that it had established an operations center, headed by Stachura, the deputy minister, to direct police and SB operations against the strikers, monitor the situation and produce daily reports. To judge from a report forwarded to Moscow, the Center was remarkably pleased with its own performance: “The operational staff displayed a high degree of conscientiousness and discipline, and an understanding of their duties; combat-readiness was introduced; leave was canceled; and round-the-clock work was introduced.” While not claiming “complete success,” the operations center claimed to have limited the scale of the strike movement by “eliminating” their printing presses and breaking links between protesters in different parts of the country. In addition, “Attempts by anti-Socialist forces to establish
contacts with the artistic, scientific and cultural intelligentsia, in order to enlist their support for the demands of the strikers, were cut short.”36

  The reality, however, was somewhat different. The strikers succeeded in creating inter-factory strike committees to coordinate the protest and dissident intellectuals played an important part in advising them. The final judgment of the KGB mission in Warsaw was in stark contrast to the efforts by the Interior Ministry to defend its performance. The SB, it reported, “did not recognize the extent of the danger in time or the hidden discontent of the working class.” And when the strike movement began, both the SB and the police were unable to control it:

  The blame lay chiefly with the leadership of the Interior Ministry, and in particular with Minister Kowalczyk and his deputy Stachura… When the strikes intensified in the coastal region, Kowalczyk simply lost his head… In the opinion of the KGB mission, it is time to replace Kowalczyk and Stachura with other officers.37

  On August 24 Aristov sent Moscow the alarming news that the deputy prime minister, Mieczysław Jagielski, was negotiating with Wałęsa and the strike leaders.38 Next day, the Soviet Politburo set up a commission headed by Suslov, its chief ideologist, to monitor the Polish crisis and propose remedies.39 On August 27, at the Pope’s instigation, the Polish bishops approved a document that explicitly claimed “the right to independence both of organizations representing the workers and of organizations of self-government.” Confident of the Pope’s backing, Wałęsa was now convinced that the government had little choice but to give in.40

  The Polish government privately agreed. On August 27 the leading members of the Polish Politburo met Aristov to try to persuade him that the partial disintegration of the PUWP and the hostility to it of much of the Polish people had created “a new situation:”

  We must take a step back in order not to fall into the abyss, and agree on the creation of self-governing trade unions. We have no other political means of normalizing the situation, and it is impossible to use force. By staging a [tactical] retreat, we can regroup Party forces and prepare for offensive action.

  The Poles went through the motions of seeking “the opinion of Comrade Brezhnev,” recognizing that trade unions free from Party control were “not simply a Polish issue but an issue which affects the interests of the entire Socialist community.”41 In reality, however, all alternatives to the legalization of Solidarity had already been ruled out. The Gdańsk Agreement of August 31, which accepted “the formation of free trade unions as a genuine representation of the working class,” made a series of unprecedented political concessions, ranging from the right to strike to an agreement to broadcast Mass every Sunday over the state radio. Wałęsa signed the agreement in front of the television cameras with an outsize, garishly colored pen, which he drew with a flourish from his top pocket. Produced as a souvenir of the papal visit, it had on it a portrait of John Paul II.42

  THIRTY

  THE POLISH CRISIS AND THE CRUMBLING OF THE SOVIET BLOC

  In the view of both the KGB and the Soviet Politburo, the Gdańsk Agreement represented the greatest potential threat to the “Socialist Commonwealth” (the official designation of the Soviet Bloc) since the Prague Spring of 1968. On September 3, 1980 the Politburo agreed a series of “theses for discussion with representatives of the Polish leadership”—a euphemism for demands that the Poles recover the ground lost to Solidarity:

  The [Gdańsk] agreement, in essence, signifies the legalization of the anti-Socialist opposition… The problem now is how to prepare a counter-attack and reclaim the positions that have been lost among the working class and the people… It is necessary to give overriding significance to the consolidation of the leading role of the Party in society.1

  The principal scapegoat for the success of Solidarity was Edward Gierek, the Polish first secretary, bitterly criticized by the Soviet ambassador, Aristov, among others, for the loss of Party control.2 The strikers at the Lenin shipyard had greeted Gierek’s television appearances with derisive catcalls. Ordinary Poles summed up their feelings in one of the political jokes with which they privately mocked their Communist leaders:

  QUESTION: What is the difference between Gierek and Gomułka [who had been forced to resign as first secretary in 1970]?

  ANSWER: None, only Gierek doesn’t realize it yet!3

  On September 5 Gierek was succeeded by Stanisław Kania, the tough, heavily built and heavy-drinking Party secretary responsible for national security. The KGB in Warsaw reported a satirical comment on the changeover doing the rounds in Poland—“Better Kania than Vanya!” (better, in other words, to put up with an unpopular Polish Communist than have to face a Soviet invasion).4 It also reported that on September 6 Admiral L. Janczyszyn, the commander-in-chief of the Polish navy, had warned two Soviet admirals that military intervention would end not in “normalization,” as in Prague in 1968, but in catastrophe. “If outside troops are brought into Poland,” he told them, “there would be a river of blood. You must understand that you’re dealing with Poles—not Czechs!”5

  On September 18 Pavlov, the head of the KGB mission in Warsaw, complained to the Centre that the Kania regime was already repeating the mistakes of its predecessors—looking for compromise with the opposition rather than taking a firm stand against them. The Party rank and file remained demoralized.6 “The counter-revolution in Poland is in full flood!” Brezhnev dramatically announced to the Politburo on October 29:

  Wałęsa is traveling from one end of the country to another, to town after town, and they honor him with tributes everywhere. Polish leaders keep their mouths shut and so does the press. Not even television is standing up to these anti-Socialist elements… Perhaps it really is necessary to introduce martial law.

  Brezhnev’s assessment was, predictably, strongly supported by Andropov. It was also backed by Mikhail Gorbachev, who had joined the Politburo in the previous year. “We should speak openly and firmly with our Polish friends,” he declared. “Up to now they haven’t taken the necessary steps. They’re in a sort of defensive position, and they can’t hold it for long—they might end up being overthrown themselves.”7

  The Politburo was concerned not merely by the situation in Poland itself but also by the contagious effect of Solidarity’s success in some parts of the Soviet Union. The PROGRESS operation reports submitted to Andropov in October included one from the illegal SOBOLEV, who has been sent on a mission to Rubtsovsk in the Altay Kray region of Russia, far from the Polish border. His report made depressing reading:

  The situation in the town of Rubtsovsk is unstable. The population has many grounds to be dissatisfied with the situation in the town, antisocial elements are visibly engaged in provocative action, and there could be uncontrolled disorders… Believers [practicing Christians] are also ready to speak up, and the population approves the strikes in Poland.

  …The basic cause of dissatisfaction is food supplies, especially the lack of meat in the shops, poor living conditions and disgraceful public services. The top people are supplied through special channels, and for this there are special stores of foodstuffs and consumer goods. Theft is rampant, and the biggest thieves are officials of the Party city committee and the Soviet executive committee. There is drunkenness everywhere, and many people suffer from alcoholism.

  The Polish events have a negative influence and effect on the local population, suggesting that it is possible to improve living and economic conditions on the Polish model.8

  Among the most successful illegals selected for PROGRESS operations in Poland itself was FILOSOV, still posing as a French writer and poet. According to his KGB file, he made “numerous contacts within Solidarity.” Perhaps his most important contact was Tadeusz Mazowiecki, editor-in-chief of the Solidarity weekly, Tygodnik Solidarnóśc, to whom he was introduced in November by Father Andrzej Bardecki.9 Nine years later Mazowiecki was to become prime minister of the first Solidarity-led government.

  Early in November, Andropov summoned the n
ew, hardline Polish interior minister, General Mirosław Milewski, for talks in Moscow. Milewski reported that lists had been prepared of more than 1,200 of the “most counter-revolutionary individuals,” who would be arrested immediately if martial law were declared. Andropov then launched into an alarmist monologue designed to persuade Milewski that martial law could not be avoided:

  Even if you left Wyszýnski [the Polish primate] and Wałęsa in peace, Wyszýnski and Wałęsa would not leave you in peace until either they had achieved their aim, or they had been actively crushed by the Party and the responsible part of the workers. If you wait passively… the situation slips out of your control. I saw how this happened in Hungary [in 1956]. There, the old leadership waited for everything to normalize itself, and when, at last, it was decided to act, it turned out that no one could be relied upon. There is every reason to fear that the same may happen in Poland also, if the most active and decisive measures are not now taken.