Conversation and contacts and good-will gestures—with an occasional rough passage—ensued. That same August, John Paul received in private audience Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the new non-Communist prime minister of Poland—an old friend and ally in his Krakow days—together with Communist Commerce Minister Marcin Swiecicki and Foreign Minister Krzysztof Skubiszewski and Solidarity’s parliamentary leader, Bronislaw Geremek. Clearly, if you wanted to know what was going to happen next Monday in Central Europe and the USSR you could learn that the previous Saturday, if you had an entrée to John Paul’s Vatican.
During his October 6–7 overflight in USSR airspace on his way to the Far East, John Paul relayed a radio message to Gorbachev, asking God to bless him and the Soviet people, and sending his blessing to them all. In the same month, Sodano returned to Moscow with a request concerning peace in Lebanon, meeting both Gorbachev and Shevardnadze. With Gorbachev’s permission, too, a Russian Orthodox Mass was celebrated in the Cathedral of Michael the Archangel in the Kremlin on October 13. This was a direct appeal to John Paul’s religious heart, for October 13 was the seventy-second anniversary of the appearance of the Virgin Mary at Fatima, Portugal. John Paul’s whole foreign policy is built on the meaning of that heavenly appearance, and he also ascribes to the Virgin of Fatima the fact that, on May 13, 1981, the bullets fired at his head by assassin Mehmet Ali Agca missed him. In addition, another Russian Orthodox Mass was celebrated on October 22 in the Cathedral of the Assumption, also in the Kremlin, in honor of the Virgin of Tenderness—Mary as portrayed in a very old icon preserved in the Cathedral. Without the knowledge of the Soviet authorities, an expatriate Czech bishop walked into the same cathedral at about the same time and quietly celebrated a Roman Catholic Mass, concealing what he was doing behind the ample folds of the Pope’s own newspaper, the Osservatore Romano.
With the blessing of John Paul and the permission of Gorbachev, ten Christians and eight Soviets sat down at a U-shaped table in a seventeenth-century château at Klingenthal, outside Strasbourg, France, and for two days (October 19–21)—beneath a portrait of Charlemagne, the ninth-century emperor who has been called the original father of Europe—discussed the possibility of Christians and Marxists being able to build a new Europe together.
“We want to create a new Europe,” declared Nikolai Kowalski, Gorbachev’s top expert on religious matters, “for the good of man, for his political and spiritual freedom.” With Cardinal Poupard, president of the Pontifical Institute for Culture, listening, Viktor Garadja, director of the Soviet Institute for Scientific Atheism, asserted: “Marxism’s opposition to religion is a thing of the past.” But, warned Mikhail Narinsky, Soviet historian, “Christians must help … or our present perestroika could turn into perestrelka.”
To them, to jurist Aleksandr Berkov and the other Soviet delegates, the Christians present emphasized that “freedom of conscience is now regarded in the West as a basic human right that requires legal guarantees.” Yes, the Soviets responded, a new law, now in its second revision, was being debated in the Soviet parliament. “We need time,” said Aleksandr Berkov, “time and your patient understanding.”
Meanwhile, on October 18, Erich Honecker, Communist leader of East Germany, is replaced by Egon Krenz and imprisoned to await trial. Krenz will last only a few weeks. Down in Bulgaria, Todor Zhivkov, Stalinist leader since 1954, is forced to resign on November 10. The previous day, the East German government announced the opening of the Berlin Wall at all points. Within a month, the Wall will effectively be no more. By mid-December, slabs and portions of it will be on sale in Bonn, Paris, London, New York and Los Angeles.
By mid-November, amid the echoes of what was happening around the Berlin Wall, in Czechoslovakia, in Bulgaria and Romania, all arrangements had been made for the Vatican meeting. Gorbachev had removed the contentious and chauvinist Metropolitan Filaret from his post as chief-in-charge of the Russian Orthodox Church’s “External Office” (it handles all meetings and dealings with the Vatican), replacing him with the very pro-Roman Archbishop Kirill of Smolensk. It was a move obviously desired by John Paul, a delicately intimated wish of his, which the Soviet strongman had no scruples about satisfying. That was what these Orthodox prelates were for—to assist the Soviet government.
On November 27, Metropolitan Juvenali of Kolomna came, with a mixture of pleading and complaining, to tell John Paul that “we cannot conduct Christian brotherly negotiations under the muzzle of a gun.” Juvenali, who wanted John Paul to halt the now triumphant Catholics taking back the Transfiguration Cathedral of Lwów, was reminded that back in the 1940s, his Church had done nothing when Soviet muzzles spat bullets at the Lwów and Ukrainian Catholics. But all can be negotiated, he was told—in the shadow of President Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost!
On November 29, Czechoslovak Communist leader Milos Jakes will step down. Alexander Dubcek—hero of the ill-fated 1968 “Prague Spring,” since disgraced and demoted—and Vaclav Havel, once imprisoned for his anti-Marxist views, will become the national leaders. It will be December’s end before the last holdout of the old Stalinists, the “Pig of Romania,” Nicolae Ceauşescu, will be tried, summarily found guilty and—still not believing that it is all over—will be executed with his wife, Elena, already nicknamed bitterly, “Lady Macbeth.”
By November’s end, all was in place for the Vatican summit. Raisa Gorbachev, dubbed the “Queen of Kremlin chic” by Italian newspapers, performed her solo engagement in Messina on November 30, evoking cries of “Viva Raisa!” from crowds of Sicilians and groups of Catholic nuns waving red flags. She was there to lay a wreath at the memorial honoring the Russian sailors of four of the Imperial Russian Navy’s warships who came ashore and saved the lives of a thousand Sicilians who had been buried by the three-day earthquake of December 1908.
If ever the Western onlookers needed a sign that Mr. Gorbachev intended vast and peaceful changes in view of democratic egalitarianism, surely they had that sign in the gloom that swallowed up all those faithful stalwarts of the Party-State—János Kádár of Hungary, Milos Jakes of Czechoslovakia, Erich Honecker of East Germany, Todor Zhivkov of Bulgaria, Wojciech Jaruzelski of Poland. All of them departed because the Party-State decided they should, because the Soviet troops garrisoned on their territories would, they were assured, no longer cow the masses. In a sense, those onetime Party bosses were victims of the “new thinking”—only if they consented to their own demise could they now, by self-immolation, serve the Party-State. In any case, they had no choice. In the face of Ceauşescu’s refusal to so serve the cause and depart, together with his hated Securitate bully boys, there were threats both from Warsaw Pact authorities and from NATO people that they would, if necessary, back up those rebelling crowds with arms and ammunition. The connivance was at work even there. George Bush’s administration had consulted its NATO allies and the Warsaw Pact nations about a “coordinated response” to Ceauşescu within the framework of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (the CSCE of the 1975 Helsinki accords), should Ceauşescu prove to be an intractable problem. In the event, he did not.
“New thinking” is hardly an adequate term to describe the overall reactions among the Western onlookers of these events. It was a veritable wonderment, punctuated with that hopeful sigh of relief: “The Cold War is really over!” For many governments, those changes chased away any lingering doubts, about Gorbachev’s being an honest broker. Ludicrously but tellingly, the beleaguered dictator of Cuba, faced with a severe reduction in his annual alms from the Soviet Union, and fearful that his number was up next, used a mild understatement to complain in early December that “it is getting very difficult to build a Communist state” while “the reformers are slandering socialism, destroying its value, discrediting the Party, and liquidating its leading role … sowing chaos and anarchy everywhere.” But John Paul delivered a scathing postmortem on the Marxist ideology of these erstwhile Communist regimes, describing that ideology as a “myth” and a “tragic Utopia
.”
Now, for the West, the Soviet president—like the maître d’ praised by the bridegroom at the marriage feast of Cana—had reserved the good wine until the end of a banner year that was to usher in the new decade. In retrospect now, Gorbachev’s timing—and luck—was perfectly adapted to his personal situation within the USSR and out front, in the eyes of contemporary leaders. He would have his “new thinking.”
“The Soviet leader’s difficult task,” John Paul had stated, “is that he must introduce changes without destroying the Party-State.” It was a pithy summary of the major danger Papa Wojtyla saw threatening Gorbachev’s internal situation in the USSR. The danger was a total loss of support for his geopolitical aims among those who alone made him viable as General Secretary and now must make him viable as the Soviet president with czarlike powers. Only in that guise had he a realistic chance of holding together the ungainly USSR, already straining under the impulse of centrifugal forces, and to salvage from it a reduced core of territory.
For within the very structure of the USSR, huge and vicious strains were beginning to appear. Wildfires of ethnic conflict and economic woes were suddenly blazing throughout the six Muslim republics—Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Tadzhikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Nakhichevan—challenging Moscow’s central control in an area covering the Soviet Union’s southern flank, a strategically sensitive area. In Kirghizia, Moldavia, Armenia, Georgia, Byelorussia and the Ukraine, the winds of opposition and local autonomy were setting off high-decibel alarms in the USSR’s very top-secret Defense Council.
The three Baltic States, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, gazing hungrily at the successive “liberations” of the Eastern European satellites, said quite bluntly that they wanted out of the USSR. Already in 1988, the Lithuanian parliament declared it was sovereign and not subordinate to the USSR. The Lithuanian national movement, Sajudis, had the backing of a majority of Lithuanians, including—in a very Catholic population—the support of the non-Catholic minority represented by, for example, the Jewish writer Grigorijus Jakovas Kandvivius, who was elected to parliament. Estonia’s elected representatives have made the same assertion of independence. The Latvians celebrated Independence Day on November 18, 1988, with public demonstrations lit up by thousands of maroon-and-white national Latvian flags.
Meanwhile, perestroika had as yet produced no tangible results. Food queues at depleted shops were just as long; necessities were scarce; fuel was expensive; demoralizing stories were spreading about dissatisfaction in the Armed Forces, about continuing Soviet atrocities in Afghanistan; about the special supplies of rich food and beautiful luxury items available to the sacred nomenklatura; about revolts against Gorbachev within the Party—even within the all-powerful Central Committee. Besides, the Soviet economy was and still is suffocating from a worsening but hidden inflation, enormous budget deficits compelling billions of current rubles to lose their buying value, while price controls distort resource use and force goods onto the flourishing black markets, which only nourish an underground economy that does nothing for state revenue enhancement.
By the time the Soviet president would meet President Bush at Malta on December 2, 1989, the question most often heard abroad would be: “Is Gorbachev on the way out?” Several officials in the Bush administration openly stated that Gorbachev “cannot hold on.” Many spoke about “saving Mr. Gorbachev.”
In order to rebuff and beat down the “conservative” elements in the USSR who could prevail over him—so the message was conveyed to the West in a thousand and one ways—the endangered Soviet president needed a new type of cooperation from the West. Western pressures and demands must be tailored to suit his convenience in repelling the basic charges looming up against him on the home front. Perestroika was not working, his adversaries complained; and in all this glasnost, he was giving away the whole Soviet shop—selling out to the capitalists is what his opponent Ligachev meant—and at the same time demoralizing the Soviet Marxist spirit. Retired Colonel Igor Lopatin, as leader of the Council for Interfront, the Moscow lobby of Russian nationals in Latvia and the other Soviet republics, railed against Gorbachevism as threatening the units of loyal Communists throughout the Soviet Union.
Faced with such virulent opposition, Gorbachev let all concerned in the West know that he must not be perceived as conceding “humiliating” and debilitating conditions to the Western democracies. This was the much-desired “new thinking.” With Western cooperation, he could elude his enemies and pursue his main internal goals. There was much admiration in John Paul’s Vatican for the terrier-like tenacity of will with which Gorbachev relentlessly pursued the dismantling of the Soviet satellite nations abroad while countering the “hard-liners’” reactions at home to that very policy, seeking even greater powers for himself at home and a more complete endorsement of his ideas. For that foreign policy vis-à-vis the satellites was intended to elicit—as one of its chief effects—the “new thinking” of the West, and that “new thinking” would enable him to overcome his enemies at home.
As long as he could retain his general secretaryship of the Central Committee, his alliance with the KGB, and therefore his control over the officer corps of the Red Army, those czarlike powers he needed would be his because guaranteed by 230,000 KGB troops (with tanks, helicopters, artillery and planes of their own); by 340,000 Internal troops; by elite units like the 30,000 Spetsnatz; by some 70,000 paratroopers; and by some particularly trustworthy Guard divisions. All in all, his ultimate strength resided in this military arm of over three quarters of a million highly trained and carefully indoctrinated “effectives,” who could count on the blind ideological support and allegiance of perhaps 15–20 million citizens throughout the USSR. Gorbachev’s personal fate and fortunes came down to that.
John Paul’s observation to French journalist and writer André Frossard, although it anticipated by two years the surprising events of autumn and winter 1989, indicated how penetratingly he had understood the Soviet chairman’s position vis-à-vis the West and to what lengths Gorbachev would have to go in order finally to elicit from his Western contemporaries the type of cooperation and collaboration that was needed if his reformed and renewed Leninist Marxism was to get the Party-State over the top of the biggest hurdle in its path since November 1917. “The Soviet leader must change the way the [Soviet] system works, without changing that system,” the Pontiff remarked to Frossard.
In spite of all Gorbachev brought about in the Eastern satellites and the USSR by the end of November 1989, there remained that fundamental difficulty for the mind of the West: the Soviet system. The fright and apprehension it had engendered and generously fed for over seventy years was a fire that burned in the Western mind. The most impressive expression of that fright and apprehension was composed and published by an anonymous “Z” in autumn of 1989. “Z” was quite frank and forthright: No matter that the Soviet leader is making his socialist system more humane, and no matter even that by some political sleight of hand he apparently replaces it with a market economy—and even with the trappings of a Western democracy. No matter, asserted “Z”; the brute fact is that the Party-State remains intact. It is the monster. That is the only fact that merits attention. As long as that Party-State remains, “Z” recommended, it should be a hands-off policy for the West. Let Gorbachev and his Party-State stew in their own juice and perish—for surely they will perish.
The “Z” attitude, in other words, gave a negative opinion about John Paul’s questioning summation of Gorbachev’s difficulty. No, “Z” answered; in order to survive and succeed, Gorbachev cannot do what the Pontiff suggested he had to do. But “Z” was speaking—as the Pontiff was—about facts. The wily Soviet president knew and knows that, fortunately for him, it is not facts that move international opinion and individual men’s minds today; it is their perception of facts. Their perception becomes for them the reality, no matter what the facts.
The gambit in which the Soviet leader indulged between December 1, 1989, and
mid-February 1990 would all but assure him that the overall Western perception became as follows: The Party-State, if not as dead as a doornail, is certainly on the way out of all effective existence. The “new thinking” would be pushed to its logical conclusion. “Z” was derided, in the words of Vladimir Simonov, political analyst for the government-controlled Soviet press agency Novosti, as “a hybrid of far-right extremism and naïveté … the position of perestroika’s gravediggers … that still regard the Soviet Union as something diabolic.”
If anything was needed to show convincingly that the “Z” thesis had had no appreciable impact on the progress of the “new thinking” in the official mind of the West, it was the arrival of President Bush, on December 1, at the United States warship Belknapp in Maltese coastal waters, where he was scheduled to “summit” with Mr. Gorbachev on December 2. On the eve of the Vatican summit, the wryly humorous Soviet spokesman, Gennadi Gerasimov, commented: “They have been talking for years about a dialogue between Christians and Marxists. This time it will be real. This time it will be a conceptual talk.” On Gerasimov’s Marxist lips, “conceptual” meant “down-to-earth” and “practical”—the opposite of religious emotion and ideological passion.
23
Vatican Summit
In the range of summits and “summitry” the world has witnessed since 1945, the Wojtyla-Gorbachev summit of December 1, 1989, struck a peculiar chord of its own. It displayed the usual characteristics of summits: two supreme leaders sitting down together to discuss their mutual relationship; panoply and power in evidence from both sides; worldwide interest in the meeting and its consequences; and a vital function of their meeting in the ongoing concrete affairs of their contemporaries.
Keys of This Blood Page 57
