Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

Hundreds of strikes had taken place around Poland over the previous few weeks to protest a rise in meat prices, but they had always been settled behind closed doors. Strike leaders calculated that the presence of journalists, particularly foreign journalists, would only complicate their negotiations with the regime. Communist ideologists regarded factories, coal mines, and shipyards as proletarian fortresses, built to withstand the assaults of class enemies. In years of wandering around the Soviet bloc, I had never once been permitted to visit a factory without being chaperoned by government officials.

To my amazement, the shipyard gates suddenly opened a crack, and I was ushered into the forbidden world. Marxist ideologists would never be able to come up with a satisfactory explanation for the scene that now confronted me: workers rebelling against the “workers’ state.” Strikers were lounging around on the grass, sitting on torn-up pieces of asbestos. Heated discussions were going on everywhere, as if people had just been released from a lifetime vow of silence. Some workers had scrambled on top of the shipyard walls, to honks of support from passing motorists. An incongruous touch was provided by several dozen patients from the shipyard hospital, who were wandering around in striped pajamas and red dressing gowns. When the strikers found out that I represented a Western newspaper, they came up and hugged me excitedly. Cries of “ Amerika, Amerika ” rippled around the shipyard.

I was led to a large hall, decorated with a statue of Vladimir Lenin at one end and a model sailing ship at the other. Negotiations were already under way between the strike committee and the shipyard director, Klemens Gniech. The man sitting opposite Gniech caught my attention immediately. A shortish figure, about five feet seven, he was dressed in a crumpled dark suit and a checkered, open-neck shirt. Apart from his oversize mustache, the first things I noticed were his quick, darting eyes, impish smile, and cheeky, rasping voice. He had the air of a born rabble-rouser.

“That’s our leader. His name is Lech Wałęsa,” whispered my guide, Gregorz Obernicowicz. “He’s the person who decided to let you in.”

Wałęsa understood, almost instinctively, that the ability to command public attention was his most valuable asset. He also realized that he could use the Western media to circumvent the information blockade imposed by the Communist authorities. Since childhood he had secretly listened to the broadcasts of Radio Free Europe and the BBC. He knew that any reports filed by a Western journalist about the shipyard strike would immediately be broadcast back to Poland by Western radio stations—and heard by millions of Poles.

Speaking the truth openly was Wałęsa’s trump card. It was what distinguished him from the despised apparatchiks and gave him his authority. When I asked him that first day why he had decided to allow a foreign journalist into the shipyard—when other strike leaders had kept us out—he replied: “We want to show people that they do not have to be afraid.”

Later on the strike in the Lenin Shipyard became an international media event. Negotiations were conducted under the glare of television arc lights. During the first few days, however, the atmosphere was extraordinarily intimate. I felt as if I had wandered behind the scenes of an elaborate theater production. For years the Communist authorities had forced Western journalists to watch the show from the balcony. We suspected that what we were seeing on the other side of the proscenium arch was false but could never be sure. The actors had become thoroughly accustomed to the lines written for them by the party ideologists. Yet here they were, rebelling against the director and rewriting the script. The make-believe world created by Communist propaganda had been shattered.

Watching the workers gain confidence in one another, I understood why the authorities attached so much importance to walls and fences. In order to preserve and consolidate their power, the Communists had taken the strategy of “divide and rule” to its logical extreme. The most obvious wall was the one that divided Communist countries from the outside world: the Iron Curtain. But equally important were the internal walls that divided workers from intellectuals, crane operators from welders, Poles from Jews. Some of these barriers were real. They took the form of censorship, restrictions on freedom of movement, and a ban on independent organizations of any kind. But many were psychological, the legacy of decades of arbitrary rule and a climate of ingrained fear. Freedom of association was a mortal threat to the totalitarian regime. As the self-appointed instrument of historical progress, the Communist Party controlled an atomized and defeated society.

When I think back to the shipyard strike, what sticks in my mind most of all was the extraordinary lightness of spirit. There were many tense moments, particularly at the beginning, but the predominant mood was one of infectious gaiety. The warm August sunshine helped create a holiday atmosphere. But mostly it was the smiles on people’s faces, the sense of walls coming down, the sheer irreverence and improbability of it all. When the workers were discussing what material to use for a monument to commemorate the victims of Communist repression, someone pointed to the life-size Lenin on the podium. “We won’t be needing him anymore. Let’s use that,” he suggested, to ironic cheers.

There was a quality of self-liberation about the conversations that took place at the shipyard in August 1980. After years of lies, people were at last looking one another in the eye and telling the truth. They were learning not to be afraid, as Wałęsa had hoped. In the process they helped liberate the rest of us from our own preconceptions. We discovered that people we had previously dismissed as representatives of Marx’s lumpen proletariat were individuals with hopes, worries, and diverse points of view.

I also remember the sight of the crowd standing outside the shipyard gate, stretching back as far as the eye could see. It was crowds like this—good-humored, self-disciplined, incredibly patient—that had greeted the pope on his return to Poland the previous summer. There were people in the crowd from all walks of life: factory workers; office employees; students. As they waited for a glimpse of Wałęsa, they held impromptu discussions. I was reminded of John Reed’s account of the Russian Revolution. “For months in Petrograd, and all over Russia, every street-corner was a public tribune. In railway trains, street-cars, always the spurting up of impromptu debate, everywhere,” wrote Reed in Ten Days That Shook the World .

Over the next decade I was to witness such scenes many times over as Poles—followed by Baits, Czechs, Ukrainians, Germans, and finally Russians—unmade the revolution that Reed had chronicled.

LECH WAŁĘSA WAS a child of postwar Poland. He had taken part in the great social upheavals that spawned the Communist world’s first free trade union movement: the massive migration from the impoverished countryside; the struggle of the Catholic Church against an atheistic regime; the strikes and demonstrations along the Baltic coast in 1970. His life could almost be a symbol of Poland’s postwar history, with its cycles of soaring hopes and bitter disappointments.

When Wałęsa was born, in the tiny village of Popowo, in central Poland, the country was under German occupation. A few months after his birth, in September 1943, his father was hauled off to a Nazi concentration camp, where he died two years later. By the time Lech went to school, Poland was firmly within the Soviet camp, having been liberated from the east by the Red Army. The Soviets grabbed the eastern part of the country for themselves, compensating the Poles with a two-hundred-mile swath of formerly German territory. They installed a Communist-led government in Warsaw, making sure that all the key posts were held by Moscow-trained apparatchiks. Everything about the new regime—from the crash industrialization program and ubiquitous secret police to the Stalinist architecture and uplifting slogans promising a socialist utopia—was based on the Soviet model.