The Sword and the Shield

by Christopher Andrew

  This is a struggle for power. If Wałęsa and his fascist confederates came to power, they would start to put Communists in prison, to shoot them and subject them to every kind of persecution. In such an event, Party activists, Chekists [the SB] and military leaders would be most under threat.

  You say that some of your comrades cannot take on the responsibility of taking any aggressive measures against the counter-revolutionaries. But why are they not afraid of doing nothing, since this could lead to the victory of reaction? One must show the Communists, and in the first place the Party activists, the Chekists [the SB] and the military comrades that it is not just a question of defending socialist achievements in Poland, but a question of protecting their own lives, that of their families, who would be subjected to terror by the reaction, if, God forbid, this came to pass.

  Sometimes our Polish comrade say that they cannot rely on the Party. I cannot believe this. Out of three million Party members, one can find 100,000 who would be ready to sacrifice themselves. Wyszýnski and Wałęsa have roped in the free trade unions and are securing more and more new positions in various spheres in Poland. There are already the first signs that the counter-revolutionary infection is affecting the army.

  Comrade Brezhnev says that we must be ready for struggle both by peaceful means and by non-peaceful means.

  When Andropov had finished his tirade, Milewski asked him, “You have convinced me, but how am I to convince our comrades back in Warsaw?” Andropov’s reply is not recorded.10

  On December 5 an extraordinary meeting of Warsaw Pact leaders assembled in Moscow to discuss the Polish crisis. Kania heard one speaker after another castigate the weakness of his policies and demand an immediate crackdown on Solidarity and the Church. Otherwise, he was told, Warsaw Pact forces would intervene. Eighteen divisions were already on the Polish borders and Kania was shown plans for the occupation of Polish cities and towns. The meeting was followed by a private discussion between Kania and Brezhnev. Military intervention, Kania insisted, would be a disaster for the Soviet Union as well as for Poland. “OK, we don’t march into Poland now,” Brezhnev replied, “but if the situation gets any worse we will come.”11

  Brezhnev’s threat was probably a bluff. With Soviet forces already at war in Afghanistan and the probability that military intervention in Poland would result in a bloodbath, Western economic sanctions and a global public relations disaster, the Kremlin’s strategy was to pressure the Poles into using martial law to end Solidarity’s challenge to the Communist one-party state. Ultimately the most effective way of exercising pressure was to threaten invasion by the Red Army. Memories of Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979 meant that very few in either Poland or the West failed to take the threat seriously in 1980.

  It took over a year of almost continuous pressure, however, before the Polish Politburo, after a series of personnel changes, finally agreed to declare martial law. The KGB mission in Warsaw reported in December 1980 that, although Milewski was ready to go ahead with the “repression of hostile people,” most of the Politburo was not:

  Our friends consider Kania an honest Communist loyal to the Soviet Union and CPSU, but none the less one cannot exclude the possibility of a substantial difference between his point of view and ours, especially on the question of taking decisive measures… Lately Comrade Kania has tended not to adopt immediately recommendations by Soviet representatives, displaying doubts and not sharing all of our assessments of the situation in the People’s Republic of Poland.12

  The KGB was also deeply concerned at what it believed was the growing Western intelligence presence in Poland. According to data supplied by the SB, of the 1,300 foreign journalists in Poland at the beginning of 1981 about 150 were members or agents of intelligence agencies. NATO intelligence agencies, it was claimed, “were acquiring firm agent positions within Solidarity.”13

  For much of 1981 the PUWP continued to lose ground to Solidarity. On January 15 Wałęsa was received by John Paul II in the Vatican. “The son,” he announced reverently to the world’s television cameras, “has come to see the father.” Increasingly, the Pope and Wałęsa now appeared as the real leaders of the Polish nation.14 In his conversations with the KGB, Milewski seemed to despair of defeating the challenge from Solidarity without Soviet military intervention. As the news came in of Wałęsa’s meeting with the Pope, Milewski told Aristov, “I am beginning to think that order will come only when Poland has a reliable security guarantee in the form of allied troops…”15 Kania admitted to the Soviet ambassador that the PUWP had lost touch with the Polish people: “This is not a Solidarity slogan but a statement of fact, of the bitter truth.” The only forces on which he could rely were the army and the SB.16

  WITH MARTIAL LAW as the only solution favored by the Kremlin to deal with the Solidarity crisis, the role of the Polish army became of crucial importance. On February 9, probably as a result of Soviet pressure, the minister of defense, General Wojciech Jaruzelski became Polish prime minister. Slim, erect, habitually wearing dark glasses and an inscrutable expression, Jaruzelski was an enigmatic figure for most Poles. But he had a relatively favorable public image due both to the fact that he had refused to use troops against the workers in 1970 and to the reputation of the armed forces as the most trusted state institution. In KGB reports to Brezhnev, however, Jaruzelski had long been described as “a sincere friend of the Soviet Union.”17 On his instructions, the chief of military intelligence, General Czesław Kiszczak (later interior minister in charge of the SB), had for some time been meeting the KGB mission in Warsaw every two or three days to provide the latest intelligence reports on the crisis from military sources.18 As Prime Minister, Jaruzelski retained the defense portfolio.

  The period up to December 1981 was to be characterized by recurrent Soviet complaints of Polish inaction and Polish attempts to placate the Soviet leadership. During that period the Kremlin was assailed by recurrent doubts as to whether Jaruzelski really possessed the resolve required to enforce martial law. In the end it concluded that no better candidate was available. Soviet doubts about Kania, however, were to prove much more serious.

  On March 4 Kania and Jaruzelski were summoned to the Kremlin to be dressed down by Brezhnev and other members of the Politburo. When, the Soviet leaders demanded, would the Polish comrades impose martial law? And how was it that, alone among the Socialist countries, Poland found it so difficult to control the Church?19 The dressing-down had little effect. A member of the Polish Politburo, Mieczysław Moczar, informed the KGB that Kania had told him, shortly after his return to Warsaw, “In spite of the pressure from Moscow, I don’t want to use force against the opposition. I don’t want to go down in history as the butcher of the Polish people.” According to another of the KGB’s Polish informants, Kania said that neither the Party nor the government was ready for a confrontation with Solidarity—“and I’ll never ask the Russians for military assistance.”20

  “We have huge worries about the outcome of events in Poland,” Brezhnev told the Politburo on April 2. “Worst of all is that our friends listen and agree with our recommendations, but in practice they don’t do anything. And a counter-revolution is taking the offensive on all fronts!” Ustinov, the defense minister, declared that if Socialism was to survive in Poland, “bloodshed is unavoidable.” “Solidarity,” reported Andropov, “is now starting to grab one position after the other.” The only solution was renewed pressure on the Poles to declare martial law:

  We have to tell them that martial law means a curfew, limited movement in the city streets, strengthening state security [the SB] in Party institutions, factories, etc. The pressure from the leaders of Solidarity has left Jaruzelski in terribly bad shape, while lately Kania has begun to drink more and more. This is a very sad phenomenon. I want to point out that Polish events are having an influence on the western areas of our country too… Here, too, we’ll have to take tough internal measures.

  Next day Kania and Jaruzelsk
i were summoned to meet Andropov and Ustinov in the Soviet equivalent of a Pullman railway coach at the border city of Brest-Litovsk. After caviar and a sumptuous buffet, they were seated at a green-baize-covered table and subjected to six hours of recriminations, demands for the declaration of martial law and threats of Soviet military intervention. Kania and Jaruzelski responded by pleading for more time.21 On April 7, four days after the meeting at Brest-Litovsk, Mieczysław Moczar had another conversation with Kania which he reported to the KGB. Kania clearly believed that the threat of military intervention was in deadly earnest. “There would be a tragedy on a huge scale if Soviet forces intervene,” he told Moczar. “It would take two generations of Poles to remedy the consequences.”22

  The Soviet Politburo believed that such a threat of military intervention was the main restraining influence on Polish “anti-Socialist forces.” On April 23 it approved a report on Poland which concluded:

  Solidarity has been transformed into an organized political force, which has the capacity to paralyze the activity of the Party and state organs and take de facto power into its own hands. If the opposition has not yet done this, that is primarily because of its fear that Soviet troops would be introduced and because of its hopes that it can achieve its aims without bloodshed and by means of a creeping counter-revolution.

  The Politburo agreed, “as a deterrent to counter-revolution,” to “exploit to the utmost the fears of internal reactionaries and international imperialism that the Soviet Union might send its troops into Poland.” It also decided to maintain “support for Comrades Kania and Jaruzelski, who, despite their well-known waffling, are in favor of defending Socialism.” They must, however, be put under “constant pressure to pursue more significant and decisive actions to overcome the crisis and preserve Poland as a Socialist country friendly to the Soviet Union.”23

  On May 13 John Paul II gave his usual Wednesday general audience in St. Peter’s Square. As he was waving to the crowds from his open-topped “Popemobile,” he was shot from a distance of twenty feet by a Turkish would-be assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca. The bullet passed a few millimeters from the Pope’s central aorta; had it hit his aorta, the Pope would have died instantly. John Paul II believed that his life had been saved by a miracle performed by the Virgin of Fatima in Portugal, whose feast day it was. On the first anniversary of the assassination attempt, he made a pilgrimage to Fatima to place Agca’s bullet on her altar.24 If the Pope had died, the KGB would doubtless have been overjoyed. But there is no evidence in any of the files examined by Mitrokhin that it was involved in the attempt on his life.25

  In the weeks after the assassination attempt, the strongest pressure on Kania and Jaruzelski to declare martial law came from Marshal Viktor Kulikov, the short-tempered commander-in-chief of Warsaw Pact forces. Kulikov accused Jaruzelski of cowardice. “You yourself, Comrade Jaruzelski,” he told him, “are afraid of taking decisive action.” Though insisting that the time was not ripe for martial law, Jaruzelski accepted Kulikov’s insults—according to a KGB report to the Politburo—with remarkable meekness and even offered to resign as prime minister.26 Kulikov remained deeply suspicious of the motives of both Kania and Jaruzelski, reporting to the Politburo, “It looks as though the leadership of the PUWP and the government is conducting a dishonest political game and is facilitating the accession to power of those backing Solidarity.”27

  The Centre informed the Warsaw KGB mission that the time had come to find both a new first secretary and a new prime minister:

  Kania and Jaruzelski are no longer capable of leading Party and government effectively. They cannot organize the defeat of the opposition, and have been compromised by cooperating for many years with Gierek. There is no doubt that they do not even have the fighting qualities which are essential for political leaders capable of taking decisive measures.

  The Centre’s preferred candidates on the Polish Politburo to succeed Kania and Jaruzelski were the hardliners Tadeusz Grabski and Stefan Olszowski. Both, it reported, “are imbued with a firm Marxist-Leninist outlook, and are prepared to act decisively and consistently in defense of Socialist interests and of friendship with the Soviet Union.”28 On May 30 Aristov and Pavlov sent a joint telegram to Brezhnev and the Politburo, accusing Kania and Jaruzelski of consistent capitulation to “revisionist elements”:

  The present situation requires urgent consideration of the necessity of dismissing [Kania] from his post as first secretary of the central committee and replacing him with a comrade capable of ensuring the survival of the Party’s Marxist-Leninist nature and of the Socialist character of the Polish state… An analysis of the mood of Party activists shows that the most suitable candidate for post of first secretary of the PUWP central committee is Comrade T. Grabski.29

  Having discovered that the KGB was plotting against him, Kania lapsed into a tone of almost whimpering self-pity. When Pavlov phoned him on June 7 to ask if he proposed to ring Comrade Brezhnev to reply to another letter from Moscow demanding tough action against Solidarity, Kania replied, “There is probably now no point in my telephoning as everything has already been decided without me [being consulted].” Later that night Kania rang Pavlov back at home in order to appeal for sympathy:

  At this very moment your people [the KGB] are saying that it is necessary to speak up at the Plenum [of the PUWP central committee] against Kania and Jaruzelski… You do not have, and you never have had, more trustworthy friends than me and Jaruzelski… I am amazed at the method you have chosen for dealing with me. I do not deserve this… There is no need to mobilize the members of the Central Committee against me. It is clear that I shall be on the side of the CPSU… It is very bitter sensation for me to realize that I have lost your trust. I feel hurt that you have chosen such a roundabout way to mobilize opinion for an attack on me at the Plenum. I therefore find it difficult to speak to Comrade Brezhnev. What can I say to him?30

  When Kulikov asked Jaruzelski for his reaction to the latest philippic from Moscow, he replied, “They are hammering me into the ground. I’m a fool for accepting this post [of prime minister].”31

  During June a group of nine Polish generals approached the KGB with a plan to remove Jaruzelski because of his unwillingness to order martial law and replace him with a new defense minister (presumably one of the plotters), who would arrest the rest of the government, take control of strategic points and seize up to 3,000 counter-revolutionaries who would be deported to elsewhere in the Soviet Bloc. An action group led by the defense minister, containing no members of either the previous government or the Politburo, would then appeal to the rest of the Soviet Bloc for “military assistance to protect Socialism in the Polish People’s Republic.”32 Moscow’s response to the plan for a military coup is not recorded in the files noted by Mitrokhin. Given its desire to avoid “military assistance” and preserve a semblance of legality, however, it cannot have been attracted by it.

  Jaruzelski’s main concern seems to have been less his own personal position than to prevent the disaster of Soviet military intervention. On June 22 he held a meeting with the minister of the interior, General Milewski, whom he knew was trusted by the Kremlin. How, asked Jaruzelski, could he “regain the trust of our Soviet comrades?” Milewski replied that, though Soviet confidence in the Polish leadership had been severely damaged, it had not been entirely destroyed: “If there had been none at all, they would have stopped talking to us.” Jaruzelski complained that, so far as he was concerned, they had indeed stopped talking. Previously, Kulikov had phoned him almost every day and had frequently come to see him. Recently he had broken all contact. Soviet representatives in Warsaw were instructed to tell Jaruzelski that their confidence in him had indeed been shaken and that it would disappear altogether unless he mended his ways.33

  Centre files record that in the weeks before the opening of the Ninth PUWP Congress on July 14, the Soviet embassy, the KGB mission and Soviet military representatives “worked among the delegates to identify Party members who fo
llowed the Marxist-Leninist line, to establish personal contact with them, and through them to influence the course of the Congress.”34 The Suslov Commission, set up by the Politburo a year earlier to monitor the Polish crisis, gave instructions that the threat of military intervention by the other members of the Warsaw Pact must be “a constant factor in the minds of all Polish political forces.”35 On the eve of the congress, the Centre instructed Pavlov, the head of the KGB mission in Warsaw, to have “a straightforward conversation with S. Kania and Jaruzelski on their weak Party and government work, and remind them of their earlier statements of readiness to cede their Party and government jobs if necessary in the interest of saving the Socialist system in Poland and the unity of Socialist cooperation in Europe.” The choice of Kania’s successor, in the Centre’s view, lay among three leading hardliners: Tadeusz Grabski, Stefan Olszowski and Andrzej Zabínski. All other representatives of “healthy forces” in the PUWP lacked the necessary authority to become first secretary. The KGB also drew up a list of those suitable for election to the Politburo and a hit list of moderates to be removed from the government and Party posts. Top of the hit list was the deputy prime minister, Mieczysław Rakowski, who had threatened to inform the leaders of the Italian and French Communist Parties about Soviet interference in the internal affairs of the PUWP. The Centre concluded that, in view of Jaruzelski’s continuing “authority in the country and especially in the army,” it would be unwise simply to dismiss him. Rather, it was hoped to kick him upstairs to the less powerful post of president and harness his personal prestige in support of a hardline government.36